If you can’t beat them, join them: Login to MySpace with Facebook

Today MySpace released functionality to login into it’s website with your Facebook login credentials. It is an admission and acknowledgment of how successful Facebook is. Perhaps it’s little too late for the has-been social networking site, but it hasn’t stopped them from updating their service and introducing new features. It has been years since I’ve left a comment, posted a picture, or shared something on MySpace. What’s the point with the majority of my network is on Facebook right? However, I forgot how personal and visual of an experience MySpace is.

MySpace, for a brief moment in time was playing catchup to FaceBook. Newsfeeds, status updates, applications are some of the mainstream innovations MySpace has mimicked from Facebook. Things really took off from a design standpoint when they introduced MySpace Layouts 2.0  MySpace Layout was a profile and theme editor. It’s a great design decision that has given their users the flexibility of a personal unique profile while still controlling and providing a consistent user experience. Hopefully gone are the days of searching for themes on third party sites and copying and pasting code into the About Me section of your profile to somehow sneak in some custom CSS to work around MySpace’s inflexible system. I remember it being one of the biggest reasons why I left MySpace to begin with. I couldn’t handle being blinded be all the poor themes glittering my friends profiles.

In my eyes, this was MySpace and it made Facebook that much more appealing…

Logging back into MySpace today was a very unique experience. Although I don’t see myself commenting or checking out what my friends are doing as much as I would on FaceBook, MySpace is still providing a very unique content driven experience.  The login screen itself is a great visual experience that shows the latest and trending topics and information. Upon logging in with Facebook, MySpace leverages all the likes, interests you have on Facebook to create a personalized stream on your new MySpace profile.

Once you are set and ready to go, your new MySpace gets updated with content you care about based on the likes and interests from your Facebook Profile. Personally, I would love the page below to be my profile page. It’s a nice page with a decent grid layout that can provide an comprehensive and accurate reflection of who I am based on the content I like and would love to share. Additionally, it’s a page that I wouldn’t mind making public. I’d love to go a friends page and see a live updated stream of updated content from the things they like. I think I’ll use MySpace more if it can be a place where I can go find new content and avoid the mindless status updates, personal drunk photos and event invites.