MySpace, what more quintessential system is there out there, one of the sites that brought a lot of attention, both good and bad to social networking. Love it or loath it, MySpace for all its good, bad and in many cases downright ugly, brought many people into social networking. MySpace also highlighted the fun and the not so fun about social networking.

With the loss of CEO Chris DeWolfe and Jonathan Miller yesterday, one cannot help but think that MySpace is either going to continue to slide, or that they will bring in fresh ideas, fresh concepts and fresh blood into a system that has basically stagnated over the last year, and started to lose market share and traffic to facebook. The inter-team rivalry between MySpace and Facebook to capture an audience has been interesting to watch over the last two years, and it looks like Facebook is winning the game for hearts, minds and eyeballs.

While some of what MySpace does is interesting, like Music, the MySpace news site, new bands, and deeply embedded in with popular culture, there are some things that keep me away from MySpace. The number of ads and the type of ads are not what I am there for. Really, not interested in meeting singles (my profile says married, and gives my birth date, they could figure this one out with context sensitive ads, really put some sports cars up there and I’d click on them) or other forms of bling. I like electronica, but the ads really hit more hip-hop style. Nearly naked celebrities just do not go over well at work. With facebook there are none of these challenges, while facebook ads are equally bad, there are only three of them per page, most of them I’ll never click on, but I get to spend more screen space seeing what my friends are up to. That is the important part; I get to spend more quality time with what my friends are up to on Facebook rather than wading through the disaster of UI that is MySpace.

The Facebook UI (User Interface) is clean, clear, easy to use, MySpace profiles are legendary for the amount of bling, shiny things (enough on some pages to induce a seizure), and dancing hamsters. MySpace also had the predator issue, if anything hurt them with parents, who do at times control what their kids do on the internet it was the predator issue. The MySpace Suicide of Megan Meyer and all the other negative image brand killing stuff that happened to MySpace has failed to happen on Facebook. Facebook looks safe where MySpace has to still overcome the negative images even when they have take direct concrete steps to address and fix them.

This is a real opportunity for MySpace to reinvent and invigorate their web site, and while we look at the changing of the guard at MySpace, the question is will they take the opportunity to revitalize their brand and image. No one is suggesting that MySpace become facebook, there are reasons to go to MySpace if you are into music, and you like bling. The problem is that people are into many things, and facebook has done a lot to integrate into other systems like FriendFeed, their own apps quizzes and puzzles. MySpace needs to come up with reasons for me to be there, integrating with my life, providing an entertainment value and making it so that music does not auto launch on page access would be cool. In the longer run, what will MySpace do to compete, and what are they going to do now that they have the opportunity to revise, revisit, revamp, and do something cool.