Well I sure haven't been and today I finally logged into my account and I was so confused with all of the changes that Myspace has made. The way they have changed their website now, it is not user-friendly at all. For example, it took me about 5 minutes to find how to log out of the website.
Although there are many things that users don't like about Myspace, there are ways that Myspace can help increase their number of users. The main way is for Myspace to help integrate with other social networking websites, such as Facebook. It appears that Myspace already allows some integration when it comes to setting up a new profile. According to Myspace.com, "To help save you time setting up your profile (and give you more of the things you love), we can pull your interests (like movies, music, and celebs) and public profile info (name, email, gender, birth date, and photo) from Facebook and automatically add and follow them on your Myspace profile." So, it appears that Myspace is trying, but it isn't really enough to make it work for them.
Another thing that Myspace could do is to make the site more user-friendly. Like I said in the beginning, it took me a long time to figure out how to use their "updated" website. I think that it alienates the previous users that decide to log into their account after a long time of not using it. The harder the website is to use, the less likely people are to use it! Below is a chart comparison of Facebook users versus Myspace users in 2008 - 2009.
As you can see from above, there is a significant increase of Facebook users and about the amount of Myspace users has been pretty steady with a slight decline. The chart clearly shows how much more successful that Facebook is than Myspace. I believe that all of this comes back to user-friendliness. It is so easy to use Facebook because everything is laid out nicely, whereas with Myspace you have to search pretty hard to figure out how to do the simplest of things.
These are just two ideas that I came up with for Myspace to do. Ultimately it comes down to how much advertising that Myspace can do in order to increase usage, but it won't increase unless something is done to make Myspace more user-friendly. Being able to sync with the social media websites that are available would be able to increase usage because people will see using the website as very convenient. The more convenient and easy a website is to use, the more users the website will have. This is very much so the case with social media and the main reason why Facebook and Twitter are so popular.
Sources:
http://www.myspace.com/
http://techcrunch.com/2009/05/18/myspace-is-in-real-trouble-if-these-page-view-declines-dont-reverse/
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