MySpace has upgraded the home page for their users. For the longest time the user’s profile page was not editable at all. MySpace decided what was important for you to see – and that was mostly ads.
My home page in the old UI:
This always annoyed me – I would have to scroll and scroll to actually see my friend list. And as you can see my Friend List isn't even above the fold in that screenshot. Three quarters of the page was taken up by ads and other mostly frivolous stuff. The only items I really wanted to see: my profile information and my friends were at the top left of the page and shoved to the bottom right, way below the fold. Who wants to scroll past sponsored links and ads to see if their friends are online or not?
TechCrunch had written an article about a potential new UI back in September, but until wasn’t available to users until recently. Last week I logged into my account and there was a link to switch to the ‘new home skin’. While not perfect, it is a huge improvement from what it was. Overall it’s much cleaner. There are still a lot of ads, but there is now a 3 column layout instead of 2 column - allowing the information that is important to me to be above the fold. Users can move their Friend List, Friend Status, Friend Updates, and Bulletins widgets up or down to reorder them. These widgets can also be expanded and collapsed. Finally I can organize these in the order that I want to see them! The Control Panel is much better than its previous incarnation (my mail) – it looks nicer and it’s easier to read the buttons. I would have liked drag and drop capability for all the widgets, but I will take this for now.
My home page in the new UI:
