In 2010, Myspace bet its whole identity on an empty space. My job was filling it.
I was product lead for Myspace mobile during the reboot years: the flagship iPhone and Android apps, and nine standalone apps shipped in about two years, while the company fought to stay alive on a screen it was built too early for.
The rebrand landed on October 8, 2010: Myspace dropped its logo and replaced it with a blank, “my” and an empty line, for people to fill with whatever they were. It was a good idea arriving late. Over the next year the site fell from about 95 million users to 63 million. In January 2011 the company cut 47% of its staff in a single day. That June, News Corp sold Myspace for 35 million dollars, six years after paying 580 million for it.
In the same window, Facebook mobile went from 288 million users to 680 million. The war was already lost. We shipped anyway, because the phone was the one place Myspace’s traffic was still doubling, and someone had to find out what a Myspace worth opening on a phone looked like.
La Vida Logo
the rebrand, shipped as a toy.
The new logo was a fill-in-the-blank. La Vida Logo made that literal: import a photo, drop it into the my_____ mark in movable layers, recolor it, share it anywhere, and submit it to a public gallery for a shot at the Myspace homepage. The brand’s central idea became something you could hold and hand to a friend. Users made more than a million of them. AppBoy scored it 5/5.
drop a photo into the blank. it fills the mark, recolors, and sits in a card you could share.
the Myspace app
the whole network, in your pocket, in five languages of phone.
This was the one that mattered most and was hardest to win. We rebuilt the core Myspace experience, stream, profile, photos, messaging, for a black-and-white flat interface in 2010, when every other app on the phone was pretending to be leather and green felt. A 3x3 home grid, a stream that flipped between list and a full-bleed photo mosaic, a profile that led with the person. It ran on five platforms in eighteen languages, for a reported 4.5 million people a day. Mobile was the only part of Myspace still growing; traffic there had doubled in three months.
flat, black and white, and shipped in 2010. it looks modern now because it was early.
RetroMe
layer-based photo editing, on a phone, in 2010.
Import a photo, build a scene in movable layers, drop in clip art, crop and erase, share it out. Photo editing with a real layer stack, on an iPhone, the year the iPhone 4 shipped. The whole thing was dressed in letterpress woodblock type and distressed paper, a deliberate turn away from the flat chrome, because a standalone app was allowed its own world as long as it kept the my_____ bones underneath.
the page’s clearest rule, made visible: a skin may take the canvas, never the chrome. the bar above stays black and cyan.
seven more, shipped on four-person teams.
Find and message singles near you, filtered by sign, smoker, drinker, school. A dating app built inside a social network a year before Tinder existed.
Capture a friend’s reaction on the front camera and share it, before reaction videos and duets were a format. Live two weeks, 70,000 downloads, then we pulled it. Shipping a camera app to a young audience teaches you fast where the line is.
One compose box that pushed a status, photo or video to Myspace, Facebook and Twitter together, cross-posting before it was a default. Covered by Recombu.
A refresh of the iLike concert-discovery app Myspace had acquired: local listings by date and venue, tied to the artists you follow. Covered by Mashable.
Celebrity and entertainment news pulled into per-topic feeds, one for every name. Sessions ran longer and daily use went up.
An iPad news reader where the interface got out of the way and the story took the screen.
Version two of Myspace’s video-discovery app: pick a genre and a mood, get a wall of videos to love or skip.
Myspace didn’t survive the phone. But the mobile team called several things early: dating off your location, the front camera as a toy, posting once and landing everywhere. We shipped them into a company that was already sliding, on four-person teams, in about two years. The scoreboard says we lost. The record says we were reading the game right.
- Music Videos, design: Ryan Snelson
- MyPrank, development: Curtis May
- La Vida Logo digipak / brand work: names to confirm
- and the four-person teams that shipped all of this.