MyspaceCopied

By October 2010 Myspace had long been eclipsed by Facebook. The Los Angeles Times reported eMarketer's estimate that Facebook would earn $835 million in advertising that year against Myspace's $323 million, and that the site was facing a dramatic decline in users. Its answer, the LA Times noted, was borrowed from Hollywood: the reboot.

The old lockup, a people icon with myspace.com and the line a place for friends, went. The new logo is the word my in Helvetica followed by an empty bracketed space. Myspace said the blank represents the space where people express themselves; AllThingsD summed up the idea as my, fill in the space. The site itself was redesigned as an entertainment destination for 13- to 35-year-olds to discover music, film, TV and games, with features such as trending charts and badges for fan curators.

The logo was presented at the Warm Gun design conference by Mike Macadaan, vice president of user experience, who said Myspace was a platform for people to be whatever they want, so it gave them the space to do it. On the redesigned site the blank space was meant to fill with user artwork on hover. TechCrunch predicted people would hate it, coming right after the Gap logo fiasco, but judged it better than the old human-centipede-and-Arial lockup; Fortune asked whether Myspace was now an empty space.

Chief executive Mike Jones called it an exciting turning point. Myspace did not credit an outside design studio in its announcement.

Silicon Republic set out what the bracket was meant to frame. Under pressure from Facebook and Twitter, Myspace was recasting itself as a social entertainment hub, and the company said the bracket represented a space where people could express themselves. The beta site promoted influential users as curators, offered list, grid and video homepages, and launched more than 20,000 topic pages aggregating news from outlets such as MTV and The New York Times, plus hubs for film, TV and celebrities. The rollout began on 27 October 2010 and was due to reach everyone worldwide by the end of November.

The bracket was a clever idea and a doomed one. It was clever because it named what Myspace had always been about, customisation. It was doomed because it reads as a missing word, and the brand was already a fading one. It did not reverse the decline.