-My last few articles have been discussing the pros & cons of bands using My Space. Last month the “new & improved” My Space debuted & everyone had to adopt it-whether they liked it or not! The work done here was to at least get My Space back in the social network race with Facebook-ideally to equal or topple them. How did they do? Let’s see….

The Pros-it’s easier to add people. Just hover the mouse over any thumbnail-a window opens-click add friend-done. The music player now holds up to 100 songs & you have 2 folders-1 for all music & 1 for public. That’s good if you want to rotate songs-much better than having a limit of 10 songs. They also have Fanreach-which, I believe, is tied in with Reverbnation- the templates & operation are similar. I’m sure I’m overlooking more but that’s because of 1 of the cons. Speaking of which…

The Cons-one of the gripes people had w/ My Space was the amount of viruses that seem to float around. So then why add Flash-known to make it easier for viruses to flow? Most books on website programming/promoting say to use Flash sparingly-guess My Space didn’t get the memo. Now, doing things on My Space has slowed down considerably. Ideally, a site should be easy to navigate & quick to use. Not here. The text is smaller too & stuff is all over the place.

-Of course, this means it takes longer to read/post comments too.If you want to leave a comment, you have to get rid of the “Post a Comment…” text. Then you can post right? Nope-the “Post” button hasn’t appeared yet. So type your thing & click it when it appears right? Nope. Once the “Post” button appears, any text in the comment box is erased-fun times!

-The Stats are off too. Add 50 new people-your friend count will stay the same for awhile.You can link up you Facebook, Twitter & You Tube stats here-supposedly I guess. I tried to do that &, 10 minutes later, it was STILL trying to complete the task.

-I haven’t tried the video section but did look into the pics. You have more options but one that I can’t find is moving pics within an album. It used to be there. Plus the menus here are more Flash which means-you guessed it-going slower.

-I could go on but I have a word limit ya know 🙂 Although many people are deleting their pages, I would say to bands don’t delete your band page. They can still be of use-just not as your main site. Many bands have done-and still continue-to do this. You’re own website should be your main site & all the rest-My Space, Facebook, Reverbnation,etc.-should just be branches to the tree so to speak.

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