MySpace’s Events page hasn’t really seen a major upgrade for years – the site looks like it hasn’t been updated since 2005, and now lags behind Evite and the current leader Facebook by a wide margin. Today, it looks like that’s about to change. The site’s Events tab now redirects to a MySpace application called Social Plan, which was apparently built by Slingshot Labs, MySpace’s stealth incubator that was created last January. As far as we can tell MySpace hasn’t made any announcements about the new feature, but it seems to be accessible to everyone.
The new Events section is a major upgrade from the previous version, both in appearance and functionality. The biggest addition to the new application is the ability to get relevant event suggestions based on what your friends are up to. While Facebook has been doing this for years, MySpace has largely failed to tap into its greatest asset – its social graph. Users can also scope out upcoming events in their region, and can make ‘Quick Events’, which take only a few seconds to put together. The workflow of making a normal event is also much improved.
The new product from Slingshot is being billed as a standard application built on MySpace’s app platform (it includes the typical “This app was not developed by MySpace” message), and visitors can still access the original Events page at events.MySpace.com. But users that click on ‘Events’ from MySpace’s navigation bar are brought to the application, so it’s clear that this is part of the site’s core functionality (I suspect they’ll get rid of the old version entirely once they’ve made sure the new one doesn’t have any kinks). This is also notable for being the first time a Slingshot app has been deployed on MySpace itself, and indicates that the social network is pleased with the results from its unorthodox venture.
All in all, it looks like Slingshot has come up with a winner, though it will still have a tough time catching up with Evite and Facebook (MySpace probably should have rolled out something like this a long time ago). This isn’t the first time the experimental incubator paid off for MySpace: Slingshot also created DailyFill, a gossip site that has shot off to 3.9 million uniques a month since its launch less than four months ago.
Does Evite have “events”? I only see Invitations on their site.
Ops. My comment didn’t show up. I just said that I feel MySpace may not be focused enough. Events seems to be an easy feature, but it takes a whole company to work on it. That is what its competitor – the small nimble competitor is doing. Yes. MySpace is bigger, but… they also have much more things to do than Events. No wonder others can do better than MySpace.
It is starting to look like NewsCorp should have launched Slingshot years ago.
Event & Party planning could be a fun if integrated seamlessly with localization, mobile messaging and streaming, personalization etc. Or else, its so simple to create an event planning website with trivial feature such as invitations, RSVP etc. Cheers!
I left myspace a long time ago (to much spam/porn/ads) and it would take a lot for me to go back.
Way to step it up!
the previous incarnation was tom’s red-headed stepchild. they didn’t care if it worked or not; indeed, the functionality was one step shy of cryptic. they should’ve just bought upcoming and called it a day.
The spam was cleared up long ago. They have made a lot of changes worth coming back to try. Upgrade to the new home and profile, and check out music playlisting. You can listen to any song for free, and create playlists for free. I have friends on FB & MS so I still use both.
It is amazing how things are changing so quickly… websites look old in a matter of years when new features and appearance trends appear… the real advantage to the race is the efficiency improvements which are tremendous – including events and invitations to said events being sent electronically… my wife just made invitiations to our baby shower coming up – but put the wrong address on them OOOPS, I think we’ll have to try Facebook, and I GUESS maybe Myspace.
Slingshot definitely should’ve been started years ago when Newscorp first acquired MySpace. Those guys have some great ideas!
why, so slingshot can do the development that myspace should’ve been doing in the first place?
Seems like this is only available in English. When will it be ready in other languages?
Wow, that’s quite interesting information.
Events as a closed network doesn’t promote discovery. How many people will install this (or get a MySpace page) if they can’t see what is in it already.
This should have been opened up so we could see what events are in there, and then get people add and share the events they’ve found with the sign-up.
Maybe that is why it hasn’t received a big launch yet.
You don’t have to install it to see the events or to create an event. I don’t think you have to install it at all.
BTW, html doesn’t work! Anyone know a workaround?
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When are they (or facebook) going to learn to allow us to just invite all of our friends within a certain distance? I don’t want to individually click things – I do events for a bar. All the ‘friends of the bar” need to be invited and that is *tedious* beyond belief.
I absolutely hate the new events system .You can’t save any of the events pages to your hard drive because nothing is static. It uses the AJAX system. If you have trusted site lists setup in MSIE to protect yourself from trojans, then you need to manually figure out what sites to trust since it’s not obvious as it uses embedded code. Otherwise the events can’t even be administered.
I help manage several band pages for artists and Social Plan has NOT been the solution we had hoped for. There is no way to filter fans by zip code or age. The app constantly crashes or runs extremely slow… even when using the Google Gears add-on like it suggests using!
The premade Templates look great and there are some nice features, but overall some major improvements are required before it can reach it’s full potential.
At this point you still have to click on each individual guest you would like to send the invitation to. This can become very time consuming when you have a few thousand fans who live in the town where you’re playing and you would like to send them all an invite. Plus, it is extremely frustrating when you spend time adding your fans to a guest list only to have the app crash as you’re attempting to actually send the invitations out!!!