The Horizontal UI Preview

In September 2012, MySpace put out a video, and for the first time in four years people were interested.

The preview

The teaser showed something genuinely unfamiliar: a MySpace that scrolled sideways. A horizontal, card-based interface, image-forward, dark, built around music playback that persisted while you browsed. It looked less like a social network and more like a design magazine that played songs.

Justin Timberlake's involvement made it news, and the press coverage — NBC News, Adweek, and most of the technology trade — took the same line, which was roughly: this looks good, and it is probably too late.

The reaction was real. The video circulated widely. Sign-ups for early access ran into the hundreds of thousands. For a property most people had written off, a moment of actual attention was not nothing.

What was actually being built

The new MySpace was a rebuild rather than a redesign — a different product wearing the same name. Profile customization, the platform's founding characteristic, was gone. In its place was a consistent, art-directed template that everyone shared and nobody could break.

Music was the center. Artist pages, playlists, a persistent player, and a connect layer between musicians and listeners. The bet was that MySpace's one remaining real asset — its catalogue and its artist relationships — could anchor a modern product.

Analysis: the 2012 preview is the best-designed thing MySpace ever shipped, and it is the moment the company completed a trade it had begun in 2010. To get a coherent, fast, monetizable, art-directed product, MySpace removed the one feature no competitor had ever copied. What it launched was, on its own terms, good. It was also a music service with a social graph attached, competing in a year when Spotify was scaling and Facebook owned identity. The new MySpace had no structural advantage in either lane, and the thing that had once given it one had been deliberately deleted.

The people

Tim and Chris Vanderhook were running the company, funding the rebuild out of an advertising business that was profitable regardless of whether MySpace was fashionable. Justin Timberlake was the public face and creative partner, in the middle of his own return to music after a six-year gap. Tom Anderson, asked periodically for comment on the platform he had co-founded, was polite and disengaged.

What it felt like

Like a trailer for a film about your childhood. The design was beautiful and had almost nothing in common with the thing you remembered. The old MySpace was loud, broken, personal, and yours. The new one was tasteful.

Plenty of people signed up for the beta. Very few of them stayed once they got in, though that reckoning was a year away.

Why this matters in 2026

2012 is the counterexample to the theory that MySpace failed because it stopped trying. It tried extremely hard, spent real money, hired real designers, and shipped something genuinely modern.

It did not work, and the reason is the most important lesson in this entire series: you cannot relaunch a platform by removing the reason people loved it and keeping the logo. If the current owners repeat exactly one mistake, it will be this one.