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.
