I think the first round of invites went out over the past week. I've been playing with it. First impressions?

new.myspace.com

Horizontal scrolling has been extremely janky on my MBA. Sometimes it flickers backwards.

It's been amazingly art-oriented. Little emphasis on connecting with friends, LOTS on artists (anything from musicians to designers). Very little appeal to me personally — not big on following individual artists.

I love the look and I think there are some interesting product and UI concepts. "Watching" a video while browsing, for example, is pretty great. The visual treatment of things is interesting and well executed.

But there are a ton of downsides. My primary problem is that you're never really anchored anywhere. There isn't a good sense of "home" or navigation. There are no way-finding prompts either, so it's easy to get lost.

The horizontal scroll feels *really* awkward, and, worse, isn't easy to discover which just adds to the feeling of being lost in the app. This is made even worse when deep in the content. It's kind of an organizational nightmare that gets worse as you dig deeper.

I like it as an experiment, not as a living product.

I surprised myself in that I really love it. I know there are some usability issues, but the design visually is very striking. I'm also curious about the social music features. I can listen to what I want, and what my friends listen to, either by a queue or by radio… it's not as feature-rich as Spotify/Rdio, but perhaps with time it could really take them on, especially since it's free. Or maybe they'll introduce a paid plan. Who knows?

I love the quick search. And I love the "Connect" feature to music artists I love. I'm less savvy on what Connecting to a friend's photo actually means, but I remember back when Twitter started, I was confused on the idea of "Following" (and now it's super obvious what that means). :)

@Keith — Totally agree on the lack of a "home". The zero states of the dashboard don't make me feel like I am going to be accumulating anything, either.

@Jina — The search is bananas. I'll have to keep reminding myself that it's doable, though. I just tried connecting to Alicia Keys, but I don't know what that means and why I would do it. Would Alicia be annoyed that I connected to her? Is it the same as Following/Adding her to my music favorites?

I have a lot of questions about the goals of the product, and the product design itself doesn't communicate those to me. It might do it in the messaging, but who reads copy?

DESIGN:
I definitely like the visual design of the site. it reminds me of the previous dark nav YouTube. Interaction still needs some more work. The side-scrolling for instance, I can't scroll to the right easily on my trackpad using the two-finger scroll. I can do it by scrolling up/down which is wonky. Going from Profile to profile is a bit bit jarring and difficult to navigate, but I'm getting use to it. I kind of like being 'in' a person's space.

MUSIC/ARTISTS:
This is definitely geared towards artists it seems. I like the selection they have so far and it's great that it's currently free. I don't have a spotify or rdio account so this is a plus for me to get to my fav music. I still need to add more connections but overall not bad.

From what I've seen, design wise, it's fantastic. I'm happy that their thinking out of the box to develop the interface in a way that's never really been done before. Which would explain it's wonkiness. Is this considered beta right now?

I got my "invite" a couple days ago and when I clicked the link in the email it took me to new.myspace.com and once I entered my email in that box, again, it said "An invitation has already been sent to [email], please follow the steps in the email." Which, there are none. :(

So I haven't actually been able to get in there yet, sadly. Obv. you guys haven't had this issue but any suggestions? I already tried entering a secondary email but no invitation yet.

SOLVED. I guess you have to be on a computer for that invite link to work.