The new Myspace: Would you kiss a corpse if Justin Timberlake told you to?

But MySpace isn’t really dead, is it? Because nothing on the web ever really dies; not even the ancient, garish and embarrassing proto-network Geocities, which exists to this day in a sort of zombified half-life though dedicated archival fan sites. (Or Friendster, the first “real” social network, which shambles on, sort of, as a gaming community.) MySpace didn’t turn out to be the Titanic — it’s more like some horror-movie leper colony where a few unfortunate residents happened to be in the can when the last employee out wrapped the chain around the fire-exit handles.

Now, pop icon Justin Timberlake and a company called Specific Media have announced they’re just about done scraping the contagious uncool off the walls and floor. Having bought the brand from Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp more than a year ago, they’re ready to introduce a completely revamped MySpace to the world.

The new Myspace — now with fewer capitalized consonants! — takes a whole lot of cues from the sites that tossed it from the top of the social-media hill: cleaner, more intuitive layout; more and bigger photos; more media overall; and more updates from a user’s connections. Imagine Facebook, Flickr, Tumblr and Twitter making love in full color against a coolly monochromatic background, as envisioned by the designers of Microsoft’s upcoming Windows 8 dashboard.

I assume it will do everything the favored social networks of today do, only all in one place.

But will it matter? After all, while nothing ever really dies on the web, nothing ever regains full glowing health either, once the newerfasterbetter comes along. And it remains to be seen if even Justin Timberlake can scrape off the kind of uncool that’s encrusted Myspace in recent years.

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