MySites, a Finnish service that was featured in and sponsored the first ArcticEvening almost a year ago, has redesigned and repositioned itself in the market. Mysites was previously known as a place to store all your files. Some even thought, after showcasing the service in the ArcticEvening, that they are going head on with Facebook and Myspace. The new slogan, which clarifies the mission of the company significantly, is “the world’s first social operating system”.
The advantages of repositioning themselves are significant, although it remains to be seen just how much there is demand for a service of this sort. Referring to existing concepts is rational and does not require the possible user too much thought to see the value in the service. Better yet, the service has redesigned its website to support this goal and in doing so, has dropped the cartoonish look it still had some time ago.
Once you arrive at the website, it does not hit you with a ton of information like it did before. What’s even more enjoyable is the view after the sign in to the service – the design is calm and soothing as a Buddhist temple. I think Ramine’s team has done an excellent job with the redesign and repositioning. Now it’s all up to the marketing and sales on how to build traction and cashflow, something that the service still lacks as its 100% free. Nevertheless, it’s easy to imagine the ways in which this sort of a service can be commercialised.
Furthermore, I noticed a Facebook status update from Ramine that might be telling something of their plans for 2009. Ramine working on an investment can only mean so many things. We’re still to find out more about the details, but hopefully we’ll be hearing some news in the coming weeks.
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I just wish there was Safari support as currently it requires IE7 or Firefox and gives errors on Safari. Shouldn’t be too difficult to do. Plus I got a “Something went wrong” error on login.
Good to see they are openly pitching the social OS. Clarifies things quite a bit.
I got the same “something went wrong” message. I wonder if I got my UN and PW right. Don`t know. I wish they had some kind of “forgot password” feature.
You took us by surprise! We’ve been working on a big batch of updates, the new homepage and desktop being part of that. Coming soon: improved navigation, search, password reset, and a few (big) surprises.
PS: You’ll find some hints about those on our Twitter (@mysites) in the coming days.
Nice to see some changes on MySites and it’s clear that Ramine & Co have put lot of work in this major redesign. There are probably interesting ways to position MySites, but I’m very skeptical about this “social online OS” thing.
MySites is joining a very crowded niche here. Many have already created so-called web OSes (btw, I think “webtops” is a more accurate description). Here’s a bunch of such sites here:
http://www.k-director.com/blog/22-powerful-web-operating-system-webos/
However none of those sites ever gained traction… simply because people are not looking for an OS when they go online. Please prove me wrong, but I doubt there’s a market for a social OS website. The entire web itself is the social platform.
Oh, I agree. But MySites is more than just our one desktop service. We offer proper video, music, audio and file hosting / sharing / embedding services.
It just happens that the desktop is the first thing you see (Mashable.com named it the best online desktop out there), but I think the comparison ends there.
We’ll reveal more of the OS parts very soon. Just to give you an idea, we’ve created a shell and our own IDE :)