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MySpace officially launched a few new features this morning, many of which had already been noticeable on the site for a couple weeks. The center of the changes is the "New Home Skin" which attempts to make your home page (once logged in) easier to use, but in reality attempts to cram way too many unrelated features into one location. Status updates now take front and center, where you can both update your own and see those of your friends. I've always found it interesting that if you don't update your status, MySpace will do it for you with the trivial: "Adam is … in your extended network."

Meanwhile, down the left hand navigation of the homepage there are links to many of MySpace's lesser-used features like news, weather, and books (they have a "books" section?), many of which simply duplicate the links in the top navigation. The "friends" area has added a pull-down menu for browsing your network by things like "who's online" or "upcoming birthdays." There is also a box for navigating different content that MySpace (or their advertisers) want you to think is cool. A couple of other features that MySpace gloats about in their release this morning is a revamped forum and a required CAPTCHA to add friends in the hopes of reducing spam.

Perhaps MySpace's Tom Anderson does the best job of summarizing this news: "This is the first major enhancement to the look and feel of the user homepage since we launched MySpace four years ago," he said. In short, most of these changes are way too little, way too late, and reek of too many chefs in the kitchen. While there are plenty of new features for the homepage, they are poorly arranged and will take users plenty of getting used to, especially when there have been zero updates in four years as Tom mentions. At least the link for the "Classic View" of the homepage is still there so you can stick with the old look and feel.

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