MYSPACE 2.0

News Corp.’s MySpace is attempting to climb out from behind its current state of clutter with a redesign, which will officially debut next Wednesday. The makeover includes improvements on both the front-end and back-end, highlighting more intuitive search capabilities that categorize desired results and a reduction of the currently overwhelming amount of navigation options and ad noise on the site’s homepage, a higher quality video player for MySpaceTV with popout and full screen controls.

The site, according to Comscore, still boasts more than 100 million users. But even with the potential redesign, and its recent more persistent engagement with its development community, MySpace is still fighting the user base stigma of being just for kids, teens and less savvy Internet users with a fondness for animated avatars.

In an interview with the Associated Press, MySpace founder Tom Anderson said that the redesign is in part fueled by its desire to shatter its “kids only” image. But in the wake of Facebook’s steady popularity with the “grown-up” networking audience, can MySpace earn the trust of business users? (More from ZDNET)