MySpace plans redesign for next week

News Corp's MySpace plans to launch a global redesign this week in an attempt to widen its demographic and boost user engagement on the site, the social networking site said.

In what it said would be the largest scale re-launch of a website of its size, MySpace said it was changing its home page, navigation, profile editing, search, and MySpaceTV player facilities and that many more changes would be coming over the summer.

"This is more than a facelift; we're changing the way people interact with the site and with brands," MySpace said, adding that a major advertiser had signed on to take over the US MySpace homepage on the first day of the re-launch.

The main phase of the re-launch is set for Wednesday.

MySpace said it had drastically overhauled the look and feel of its searches, which it said currently rank third in total number of searches by any site.

It said it was working with Lucene Open-Source engine and community, marking the first time MySpace has contributed to the Open-Source community.