Often chastised as being an eyesore for style conscious users, MySpace has announced that they’ll be unveiling a large-scale redesign of their social-networking site later this week. The redesign will mean major design changes to MySpace’s home page, navigation scheme, profile editor, search and the MySpaceTV Flash player.. Most people say that this redesign is well overdue, as the social site has stood with their feet planted on the subject of their unsatisfactory design.

After competitor Facebook announced that they were playing around with an upcoming redesign, MySpace refuses to be outdone. Starting Wednesday, MySpace users will witness the first step in the overhaul, which has been in development for the past 6 months according to MySpace spokesmen.

The home page navigation scheme will be whittled down from 30+ links located on the top half of the page to 5 key navigational paths (home, mail, profile, music and myspaceTV) with the 28 other links available via a drop down menu bar.

Along with the design overhaul, the MySpace search functionality is also getting a boost. Search will now feature tabbed searching capability for multiple searches being ran at once. The MySpace People Search feature will also be renovated with a new coat of paint. Friends now show up as the top search result based on queried name, followed by people who are in your direct network, and then finally based on the global network, thanks to integration of the open source Lucene project. Pre-redesign, the search service had no personal network intelligence. Sending a search query of a common first name would result as a mess of a result.

MySpace will also perform a new unveiling of the Flash-based MySpaceTV, which according to MySpace, will now feature video of 480p when available, cleaner and easier controls, plus a new true full-screen mode.

MySpace worked together with San Fransisco-based firm Adaptive Path for the new design and architecture needed to help improve the network.

The MySpace redesign might prove to be too little, too late, as Facebook has already met and by all probability surpassed MySpace’s unique user statistic count. If MySpace can prove themselves to still be a viable networking site, rather than a living, breathing advertisement, they could pose a threat towards Facebook’s ever-growing market share.