It's the end of the year, but at Mashable we're looking forward. The top comments from our community this week encapsulated the sentiments common to the end of the year: reflection on the past and speculation about the future. By now you've probably noticed we've rolled out the brand new look for the site to all of our readers. The new Mashable is social, mobile and visual.

The reborn social network is now accepting its first trickle of users, and the site is, in a word, beautiful.

Myspace is going musical, and it hopes Justin Timberlake's vocal cords will put some sexy back in the social network. On Thursday, the pop-star revealed the new and improved site that now focuses on being a platform for artists and exposing music in a social way. Timberlake announced his investment in the site last year.

Here at Mashable, the week kicked off with conversations about social good with the Social Good Summit serving as the platform for a three-day global conversation. Activists, humanitarians, entrepreneurs and CEOs all discussed how social media can affect positive change on a global scale. The conversation even broke a world record: It was the largest conversation around a single topic to ever occur in one day.

Fifteen months after its acquisition by Specific Media, we're finally getting a sneak peek at the new MySpace. Justin Timberlake -- who took an ownership stake in the new MySpace -- tweeted a link to a video previewing the new service.

We love the Olympics, but an international social media showdown is a little more our speed. Ignite Social Media is back with the 2012 Social Network Analysis Report, breaking down demographic, geographic and search data that shows which networks are the underdogs and which are mounting the winners' podium. Here at Mashable, we can't get enough GIFs and hashtags.

It's been a long road for Facebook. What began as an intimate platform has turned into a social networking giant serving more than 900 million users. Facebook may be cashing in on its intial public offering this week, but it wasn't the first to introduce the world to online social networking -- many other sites were once recognized as the most popular. What made them fall by the wayside? For some, it was server instability or lack of financial support to hit the ground running.

Should MySpace last the next 20 years, it'll have at least one close observer: the federal government. MySpace's privacy practices will be kept under close watch by a third-party observer for two decades as part of a settlement related to an investigation of the company's advertising sales strategy, the FTC announced Tuesday. The agreement also prevents MySpace from making "future privacy misrepresentations" and requires it to make significant changes to its privacy policy.

Ground Control to Commander Shepard! BioWare is turning up the buzz on its highly anticipated action/sci-fi adventure game Mass Effect 3 by launching it into space before its ever-closer release date. Yes. Space. According to an article by USA Today, BioWare's parent company Electronic Arts will send copies of the game into space using weather balloons. The balloons will take off from San Francisco, Las Vegas, New York City, London, Paris and Berlin.

Is Justin Timberlake really bringing MySpace back? Could be, according to data released by the company on Monday. MySpace claims that it now has "an average of 40,000 new registrations daily" and says it has added more than a million new users since launching its new MySpace Music Player in December. The site also touts its library of 42 million songs as the world's largest collection of free music, signifying that services like Spotify -- not Facebook or Google+ -- may be its real competition.

LAS VEGAS -- Justin Timberlake, we learned Monday, is serious about bringing MySpace back. He's so serious, in fact, that he actually showed up at Panasonic's press event today at CES to talk up MySpace's partnership with the consumer-electronics giant, featuring a brand new MySpace app for TV. Timberlake's appearance was brief, but entertaining -- not unlike his frequent cameos on Saturday Night Live, which he alluded to.

Justin Timberlake just took the next step in his campaign to bring MySpace back. The pop super star and MySpace co-owner joined Panasonic on stage at the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show to announce a new service that will make TV a whole lot more social.

Your social media profiles have morphed as the sites they live on have changed. So has the way people view them. To get a better idea of how profile design affects profile viewers, Mashable asked eye-tracking research startup EyeTrackShop to compare visual statistics for Twitter, Facebook and MySpace profiles before and after major site redesigns. The company had 30 people to look at the profiles while tracking their eye movements.

Since the rise of the Internet in the '90s, the web has shown no signs of slowing down. We've watched the birth and evolution of social media, e-commerce and online video entertainment. It's hard to imagine that the treasured websites we all use today were at one point just scribbles on a piece of paper, or the brainchild of a 19-year-old college student.

Does the requirement that you must use your real name on Facebook and Google+ make you shy away from saying anything risqué on those networks? If so, you might want to sign up for Anybeat, a social network that aims to become a hub of conversation about controversial subjects. The site is officially out of beta as of Monday. Founded by Dmitry Shapiro, the former CTO of MySpace Music, Anybeat separates itself from other social networks by encouraging its members to use pseudonyms.