MySpace slashes its staff in half

MySpace said Tuesday that it is laying off 500 employees, cutting its staff by 47%.

"Today's tough but necessary changes were taken in order to provide the company with a clear path for sustained growth and profitability," CEO Mike Jones said in a written statement. "These changes were purely driven by issues related to our legacy business, and in no way reflect the performance of the new product."

he company announced the long-rumored staff chop at the exact moment most of the tech world's attention was riveted elsewhere, on Verizon's hotly anticipated announcement that it will soon begin selling Apple's iPhone.

Once king of the social networking world, seven-year-old MySpace has fallen behind younger and nimbler rival Facebook. Acquired by News Corp. (NWS, Fortune 500) in 2005 for $580 million in cash, the site's active user base now hovers around 130 million -- far short of Facebook's 500 million.

Trying to reposition itself, the Los Angeles-based network recently rolled out a new interface focusing on music and social entertainment.



It also unveiled a Facebook link that allows MySpace users to integrate their profile data and log in through Facebook -- a move some took as a sign that MySpace is waving the white flag.

Jones tried to quash those rumors in his announcement of the company's deep layoffs.

"While it's still early days, the new MySpace is trending positively and the good news is we have already seen an uptick in returning and new users," he wrote.

But in a recent interview with Fortune, Jones acknowledged the sharp challenges the company faces in trying to rebuild.

"My belief is that MySpace got very, very diverse in its offering, and didn't really have a specialized service that users understood," he said. "As we broadened our service over time, I think we lost some of the core strategic functions that MySpace offered early on that delighted its customers."

source

facebook killed my space

Indeed, even twitter killed myspace. Everything now is Facebook & Twitter, companies don't even promote their pages with Myspace any longer. The-EN has a Myspace page, 200+ friends on it too. But most of our outside traffic comes from our facebook page, Myspace has really fallen down, and their website is super laggy..

I used myspace up until a little over a year ago. I liked the customization and music options, which I wish we could do on Facebook; but the reason I left, was because on Facebook you can instantly see your friends status updates. I remember at one time no one had a Facebook, only a Myspace, I began to only find one out of 10 people I searched for on there. Now I'm trying to learn twitter...I still prefer Facebook.

Lol, I said the same thing Cyn. I was like, damn.. FB is so.. plain? Myspace had fully customization over everything, and if you wanted to name yourself "The God of Thunder" it was possible! Facebook keeps you more to your real name and stuff, but there is less lag, cleaner pages so its easy to browser.

Twitter took me some time to learn... When I first signed up on twitter I was like WTF am I looking at? O_O All I saw was people typing sentences that looked like "#superfudge I missed @brotherjoseph for a #meeting @church so I'm bumpped #FML"

Eventually you'll understand that # = Hash tags, which means "Keywords" you are pointing out. The more people on Twitter who use the same Hash tags(keywords) in their tweets(post) becomes a "trending topic" on twitter. Following twitter trends in your post is a good way to get your page known because everyone viewing the twitter trends will come across your page if you are using the similar keywords.

The @ symbol indicates another user on twitter. So if you typed "@The_EN you are so #cool!" The-EN's twitter account will be linked in that post, and you will also be hash tagging that post with the word "cool". Now everyone looking at trends with the word "cool" will come across your post.

Well thats it for twitter lessons 101 on a Myspace news topic

lol, ok, I'll have to try that out today