Tom may be losing some of his MySpace friends

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Tom may be losing some of his MySpace friends

June 12, 2009 – 9:14 am – No Comment

It looks like the giant social networking site MySpace is gearing up for some serious layoffs. It is expecting to have to lay off as many as 500 of the 1,600 it currently has working at their headquarters.

The company, owned by News Corp, is trying to cut costs to help in the fight with arch rival Facebook.

MySpace currently had committed to a 12 year lease on a Playa Vista building near Los Angeles, CA. The lease would have cost the company roughly $350 million. Now, because of financial hardships faced by the company, it has backed out of the lease. The building was a 420,000 square foot office space in Play Vista, California.

The market share for MySpace has been declining steadily since it was bought by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp in 2005. It has been losing visitors and advertisers to Facebook, and more recently, Twitter.

In my own opinion, as well as the opinion of many of my friends, is that MySpace is a second rate Facebook. Even though many of us have been using MySpace for longer, the overall sight design as well as some of the more unsavory clientele have made the site really come in second place to Facebook, but still well above the Xuqa. Now, even though Twitter isn’t my favorite social networking thing, I find myself on it more than I am on MySpace…perhaps its because it is one of the only social networking applications on my new phone.

So it appears that Tom will be losing nearly a third of his coworker friends on MySpace. I hope that those developers and programmers find work, but not at Facebook because I like Facebook the way it is, even if all the applications and quizzes are really annoying at times.