Myspace’s Last Ditch Attempts, Laying Off Half its Staff
Making another attempt to revitalize itself and making a comeback, MySpace is expected to lay off around 600 employees tomorrow. This will be roughly a full 50% of its staff strength. The news has been lingering since December, but the date has been finalized as 11 January now.
Besides this, MySpace employees are expecting some more layoffs by the company, reaching it almost 70 per cent. After this, News Corp., MySpace’s owner will look towards selling it to Yahoo.
Although the social network-turned-entertainer is experiencing bad times, there are several other developments that it made in the past six months. For example, in order to maintain whatever position it can muster, it renewed its image and underwent a well-intend makeover, with focus on social entertainment. MySpace made several technical level structure changes to compete with the likes of Facebook and Twitter.
To entertain its mobile and iPhone users, MySpace updated its mobile site, as well as launched an iPhone application.
“We have a two-pronged approach to our mobile strategy. We are creating the best experience for Myspace mobile web users by taking the most compelling entertainment elements of Myspace.com and making them portable, while simultaneously building a portfolio of independent mobile applications tailored specifically to entertainment categories. This approach allows us to offer a meaningful social entertainment experience on mobile that is both fast and engaging, said Michael Jones, chief executive officer for MySpace.
More recently, it also made its mobile website accessible to iPhone, iPod Touch, Android, Palm and select Nokia and BlackBerry devices.
To catch up with the global social gaming and virtual currency trends, MySpace incorporated Making Fun in its gaming strategy. The founding members of of this game business are John Welch and Lee Crawford.
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