Lost in all the recent talk about Twitter and Facebook has been MySpace, the pioneer in the social networking world. It’s back in the news today, but not for anything good. MySpace owner News Corp. plans to lay off 30 percent of its staff – about 400 employees.
MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta said, “Our staffing levels were bloated and hindered our ability to be an efficient and nimble team-oriented company.” He acknowledged the cuts are tough for a lot of people, but that the company wanted to return to a “start-up culture.”
MySpace has been running way behind Facebook in its number of users and even farther behind Twitter in terms of notoriety as of late. News Corp. bought the social networking site for nearly $600 million when it was a hot commodity, but MySpace has struggled to make the big money that many hoped it would.