End Of An Era For MySpace?

Myspace

The social networking hub known as Myspace, previously MySpace, used by many in Tipperary to promote the entertainment industry, have recently announced it will cut possibly half of its global workforce, as part of it’s restructuring efforts.

Up to six hundred Myspace employees worldwide will soon be looking for work, as the site continues to redefine itself from a social network site to an entertainment content site with added social networking features. Myspace’s recently announced layoffs already follow two previous rounds of job cuts which it implimented in 2009, reducing it’s then workforce by 30%.

Myspace, which sought to partially retreat from it’s once mighty social network to an entertainment content site, has seen its Web traffic numbers drop dramatically in the recent past.

The parent company News Corp. and it’s division, which includes Myspace posted a $156 million loss for the quarter ending September 2010.

News Corp. may now be looking to sell this site which it purchased for $580 million in 2005, and one potential buyer, according to rumour, just may be Yahoo!, best known for its web portal, search engine (Yahoo! Search), Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, advertising, online mapping (Yahoo! Maps), video sharing (Yahoo! Video), and social media websites and services..

Myspace was overtaken Internationally by its main competitor, Facebook, in April 2008, based on monthly unique visitors.

Last August, Myspace launched a service that allowed you to push your Myspace activity into Facebook. This was followed by a new product called MySpace Mashup with Facebook that let you pull in your likes and interests from Facebook, to obtain personalized entertainment recommendations onto Myspace. This move incorporated Myspace into Facebook’s universal login platform, and many critics saw this move as Myspace formally bowing down to its more popular and ever increasing social networking rival.

The big question currently being debated regarding Myspace is whether it can recover or if any new potential owner can revive it’s ailing social networking hub, through into 2011.