Looks like the acquisition of MySpace might go full circle:

1) MySpace for $ half a billion - Rupert Murdoch is an idiot!
2) Murdoch is a genius, he nabbed MySpace for a fraction of what it is worth! Brilliant!
3) No, it isn't worth anything after all...

[money.cnn.com...]

Social networking site MySpace said Tuesday that it plans to slash nearly 30% of its workforce, leaving it with 1,000 employees.

Once the world's largest online social network, MySpace has struggled to compete with the rapid user growth of rivals Facebook and Twitter. Usership and average time spent on the Web site have decreased over the past several months.

"Simply put, our staffing levels were bloated and hindered our ability to be an efficient and nimble team-oriented company," said MySpace Chief Executive Owen Van Natta. "Our intent is to return to an environment of innovation that is centered on our user and our product."

More News on the demise of Myspace

[edited by: engine at 10:57 am (utc) on June 17, 2009]
[edit reason] added quote [/edit]

MySpace Chief Executive Owen Van Natta

Seriously?

Surely this guy was destined for work in social networking...hehe...

Murdoch made his money back years ago when they signed that advertising agreement with Google.. since then it has been frosting on the cake.

It was always inflated, and let's face it, was anyone surprised like I was that a website with such atrocious connection times could ever really become that popular.

How long does it take to load a page on that website!

The part that gets me is "offices around the world" - it's a website, if you need that many people to run a lousy website, something is wrong.

[edited by: incrediBILL at 5:12 pm (utc) on June 17, 2009]

The part that gets me is "offices around the world" - it's a website

Many features/codes for myspace were coded around the world.

Myspace, earned a HEAVY FORTUNE, when they had too, like any other web idea (commercial) they are going to face competition now.

Many features/codes for myspace were coded around the world.

I've worked with SF Bay Area companies that coded worldwide features from our locale simply because we have the diversity to fill in all the skills needed without an excessively expensive worldwide deployment.

Hey, what do I know, I only developed a Unicode product in 20+ languages, I'm a novice ;)

MySpace became the ghetto of social networking.

what do 1000 workers do on a website? you guys tell me, many of us operate really big sites alone or with a few helpers.
this is absolutely crazy new economy bs. in all seriousness, if markus frind manages to work on a quite comparable website all by himself, shouldn't say ten people suffice for myspace? 50? surprise: with a reasonable amount of employees like that they would also be able to get profitable.

1000 people to feed.. what a massive overhead megalomaniac website operators can produce if they are given a stupid amount of venture cash to burn.

Funnies post of the week, hands down:

MySpace became the ghetto of social networking.

what do 1000 workers do on a website?

Well, let's see... you would have a CEO, plus several VPs to tell him he is smart - so that is probably 10 people, each with a secretary. Each of the VPs would have about 10 people to boss around, so that they have something to do. So now we are up to 1+10+10+100=121 . Then you need 10 people in the HR department to stop those 121 from doing illegal things to each other in the workplace. With that many people you will also need a mailroom, concierge service, travel planning department, building maintenance, so that has got to be another 50 people. Now we are up to 181.

Server care, website features (hah!) and other IT related issues could be another 100 people. Then you have all the hundreds of people that were hired because they need to screen for all the perverts stalking children on MySpace. And don't forget the advertising department that gets all the money coming in to pay for all this. That has to be at least 50 people spending their time having expensive lunches and filling out fake prospecting reports and working on sales funnel graphs.

OK. I can't see why they need so many people either. Fire about 1300 people and things should be fine. Its all User Generated Content anyway, unless Tila Tequila is a Myspace employee.

gpilling, i could not stop myself lol.
excellent markup

Basically I'd expect the usual programming teams structure:

a) new ideas group - spends most of their time writing new code
b) testing and bug fix team - spends most of their time trying to understand a's undocumented buggy code, and fixing bugs
c) customer feedback team - implements new features requested by users, even when it makes the site/code unworkable. Ignores advice from the above.
d) maintenance team - spends most of their time trying to understand a's b's and c's undocumented buggy code, with the hope of making the site not run like a snail.

I other words lots of duplication of work and loss of knowledge.