Here’s the email that Jonathan Miller, News Corp.’s CEO Digital Medial, sent to all Fox Interactive employees about the departure of MySpace cofounder and CEO Chris DeWolfe. DeWolfe is gone. Cofounder Tom Anderson will apparently stay on but not as President and will no longer control product.
The press release went out an hour ago, and given that internal emails inevitably leak, there’s little additional information here. But at least Miller is giving DeWolfe as graceful an exit as he can.
To FIM Employees:
I am writing to share the news that MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe will be stepping down from his executive role in the near future. He has agreed to serve as a strategic advisor to the Company and will remain on the board of MySpace China.
In addition, I am currently in discussions with MySpace President Tom Anderson regarding his role within the organization.
I want to take this opportunity to thank them both for their incredible contributions to the Company, and for pioneering one of the greatest social media revolutions of our time. I wish Chris nothing but the best in any new endeavors and, like many in this industry, am eager to witness his next innovations.
I understand the importance of having a dynamic, inspiring and innovative management team, and am dedicated to ensuring that MySpace continues to benefit from the highest levels of passion and enthusiasm.
I also want to thank everyone across FIM for giving me the opportunity to work with all of you. With MySpace, IGN, Photobucket, Fox Audience Network and our Digital Publishing Group, this is an exciting collective of properties and I’m enthusiastic about the opportunities that lie ahead.
I hope to meet and work closely with many of you over the weeks and months to come.
Best regards,
Jonathan Miller
“In addition, I am currently in discussions with MySpace President Tom Anderson regarding his role within the organization.” I’ll wait to hear about Tom next and I’ll bet I’ll here it first from TechCrunch.
I’m hearing a lot of chatter about Tom and his strong desire to stay on board no matter what his role.
Thanks for the update Michael (I am actually excited to get respond from you, REALLY!), I am sure he’ll would stay for some pay cut in this down economy.
I wonder if they will get rid of the famous Tom profile is he does in-fact leave.
Updated: MySpace in talks with MyLocator.com to become Next Generation Professional Social Network.
JournalistLocator.com – it happens
Where else is Tom going to work?
I mean really. It’s not like he’s going to step in as VP of Microsoft.
Had they and Brad Greenspan not sat there and ripped on each other for years they all would have been MUCH better off.
Just like in the Final Fantasy 6,7,8,9 games, when you lose your initial team, you lose the game or it takes you forever to finish it.
They tore each other apart. This is a fitting end.
I love Final Fantasy 7, but who would Tom be… Cloud and Chris as Zack?
I’ve worked at MySpace for the last few years and Tom is more of a roadblock to progress than most people understand. The company is better off without him. Having him in place in any role is a bad idea.
i work at myspace, which is why i have remain anonymous. i agree with “tom’s friend”. tom is a blocker to progress. he is a smart man, but is not a visionary as everyone seems to call him. we work very hard, and we put in a lot of effort trying to plan our work, but tom comes in and interrupts our work with his special projects all the time. or he kills stuff we are in the final stages of launching. there are so many things that might have made us more competetive but tom pulled the plug on. basically, all of the ‘new’ features he pushes for are reactions to features on other sites that are successful (friendster, facebook, youtube, and more). also, he kills every effort we try to take to expand more internationally. myspace needs responsible leadership to do what’s right for the market. most of the time, i fear that tom is really trying to promote tom-the-celebrity. that’s the one thing he knows will be portable beyond myspace, and that is what drives his decisions, imho. many times at the expense of good projects that should launch. don’t fool yourselves, myspace will make better progress when he is removed from micro-managing operations.
Tom is the sh*t! FIM is RETARDED to think that mostly ALL of the tastemakers that WE brought to the site are going to stay if Tom and Chris are gone! Bureaucracy is at it’s finest here…Tom and Chris are the only reason why MySpace has done so well after the acquisition…..if you left it up to FIM – who had ZERO internet strategy of their own, MySpace would have folded to even a Hi5 years ago. The ONLY reason why Tom is even considering staying after all of this, is because this is his baby….he doesn’t want some machine to ruin it – this is a part of him. I was at MySpace from 2003 – a few months ago, and all of these people that work at MySpace that are dissing Tom are probably a bit green….new to this game. If your ideas are so great, why didn’t you build something like this yourself before you came to work at MySpace really excited to work for Tom. Oh, and Brad Greenspan is a piece of work….just look at his sites LiveVideo and etc….they are all overwhelming clusterf*cks – good luck Brad ‘founder of myspace, freemyspace, and imparanoidcokehead.com’ Wooo! Tedskillz:)
you “myspace employees” should stop talking shit and tell the man to his face. if u had any real gall you’d post your real names, bitches.
They should truly get rid of the data warehouse manager at myspace, who had at least 5 employees of hers complaining about the hierarchies she created and she tried to fail purposefully employees not in her favor, like those who doesn’t know how to joke or flatter her to her expectations.
Under her control of information and knowledge flow, those employees out of the loop will not be able to do the work correctly and she has been providing wrong data to executives for months due to her fault.
Sooner or later, the upper management will find out how this manager is operating her own bureaucracy and hurting the company performance… employees don’t fail; the manager fails them!
Of course, what else will he do? Who would actually hire someone whose unofficial product plan is to copy Facebook?
- Not from India
Michael, what’s up with the background color, dark, black?
It just takes away from TechCrunch’s spectrum of eye appeasing.
TechCrunch is turning off the light for earthday I think!
its earth day, dude.
LOL Opps, thanks for the correction.
MySpace is irrelevant now. Nothing will save it.
ok god
re: black background. I suspect it’s an earth day thing. Black requires less power to produce than white.
Course maybe Michael is just going goth…
That isn’t right actually. Black actually takes more power to produce, which is part of the reason why bad tv’s can’t display deep blacks very well. (or so I have been told)
http://www.scia...k-is&page=2
Last line:
“For those who’ve graduated to thinner LCD models, black screens are actually sucking up more energy then their white counterparts.”
I can’t wait to see Miller sink this ship. AOL 2.0. How exciting!
Miller can get any service to 100 million users, so long as it starts with 200 million …
I forgot it’s an earth day… today?
Look. The growth of Facebook vs. the recent decline in MySpace users has some exec’s at MySpace pissed. Understandably they’re mad, but they have no one to blame but themselves. Anyone’s who’s watched the recent developments had to expect News Corp to go in a new direction.
Out of everyone I know… I only know 1 person that still uses MySpace. It’s a kiddie land. They ruined it by allowing people to add all that crap to their pages. Most pages don’t even open (even in current browsers w/ the most recent version of Flash). Facebook is a much cleaner, quicker, feature rich and more fun experience to use.
Whoever the new CEO will be they sure as hell have a tough job ahead of them.
adding all that crap and customization is what made myspace so popular in the beginning
And is strangling it now. The general public cannot design attractive web pages, that’s painfully obvious on Myspace.
It may already be too late, but Myspace must quickly evolve or die. Myspace hasn’t significantly evolved in > 2 years, which is an eternity on the social web.
Agreed. To that end, Twitter hasn’t evolved either (ok, they added search…) and they’re doing pretty good right now. It should, however, be noted that MySpace is the only one pulling a profit.
Mike, you’ve got to be on our internal distribution list.
…right?
Can you do me a favor and tell me when the next message will be sent? Surprises are beginning to bug me.
What internal list are you talking about. Looks like they have a special list that runs 15mins earlier to the actual distro list.
I get to know more about my employer in techcrunch before internal communication !
Mike you’ve got real contacts !
Same here
No doubt, Robbie! I check in here every morning to see if I still have a job, and then to find out what the special is at the cafe.
Just like what had happened to Skype, same thing will happen to MySpace.
Chris and Tom will come back in less than 2 years asking to buy it back from FIM.
In discussions with the infamous Tom? Does this mean he’ll go to? I agree Myspace has become irrelevant. Facebook’s much more interactive. It is also Marketer Friendly which makes it more popular to be part of social events.
uh, “marketer friendly?”
I actually thought myspace was only for kids, the name should change to mykids
r u retarded?
where’s your sense of humor? that was funny
Both MySpace and Facebook should focus on their strengths rather than be THE one-stop-shop in the social web.
MySpace is better for music and following/connecting with bands. Facebookis better for connecting with real world friends.
Look at sites like Geni and LinkedIn … they have focus.
Someone new needs to take control of the mega mass of emails that flow into myspace help mailbox… It would be nice to see someone actually answer some of them and fix there hacking problems and taking over other peoples accounts and not to mention the scammers from Africa on there computers trying to scam money out of women and making them believe they love them and care for them like I saw on Dr. Phil.. It’s pathetic how nothing has been done to block them..
Hey Facebook User,
I work over at MySpace. We’re in the process of overhauling online help to address general issues more pro-actively and respond to individual questions more efficiently.
We’re also tackling spam and phishing more aggressively to ensure our users’ safety and security. We’re deeply committed to improving customer experience and appreciate your thoughtful comments and feedback.
We’d love to have you back!!
spam is down 90% on myspace, while facebook is all buddy buddy with the koobace worm. try changing your pw often if you are paranoid about account security. and how bout this, DONT ANSWER MESSAGES FROM PEOPLE FROM NIGERIA.
but really, how can u call myspace pathetic when spam and TROJANS have increased at such an alarming rate on Facebook. but let me guess, to you, some way, some how, it’s “still worth it.”
The MySpace website is an absolute mess. It’s one poorly executed idea after another, each one slapped into a random section on the site for people to accidentally find and use. Sometimes it looks like the old MySpace and sometimes it’s skinned to look like the new one.
Someone has a lot of work ahead of them but I have the feeling it will just be some exec with a huge ego who isn’t looking at the details.
What is the correct Alexa traffic rank of TechCrunch
–check it
techcrunch wtg on breaking the news first
Myspace is doomed. Facebook will rule.
yeah, with facebook’s year’s worth of cash.
They need a cleaning service as CEO to rinse all the garbage out of the profiles and pages.
Logged out of Hotmail today and got a failure to log out of Facebook screen. So obviously Hotmail is working on integrating FB.
So I’m sure MS is planning a buyout of FB. You heard it here first.
By the way… way to go deWolfe
WTF? What kind of logic are you using to come to such a lame conclusion? And why are you ever logged *in* to Hotmail in the first place?
lol. It’s purely a throwaway account. Use it for spamming TC with comments, etc. Seriously though, it was a FB page built into hotmail. So they are working on something. I got the feeling that FB becoming a MS property is already in motion.
Facebook is slowly creeping up to overtake MySpace…then you hane Linkn….Twitter
I didn’t realize Photobucket was owned by Fox Interactive Media group.
MySpace has a long way to go to being what it was. They were the one’s who started this and I hope they get back on their feet soon.
I am NOT a huge fan of Myspace anymore it isn’t a landing page like Facebook. You can organize your activities on FB but you can’t on Myspace.
myspace didn’t “start this” – I’m pretty sure Orkut was around first. MySpace was the first social network to get realy large.
Michael,
Brilliant, you broke this before anyone was even close, including the WSJ.
Paul
Omg am I the only one who still likes Myspace? I’ve never had many issues and if I did always got a quick response. The customization has always been appealing and I agree that It is best for the music networking and exposure. I don’t like Facebook for Music but it is good for the personal friends thing.
I think Myspace and Facebook can peaceably coexist.
They can coexist… just not in the minds of the male dominated tech world.
As if we didn’t all see this coming? MySpace has been irrelevant for a few years now because it strictly caters to teens and pre-teens w/ their music heavy content. Most adults that use social networking may like to share a song or two with their friends, but they don’t want to be bombarded by it like MySpace tends to do.
I had a MySpace page for a whopping six months once upon a time, and by far the two things I hated most about MySpace were: a) a song automatically loading/playing on anyone’s page, and b) the awful designs some people used. I can remember pages that would take five minutes just to load and then they would have quite the lag when scrolling.
MySpace killed itself by becoming to complicated and cluttered. That is why facebook has become the defacto go-to social media site. It’s a relatively clean and simple interface with not too much clutter.
Just my $.02 — take it for what it’s worth.
it was worth zero.
a) you can set in your preferences *not* to auto-play music on profiles.
b) stop viewing lame people’s profiles. no one forces you to do that.
my 2 cents: MySpace provides users with the most customization and control. No one comes close. Try getting out of a g’dman message thread on FB @mikecherry.
Amen Robbie!
Though I do find it funny how MS is constantly being compared to FB. How can you compare apples to oranges, especially oranges that don’t have a business model or ANY revenue associated with it…and probably won’t for another five years.
How you like ‘dem apples!
yeah isn’t it real cool having your mom stalk your facebook pages? there will always be youths who will be drawn to myspace, while all the old people at facebook die off. and by clean, i think you mean completely bland and boring and zero personality. dont blame myspace on slow loading images, blame your internet connection. i have lowest level cable and things load just as they always have, well.
MySpace is almost dead.
I was on it when it first started, and still remember the first message I received about it on Friendster. It stated, “Friendster can’t handle the massive amount of new users, so join MySpace.com.” Everyone listened, and followed the trend, and MySpace became mainstream.
After six years, I deleted my Myspace account last month. MySpace was a great platform, but it’s might be a little too late.
yeah and facebook has what, $300 million left? funny how serious advertisers like paying myspace more than facebook. myspace is currently expanding a stupid fast pace, while facebook is the perfect supplement to the apple sheep. remember “facebook music?” Oh, you don’t? LMFAO.
Seriously. How do you people claim Facebook is on the up and up. Let’s see, Oct 2007 Facebook was valued at $15 billion dollars. Currently, they are valued at $2 billion. Who needs the miracle? MySpace, who continualy poors in millions from advertisers, or Facebook who prefers to dig their own graves with their anti-user sentiment and lack of financial understanding?
Read an article by Owen Thomas as early as Mar 17 2009 predicting Chris’s leave. I can’t believe it is becoming true after a month.
Anyway hope Chris do well in whatever it is.
Facebook is better or maybe just because it is newer. Social networking is just like fashion, people flock to the new ones…
To me, myspace is much more fun but has been overdone…since they forget the No 1 rule in branding is focus. They have done too much that diluted the brand image.
Facebook is more boring but a better focus on social communication, being easy and simple.
i agree with clerks last comment, facebook does suck at user feedback & i think they’re arrogant as hell, but myspace is the king for promo tools you must admit – i have over 100,000 friends on myspace that i leverage to promote my record label & artists. I hear there’s a new site coming out soon that won’t even leave a trail next to the likes of twitter & that is far more engaging then the outstanding two sites. I guess we’ll just keep an eye out till that one opens /