MYSPACE IS DONE

This week MYSPACE has fired 47% of it’s staff (500 people) and rumors are News Corp. is preparing to sell the company.  Here’s what CEO Mike Jones had to say about the possible end of an era:

“Today’s tough but necessary changes were taken in order to provide the company with a clear path for sustained growth and profitability,” Jones said in the statement. “These changes were purely driven by issues related to our legacy business, and in no way reflect the performance of the new product.”

After the restructuring, MySpace will be put up for sale, All Things D, a website owned by New York-based News Corp., reported yesterday. The business will be offered to private equity firms and possibly to Yahoo! Inc., the website said.

In a few more years Facebook will be gone as well mark my words.

-AL

A BAN ON SOCIAL NETWORKS

A New Jersey public school principal has had enough of the harm — from sexual predators or mean girls — that can come to young teens on sites like Facebook and MySpace. So Anthony Orsini, principal at Benjamin Franklin Middle School in Ridgewood, N.J., wants kids blocked from the sites at school and at home.

Orsini told “Good Morning America” today that the online taunting used to be limited to students in eighth grade or higher. Now he’s seeing kids as young as fourth grade creating Facebook pages to bash a classmate. “It’s become meaner and meaner and they don’t understand they aren’t socially and emotionally ready to understand. We see the times that things are posted on line — 2:30 in the morning, 1:30 in the morning, students are supposed to be asleep at that time.” You can try but you can't stop the social networking trend. That's like trying to win the war on drugs. You can slow it down but demand is too high.

-AL