MySpace hires 5 executives, plans to cut staff by 5%

MySpace after making quite some news with changes and its business reports has for us is plans at announcing new hires into its team. The present hiring tops out to be among the elites coming from various well known firms like Yahoo, MTV and LA Times.

MySpace had been up and about doing upgrades to its site lately along with partnering with OpenID and the most recent Classifieds by Oodle is turning up barrels to have a place in the spotlight. But does this present recruiting a bit odd form what is going on within MySpace?

This hiring comes despite MySpace showing the door to about 5% of their staff in due time. The announcement was made via email that was sent to the entire staff (the copy of which is given below, courtesy Michael Arrington). The new executives to join MySpace are; Manu Thapar, SVP of Engineering (Previously Yahoo VP Engineering), Angela Courting, SVP of Marketing, Tish Whitcraft, SVP of Customer Care, Jason Oberfest, VP of Business Development and Abe Thomas, VP of Online Marketing.

The Email is given below

Hey everybody,

MySpace has been on a hyper-growth track since our launch in January 2004. We’ve evolved into a stable, profitable business with amazing talent driving one of the most trafficked websites in history. Four years ago we started at a small office in Santa Monica with a few employees, and now we operate offices in 19 countries across the globe and support 29 localized communities across the web.

Today we’re pleased to announce several new senior team members joining MySpace:

· Manu Thapar, SVP of Engineering
· Angela Courtin, SVP of Marketing
· Tish Whitcraft, SVP of Customer Care
· Jason Oberfest, VP of Business Development
· Abe Thomas, VP of Online Marketing

Looking back, this has been an incredible year of innovation and expansion—in the last few months, we have successfully developed and launched a number of major company initiatives strengthening our leadership position in the future of the social web. All of you have played a big role in keeping MySpace in the driver’s seat of innovation.

Here are some of the initiatives we’ve rolled this year:

· MySpace Developer Platform
· Site Redesign
· Data Availability
· Formation of the MySpace Music Joint Venture
· MySpace Support for OpenID
· OpenSocial launch with Google, Yahoo and others
· Implementation of Google Gears for Mail Messaging and Sort

Looking ahead, there’s a lot more to come—this is going to be a big year!

Thanks!
Amit

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