Jon [Miller] came to us and said, `Would you like to be co-presidents?’ We said, `Hell yeah.’ We didn’t have to move our desks,”
– Former MySpace Chief Product Officer Jason Hirschhorn’s reaction to the abrupt firing of his boss and his promotion to co-president of MySpace.
More bad news for an already bullet-riddled MySpace: three key employees have left the company to join Gravity, a cross-town startup founded by former MySpace COO Amit Kapur, SVP Steve Pearman and SVP Jim Benedetto.
We covered Gravity’s launch in December 2009.
The three MySpacer’s are Chief Software Architect Chris Bissell (we previously reported Bissell’s resignation), Chief Systems Architect Dan Farino and Development Manager Robbie Coleman.
First launched back in April 2009, TweetPhoto has been steadily building out its service with multiple useful features, including Foursquare integration and a partnership with Kodak. Today, the site is getting a huge overhaul with more social features and a new iPhone app.
TweetPhoto has now added the ability to sign in with Twitter OAuth, Facebook Connect, MySpace OAuth and Foursquare OAuth so that a user of any one of these social networks can use TweetPhoto as a stand alone photo sharing service. The site will also be rolling out LinkedIn support in the next few weeks. In addition to login capabilities across all four of these services, TweetPhoto users can also link these social networking accounts together. Once you link your Facebook, Twitter, MySpace , or Foursquare accounts on the site, your photos uploaded to TweetPhoto can be simultaneously broadcast to all of the networks. Third party applications that use TweetPhoto as the default photo uploader such as TweetDeck and Seesmic’s BlackBerry app, will also include this functionality.
Last year we reported that MySpace founder and former CEO Chris DeWolfe was raising a big round of capital to start acquiring companies. He’s now closed on that round of capital and has made his first acquisition. He’s also “got the band back together” by bringing on a slew of former MySpace executives to help him with the new ventures.
His company, called Platform G, has acquired MindJolt, a San Francisco based social gaming platform founded by Richard Fields. Austin Ventures is backing him financially with an initial injection of capital that is rumored to be in excess of $20 million. Chris Pacitti and Tom Ball from Austin Ventures have joined the Platform G board of directors, and the company is now renamed MindJolt as well.
Troubled social networking giant MySpace has lost another key executive with the recent departure of John Faith, until recently General Manager and Vice President of MySpace Mobile. His resignation hasn’t been announced yet (nor has his LinkedIn profile been updated), but we’ve confirmed hallway rumors that he jumped ship at the end of January 2010 both with the man in question and the company he used to work for.
Faith has moved to Austin, Texas – just in time for SXSW – where he has joined local startup WhaleShark Media as SVP of Engineering. 
We’ve gotten word of another departure from MySpace in the wake of CEO Owen Van Natta’s firing two weeks ago. The latest to leave is Chris Bissell, MySpace’s Chief Software Architect, who has been with the company for over four years. Bissell was one of the few remaining members of MySpace’s old guard, which has gradually left (or been fired) from the company since the executive shakeup last spring that removed long-time CEO Chris DeWolfe.
Bissell was charged with maintaining MySpace’s backend architecture and ensuring that the site scaled to meet demand. MySpace has confirmed that he is leaving the company. The news comes on the heels of the departure of SVP of User Experience and Design Kate Geminder and stream architect Monica Keller, who both left within a week of Van Natta’s firing.
Internal MySpace product documents continue to leak into our inbox from presumably angry employees and former employees. Today we’ve got a late 2009 powerpoint presentation created by Tim Sutcliffe, MySpace’s Senior Manager Information Architecture. The document summarizes the recommendations on rebuilding the MySpace developer/apps platform from an outside UK based user experience firm called Userfocus.
Sutcliffe was part of Katie Geminder’s “swat team” organization at MySpace, and supposedly “knee deep” in the remakingmyspace project that we wrote about yesterday. Revamping the apps platform was a side project, but this document is representative of the type of work that group was doing, say sources.
Or at least, sort of. This document recommends what some product people call “pushing pixels around” instead of rebuilding from scratch. The remakingmyspace project was clearly the latter. Although since that project has now been scratched, we’ll never know whether it would have been successful or not.
The full document is below.
In the summer of 2009 MySpace hired Katie Geminder, Facebook’s Director of User Experience and Design, as an SVP. Her primary job was to assemble a “swat team” of leading outside designers and user interface experts and re-imagine MySpace from the ground up. That team was made up of four people – including two former Apple designers and one ex-Facebooker – and worked out of a conference room in MySpace’s San Francisco offices for six months. They were creating a new site, located at remakingmyspace.com, and it was going to launch sometime right about now.
RemakingMySpace was going to be a new version of MySpace with every piece of legacy stuff thrown out the door. Users and employees would be solicited for input – to get new ideas and vote on already submitted ones – to rebuild the service brick by brick. Most of the work over the last six months was spent reimagining the design in various ways that would be shown to users, and building tools for the submission and consideration of new ideas. And “users” was broadly defined to include input from artists and bands, advertisers, etc.
It was bold, controversial and progressive, say some sources. And now it’s also very, very dead. 
MySpace’s new slogan, and the theme of their new product strategy, will be “Discover and be Discovered,” we’ve confirmed from multiple sources. This will be their differentiating factor from Facebook, execs told employees at an all hands meeting last Thursday.
The meeting was called in the wake of the firing of CEO Owen Van Natta and the related promotions of Mike Jones and Jason Hirschhorn to co-presidents. The meeting, which was held in the courtyard of MySpace’s Los Angeles headquarters to accomodate 600 or employees, was also broadcast to other offices around the world.
MySpace has launched an activity and content stream, which they are calling simply the “Stream.” Previously they showed a feed of status updates from friends, but the new feature shows a lot more content, including things like music your friends are listening to on MySpace Music, video they’re watching, links they are adding, etc.
The company hasn’t formally announced the product, which sort of makes sense since they’re still playing catch up with similar features on Facebook. But it’s an important beachhead in their go-forward strategy, we’ve learned. More on that in our next post.
