Hypebot just ran a story about Myspace Losing 66% Of Their International Staff, Including the possibility of scrapping most of their world offices (including the one in India, but not China as that’s a separate company).
Here’s the comment I posted:
Myspace lost it when they refused to update their design, to open up the data that artists had put on there to sharing, and didn’t bother trying to understand the changes in the nature of social networking that happened while they were spending their time shouting about being the biggest.
Myspace pages now look like Geocities pages – a sign of a naive time in the web’s recent past.
How to fix it?
- Make the music player, gig dates and blog headlines embeddable,
- make friend/follow asymmetric with easier ways to share music (maybe a ‘top 10 most recent bands I’ve dug’ plugin, with a ‘like this’ button on every artist page to feed it?),
- allow blogs to be auto-update via RSS feed,
- sort out the basic design disasters (include a proper design editor as standard ALREADY!!!)
- make hooking up Twitter to the status a cinch,
- oh and do a deal with BandCamp to make it possible to replace the music player with a bandcamp embed…
Basically, use some of those Murdoch millions to incorporate the best bits of reverb nation, last.fm, facebook and twitter. Or, alternatively, disappear. The choice is theirs 
What say you? Have Myspace left it too late? What do they need to do?