Following CEO's exit, MySpace plans relaunch

According to Western reports, co-presidents Mike Jones and Jason Hirschorn, who were promoted to lead the company after Van Natta’s exit, said MySpace will undergo a revamp in several phases over the coming months.

The new site looks to leverage MySpace’s strengths as a music and entertainment platform, they said.

Reports note that changes will make live feeds more prominent, better faciliate photo uploads and allow musicians to monitor where their tracks are being listened to.

MySpace’s bid to play catch-up is a far cry from its former status as a social networking leader. In 2005, the website was acquired by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp for US$580 million. At the time, MySpace was reportedly signing up 150,000 new users a day and claimed 24.2 million unique users.

MySpace has an estimated 33 million status messages per day worldwide while Twitter has more than 50 million tweets per day.

However, by June of last year, the changing digital landscape forced the company to lay off 30 per cent of its workforce in a bid to become more efficient. Van Natta, who had been at MySpace for two months at the time, reportedly faced further hurdles implementing his ideas, and he resigned his leading role last month.

Social networks including Facebook and Friendster, as well as local-market sites QQ, Mixi and CyWorld, are dominant in Asia.