TrentLapinski.com

To be read in the voice of Simpson’s character Troy McClure
Hi, I’m blogger Trent Lapinski. You may remember me from such articles as “MySpace: The Business of Spam 2.0” and “MySpace Founder Speaks Out Against News Corp“.
/end Troy McClure voice.

On a more serious note, according to ReadWriteWeb, Slashdot, and PCWorld.com MySpace is allowing it’s users data to be “repackaged” by third parties and then sold. This data includes users names, zip codes, blog posts, photos, status updates, and more. News Corp has apparently spent the last five years mining everyone’s data, using it for their own needs (mainly to shove ads down your throat), and now that they’re done with it they’re enabling the data to be sold. This means if you use or have used MySpace.com your personal information is potentially being sold, your privacy compromised, and you willingly gave News Corp your contact information, your thoughts, your photos, and your status updates all in the name of “social networking” and “open standards.”

To make matters worse, MySpace’s corporate structure is collapsing faster then a side plot in an episode of 24. A considerable number of mid level managers, engineers, and developers have either been fired, resigned, quit, or are undermining authority by playing into the top executives politics, and infighting. It’s pretty much exactly the kind of shenanigans MySpace founder Brad Greenspan predicted would happen when News Corp forcefully purchased MySpace. Greenspan believed that MySpace should have never sold to News Corp and remained a publicly traded company to bring the accountability required to keep the site on the cutting-edge, and to protect the rights of it’s users. All these years later it looks like he was right.

Granted it’s been a long time since Greenspan lost MySpace, and as I stated in a comment on TechCrunch I’m sure in recent years some talented people have worked for the company. Even when the ship was still in former MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe’s hands it wasn’t free from nepotism, and suffered from News Corp’s “business as usual” behavior and attitude (which ultimately pushed DeWolfe, Tom Anderson, and a lot of his original team out on the street after their initial contracts were up). If anything, we’re now getting a clear picture of the structure DeWolfe and his team put in place that failed to sustain MySpace, let alone take it into the future. Which isn’t surprising considering much of the initial inspiration for the original MySpace came from copying Friendster, Toan Nguyen, Brad Greenspan, and other eUniverse resources. That structure has now completely unraveled revealing complete systematic breakdowns.

Owen Van Natta, who took over as CEO after DeWolfe, inherited a company and website on the brink of collapse, and while he didn’t accomplish much, he didn’t have enough time to really do so as he was removed after just 9-months. Van Natta was still somehow able to hold the ship together and at least keep middle management employed, but clearly the breakdowns in this company were far beyond anything he could have fixed overnight.

Now that Co-Presidents Jason Hirschhorn and Mike Jones are shaking things up further, it’s only because ultimately the problems with MySpace predate them. Although, no matter what their plan is it’s probably too little too late. The 800lbs gorilla in the room remains and it’s Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, and they’re now letting your info to be sold for $10 per raw data dump. Ouch.

Update: It turns out MySpace was not selling the data directly themselves, but giving it away to be “repackaged” and then sold (Infochimps blog).

Disclosure: After interviewing Brad Greenspan and publishing the article on MySpace on ValleyWag Greenspan offered me a position at his new startup LiveUniverse which I accepted. LiveUniverse’s CTO was Toan Nguyen who was one of the original developers of MySpace. I spent about two years working under both of them in various capacities before moving on to Playboy, and other projects.