Last week we received confirmation of the rumors surrounding the MySpace layoffs, with the social networking company trimming its staff by 30% and releasing statements regarding its plans to restructure and focus on innovative products for its future. Today MySpace offers up more details surrounding its intent to restructure, stating that its international operations will be cut back in some regards as well.

MySpace will be refocusing its international operations around a smaller number of territories, with plans to “retain a robust global consumer presence,” according to the statement sent out by MySpace. While this plan is still subject to consultation with the international employees in various countries, MySpace is really looking to make a uniform move here across all the countries in which MySpace has a presence.
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It was widely speculated that MySpace was getting ready to undergo massive layoffs at its company, and the social network has confirmed the rumors today.

Touting the layoffs as a plan for restructuring the company in order to become more “innovative, efficient and entrepreneurial,” MySpace is letting go of 30% of its staff, whittling the company down to 1,000 employees. MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta was quoted as saying that the staff had become bloated, making MySpace hindered in the innovation company.
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Lots of Microsoft support coming from MySpace today. Announced at the CTIA Wireless 2009 conference as well as the Web 2.0 Expo that will be going on in Las Vegas and San Fransisco respectively, Microsoft Windows Mobile as well as Microsoft Silverlight are both supported by MySpace. The added support extends MySpace’s mobile accessibility as well as the potential for more MySpace OpenSocial applications from developers and third parties.

MySpace has actually partnered with Microsoft to set up the new offerings. While the Windows Mobile 6.1 support won’t be available until later on this summer, the application will be better optimized for a friendlier user interface with improved options for direct delivery of MySpace-related content. Several of MySpace’s main social features are to be tied in with the Windows operating system itself, for better accessibility and media-sharing options for users on the go.
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Married on MySpace. It’s got alliteration, but does it have your vote of confidence? In partnership with Endemol, the production company behind a number of reality shows made for television and the web, MySpace is taking vows to give users the wedding of their dreams.

The new interactive online series is set to air in May, with 13 episodes and a live wedding ceremony concluding the show in August, but submissions for the show open up today. The deadline is April 17th and the finalists for Married on MySpace will be announced on April 24th. Similar to wedding shows seen on morning news programs or the Lifetime Network, its the viewers (in this case, MySpace users) that determine which lucky couple will get an all-expenses-paid wedding.
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Going along with other MySpace efforts to keep users on the site, the social network has enabled photo editing directly from users’ photo albums. Powered by FotoFlexer, the new MySpace photo editing options are available now for U.S. members. This makes personalization of images even easier, and more accessible to users from within the MySpace portal. International roll-out is expected in the coming months.

Promoting “creative freedom” the collaboration between MySpace and FotoFlexer allows users to do everything you’d expect from basic image editing to all-out bling. There are color effects, decoration options, distortion features, borders, and even wrinkle smoothers. Once a user has finished editing a given photo, it can be added to the respective album as a duplicate or replace the original photo.
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There are a lot of credit card initiative programs going on right now, given the economic state of affairs and the increased standards for lending out money and credit. So when I learned of Citi Cards teaming up with MySpace, I wasn’t at all surprised. Gotta get ‘em while they’re early, right?

The new offering coming from Citi is called Citi Forward, which is a credit card that’s supposed to be more tailored to the financial needs of current consumers. Citi Forward aims to encourage the maintenance of good “healthy” credit, by incentivizing consumers by things like lowering their purchase interest rates by a quarter percent when cardmembers use credit wisely. Other rewards include ThankYou Points each billing period for paying on time and staying under the credit line.
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There’s a push to make the Symbian platform open and more available to all organizations, and the Symbian Foundation has been set up to make this initiative come to fruition. Today, the Symbian Foundation has announced a number of new supporters, including HP, Mobico and MySpace.

In gaining 12 new supporters, the open source mobile platform has a greater reach than Google Android in terms of the organizations that are behind Symbian. While this is good news for Symbian, there are still more hurdles to overcome, as Android continues to gain support, and Symbian has lost ground to other platforms such as Apple. Yet the growing support for mobile platforms like Symbian only reiterates the growing focus on mobile development.
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MySpace is partnering with the Wall Street Journal for a citizen journalism contest this year. One lucky MySpace user can win a trip to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland for the event later this month, along with a press pass, Congress and Media Center access, and syndication of their MySpace blog via WSJ.com. See here for details.
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In Omaha Nebraska, Attorney General Jon Bruning is proposing a few legislative changes to increase public safety, and this includes cracking down on the presence of sex offenders using online social networking sites, according to MSN. Bruning wants them banned from sites like MySpace and Facebook all together, making their use of such social networks a crime.
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Cyberbullying is one of those semi-intangible acts that plays into the mysterious anonymity of the web, but that hasn’t stopped legislatures from trying to curb this very harming behavior. After a high profile suicide case in 2006, which was a result of cyberbullying that had occurred on MySpace, the state of Missouri has been trying to get more laws in place to better prosecute cyberbullying.

Ars Technica reports that a handful of changes made to the state’s harassment laws includes cyberbullying, which is something other forms of legislature across the world may begin to layer into their own existing harassment laws.
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