Many highlights that stood out for me:

The company also prided itself on being able to respond quickly to the needs and demands of its community, but once Murdoch had set the $1bn revenue target, putting the MySpace community first became more ­difficult. According to former MySpace executives, the advertising on the site was making it less compelling for users. Meanwhile, any innovations or changes that might have cut the number of page views – and therefore advertising revenues – were likely to fall foul of News Corp.

Facebook was quick to embrace Ajax but MySpace did not follow suit, partly because to do so would have reduced the number of page views the site generated and therefore its advertising revenue. “It would take five steps to post a comment or send a message, so five different pages would open,” explains another former executive. “There would be ads on each of those pages, so we were making money. We went to News Corp and said: ‘We want to change this but in the short term our revenues will drop.’ It became a long back and forth. [They] were pushing back – they wanted to make sure we weren’t going to drop our revenue numbers.”

“There was always pressure [from Levinsohn’s team] to increase the number of ads per page,” he says. “If there was any pushback from MySpace then it was over that because the user experience would suffer.”

The above  clips is a big problem that organizations face:  taking the time to build trust;  the temptation to appease and attract advertisers to display their ads;  a move usually guaranteed to result in utilizing Web design justifications based more on old-media advertising than discerning the appropriate style for the context of online community,  and how the audience expects to be connected to that community.

As the rivalry with ­Facebook intensified, MySpace staff took pride in the fact that theirs was an edgier site, with a younger demographic. One employee even had jokey stickers printed saying: “Your Mom is on Facebook”.

Here,  they seem to have forgotten where Facebook came from.  The universities.

The team became focused [on] cutting costs rather than thinking about driving the business

Again,  the task of becoming trusted is undermined by the panic/rush to “increase revenue immediately”. 

“The bureaucracy crept back in when he bought the Journal [and] Murdoch became less interested in MySpace,” says a former MySpace executive. “Then the recession hit and every finance guy at News Corp became involved in what we did so we had to spend all our time doing PowerPoint demonstrations.”

In my experience as a developer it seems that most of the time,  we spend time on building rehashes of what is already out there,  because someone else said we gotta have it,  and we ought to be doing that.  Many times,  they’re right,  we really ought to.  But there is also a benefit in building prototypes  (it’s called R&D)   It takes a “demo” and some “what if we took something like this,  and used it to do that?”  In the article,  the claim is made that often these “business/marketing “give us a strategy”  demands which require these “PowerPoint demonstrations” are putting the cart before the horse.  The developers,  via their experience in the actual birth of upcoming must-have features,  can often visualize/envision how to utilize these things in their own business  (if they are in tune with the aims and mission of that business).  It’s the administration’s job to do the analysis and ROI forecast,  not the developers.  The developers can and should be a constant source of inspiration for the strategy,  not the other way around.  When it is a constant barrage of “let’s do this” ,  the developers who ARE in touch with the mission of the business or organization are focused on the administration’s senses about what the best Social Networking features are,  instead of the administration sitting down with developers who have a shared vision of what Social Networking can do to fit the mission,  and engaging in a discernment about what the organization needs to implement.

FT.com / Reportage – The rise and fall of MySpace