Internal MySpace product documents continue to leak into our inbox from presumably angry employees and former employees. Today we’ve got a late 2009 powerpoint presentation created by Tim Sutcliffe, MySpace’s Senior Manager Information Architecture. The document summarizes the recommendations on rebuilding the MySpace developer/apps platform from an outside UK based user experience firm called Userfocus.
Sutcliffe was part of Katie Geminder’s “swat team” organization at MySpace, and supposedly “knee deep” in the remakingmyspace project that we wrote about yesterday. Revamping the apps platform was a side project, but this document is representative of the type of work that group was doing, say sources.
Or at least, sort of. This document recommends what some product people call “pushing pixels around” instead of rebuilding from scratch. The remakingmyspace project was clearly the latter. Although since that project has now been scratched, we’ll never know whether it would have been successful or not.
The problem, as the document states, was that MySpace app installation rates were too low, and churn was too high, relative to Facebook: “MySpace apps are not performing cf. Facebook regarding churn and installs. It’s believed that these performance problems are caused by basic usability issues.”
Sixteen pages of specific product recommendations followed. The entire document is embedded below.
MySpace would not comment on the document.
Update: MySpace sent a takedown notice to Scribd, who was hosting the document. We reposted it here.
MySpace is one of the world’s largest social networks, with about 125 million users. Originally inspired by Friendster, MySpace quickly grew to become the world’s largest social network, before being overtaken by Facebook. User pages are highly customizable and support integration with widgets such as Slide or YouTube. MySpace provides users with a way to connect around content and culture. MySpace was started as a side project of the internet marketing company eUniverse (now called Intermix Media) in August...
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