Troubled social networking giant MySpace has lost another key executive with the recent departure of John Faith, until recently General Manager and Vice President of MySpace Mobile. His resignation hasn’t been announced yet (nor has his LinkedIn profile been updated), but we’ve confirmed hallway rumors that he jumped ship at the end of January 2010 both with the man in question and the company he used to work for.
Faith has moved to Austin, Texas – just in time for SXSW – where he has joined local startup WhaleShark Media as SVP of Engineering.
That company’s still in stealth mode, but was founded by former Bankrate COO Cotter Cunningham, so we’ll be keeping a close eye on that one.
It’s worth noting that another key member of the MySpace Mobile team, Ulf Waschbusch, also left the company in July 2009 – he recently landed at gaming startup Garena.
I asked MySpace who was running all things mobile now that both employees walked away from the company, and they informed me that stepping in for Faith is Nat Brown. In case you’re not familiar with that name, Brown was once one of Microsoft’s foremost technical minds – he created and evangelized the ActiveX/COM object model in the early nineties and went on to play a crucial role in the creation of XML, DHTML, and the first Xbox.
Brown went on to do a brief stint as CTO at CAC Media before serving the same role at online music startup iLike, which was acquired by MySpace in August 2009.
MySpace says Brown will henceforth be taking charge of the Mobile division, and that we can expect a lot from that particular unit in the “very, very near future”.
We’ll see.