MySpace is hiring for a “BIG ‘Stealth Project,'” according to job listings that have popped up over the last few days.
MySpace is in for a “major overhaul” in the next few months, owner Rupert Murdoch, CEO of News Corp., said recently (MySpace Bleeding Money; News Corp Promises “Overhaul” Soon). But there are few clues as to what “Stealth Project Burn” might be and whether it would even be part of MySpace.com.
MySpace is looking for developers with “killer Ruby on Rails skills” and experience with MySQL, NoSQL, Linux, Apache and, ideally, experience with social networking sites and large data sets. Pretty broad skill set, but this is interesting:
While this is MySpace, this group is autonomous, working on a different platform and roadmap.
What could MySpace be planning? Murdoch said the overhaul will be complete in the next few months, implying that it’s already started. Earlier this month, we reported on MySpace’s effort to add curated content to user news feeds (MySpace Preparing to Go Beyond Friends in Your News Feed) designed to drive traffic within the site.
MySpace still pulls 50 million visitors every month from the U.S. alone. But the network is struggling to remain relevant alongside Facebook and Twitter and continues to lose money for its corporate owners. It’s become clear that MySpace needs to switch it up in order to attract users and figure out better ways to turn those users into money. Today is also the site’s seventh birthday.
The site is experimenting accordingly. Already this year, MySpace has launched MySpace Mail, MySpace Events and a site redesign.
We’ve asked MySpace for comment and will update with the response. UPDATE: The response was, “can’t specify what this project is at this stage.”
But perhaps our readers have some ideas. What else is in the cards for MySpace? MySpace Questions? A geolocation product? A sister site?
