Tom must be bummed. He has fewer friends.

Back in April I wrote about Tom, who is one of my friends on MySpace.

Tom was the first friend that we ever had on MySpace. We didn't know a lot about Tom, and in fact we didn't even know how old he was, but he seemed to be a nice guy, and he'd always pass on messages to all of his friends, such as tips on new music and warnings about compromising the security of your account....

Well, our friend Tom was in the paper. Well, actually it's not a paper any more, it's more like electronic stuff, or at least that's where I saw the story. You see, Tom and his friend Chris are going to be doing some different things....

Yesterday I checked on Tom, and he must be feeling down. He hasn't updated his MySpace profile in a few days.

Today I found out why Tom might be bummed:

The social network MySpace is reducing its staff to cut costs in an effort to return to what it calls a “startup culture.”

MySpace, a division of News Corporation, said the layoffs would affect all American divisions of the company and lower the total number of staffers to around 1000.

And Owen said that Tom has too many friends.

These decisions are difficult for everyone, but especially for our friends and colleagues who contributed to MySpace’s success and are directly affected by the changes. Through no fault of theirs our company’s size became unsustainable. The future success of MySpace is dependent upon us operating as a nimble and entrepreneurial company with the adaptive mentality of a start-up.

And both Owen and Jon said that Tom was fat:

“Simply put, our staffing levels were bloated and hindered our ability to be an efficient and nimble team-oriented company,” CEO Owen Van Natta said in a statement....

“MySpace grew too big considering the realities of today’s marketplace,” said Jon Miller, News Corporation’s (NWS) CEO of Digital Media.

Maybe Tom can get a Facebook account and make new friends. Somehow I suspect that if Owen and Jon don't really like Tom any more, Rupert probably doesn't like him either.