MySpace Closes Slingshot Labs

Has the fateful day come where MySpace finally gives up, rolls over and dies? Perhaps not quite yet, but it sure seems like doomsday is fast approaching. Just in time for the weekend, resident media magnate Rupert Murdoch’s social media lab, Slingshot Labs, a MySpace spinoff, closed its doors and bid farewell to its employees for good.

Gawker Media blog Valleywag was first to break the story about the shutdown. They reported that Slingshot, established within News Corp. as an incubator for potential new technologies for use on MySpace, had been in a slow and steady decline for some time despite Slingshot executive Diego Berdakin claiming “tremendous success.”
The closing came not long after Slingshot made some attempts at salvation, including a LinkedIn exclusive site and an invitation service called SocialPlan developed to allow MySpace users to plan and send invites to events. Unfortunately for some 20 Slingshot staffers, it was too little, too late.

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