According to TechCrunch, a number of senior execs at MySpace are planning to exit the tumbling social networking firm following the sudden departure (aka sacking) of CEO Owen Van Natta last week. The tech site says Senior VP Of User Experience & Design Katie Geminder will depart tomorrow, while a senior engineer, Monica Keller, has also announced she is quitting. While it's not entirely clear if these two departures are directly linked to Van Natta's axing, certainly Geminder was part of the former CEO's core team.

In related news, the Guardian reported earlier this week that Van Natta's axing was a direct result of interferences by the social networking site's ultimate owner Rupert Murdoch. It was widely reported that Van Natta, appointed as MySpace CEO last April, clashed with Jonathan Miller, the former AOL chief who was brought into MySpace's parent company News Corp at around the same time to sort out the media conglom's various digital ventures.

The Guardian says that Murdoch is increasingly frustrated that his big digital acquisition from back in 2005 is faltering in such a big way, being totally left behind by the likes of Facebook and Twitter in the social networking stakes, and, in Europe, by the likes of Spotify in terms of digital music distribution.

Some might wonder why it took til now (or, really, this time last year, when Van Natta was shipped in) for the News Corp top guard to notice that their social networking asset is losing the race for web dominance, given that the service was already well past its prime when the media firm acquired it in 2005. But, it seems, that the service actually did quite well in terms of ad sales shortly after the News Corp acquisition, benefiting from the sudden boom in web advertising that occurred a few years back, and the fact the site still enjoyed very high traffic (in the main because it had become the default home for most music artists' web presence).

But said web traffic has declined considerably in the last two years as the all round shitness of the MySpace platform continued while a plethora of new social networking, blogging and music services appeared on the scene - most with one big USP over MySpace, they actually work - and so Murdoch's big website started to haemorrhage both users and advertisers.

Many inside and outside the social networking firm wonder how long the whole thing can now continue before being cut seriously down to size, reinventing itself as a simple music service. Though even then it will need a serious technical overhaul to compete with newer digital music services like Spotify and Grooveshark - ie a scrap-what-you've-got-and-start-again overhaul.