That figure, cited by Antti Rinne of private sector office-worker union Pro (yes, these things exist in Europe), is about 38% of the global devices R&D workforce of 16,134 (at the end of 2010). After the switch to WP7, there’s not going to be a whole lot of work at Nokia for Symbian specialists, though I guess retraining them isn’t an option. (Welcome to the American way, Finns — Training is something you get on your own time with your own dime!)

The official layoff numbers will reportedly be announced by Nokia at the end of the month. In 2010, Nokia’s device R&D budget was $4.3 billion, which Bloomberg notes is more than double Apple’s entire 2010 R&D budget ($1.78 billion).

While the first WP7 Nokia smartphone is in development and expected to ship in early 2012, today Nokia actually launched an updated version of the Symbian mobile OS along with two new handsets.

Perhaps as a present to celebrate the Federal Trade Commission’s approval of the AOL HuffPo union, Patch has acquired hyper-local news site Outside.in. Interestingly, that the purchase price is rumored to be less than $10 million, although Outside.in has raised $14.4 million in funding from high-profile investors such as Union Square Ventures and Marc Andreesen.

Also, what’s a corporate restructuring without same layoffs? BORING! Tim Armstrong recently wrote an inspirational memo to AOL staff that concluded, “Let’s make magic!” Well, check out this trick — POOF! Your job is gone.

Integrating the HuffPo team is going to cause some redundancy, but the Times of India thinks the AOL office in Bangalore is going to receive the most pink slips. Nicholas Carlson at Business Insider explains: “AOL has people in India put together many of its articles and slideshows. Those are tasks people over there expect new AOL media boss Arianna Huffington will assign to her own people. (Interns?)”

Unpaid ones at that — that’s business in the U.S. of A. for ya.

Tomorrow MySpace will lay off 50% to 70% of its 1,000 person staff, including a great deal of its international employees. Workers have known this was coming for a while as News Corp. continues to trim down the much-revised social entertainment site for an imminent sale. Anybody else having AOL-Time Warner deja vu?

It seemed every piece of tragic MySpace news signalled the death knell of the beleaguered social network, but it was definitely over when Facebook vet Owen Van Natta was unceremoniously ousted as CEO. Even his tenure seemed like a Hail Mary play, but he was sacked (by his own team) before he got a chance to throw the ball. Every cringe-worthy development since, including the DOA rehaul, has just been a series of painful last gasps.

This isn’t the end, because we’re past that — this is the funeral. This is the requiem.

I was actually adding some new songs to my MySpace band profile last night and was frustrated by the confusing and un-intuitive revised layout. Yet there are still too many pages to wade through to complete simple tasks. I miss that straightforward old profile, with the picture and messaging options on the left, music and biography on the right and comments at the bottom. (I don’t miss people “pimping” their profiles — what a disaster that was.)

I even miss the old logo. While the revised logo seemed clever at first glance, it was actually symbolic of social network’s state — nothing inside.

Five years ago, MySpace was a gold mine for independent musicians — a place where you could post streaming music, list your shows, connect with fans and network with other bands for touring.

But I can’t blame News Corp. completely for the social networks downfall — eventually there were just too many people, too many bands and too much spamming — users got plain burned out. British comedy show “The IT Crowd” nailed the feeling perfectly in an episode where the characters became addicted and then exhausted by the made-up social network FriendFace.

Chances are you were friends with a guy named Minger on MySpace, who made it a point to friend everyone he came across — I actually know him in real life and he’s quite a funny guy. But who the hell was Ducky? Millions of people must have been friends with him…

Oh yeah, there were all the wannabe Suicide Girls collecting friends (mainly immature young men) by the boatful by posting titillating but not explicit pictures. That heralded the rise of the original MySpace star, Tila Tequila. The world could have down without her.

I remember receiving nonstop friend requests from fake accounts connected to porn sites (I run into this problem less often on Facebook); there was a short period at the end of the real estate bubble where I was flooded with friend requests from real estate agents. It was a little surreal, but definitely encouraged me to shutter my personal profile.

MySpace wasn’t the first social network and certainly won’t be the last, but it was a transitional network during an age of social experimentation. MySpace let users see the potential inherent in social networking, but also the horrors: stalkers, spam, hideous flash ads, oh my. MySpace taught us what we want from a social network — instead of “discovering” people online, the majority prefer connecting with acquaintances met in real life.

It let advertisers get their first taste of social media campaigning, and the wise ones noted the line where engagement turned invasive.

And unlike Friendster, which just kind of faded away, MySpace’s decline was protracted and painful, offering numerous lessons for other social media ventures  – for example, user satisfaction trumps ad revenue and don’t get acquired by a giant media conglomerate (or at least not by News Corp.).

MySpace’s requiem, particularly at the beginning of the new year, is further proof of the end of an era. No longer is social networking something the young’uns are doing on that crazy site, it’s become an essential component of the Internet, business and advertising. There’s no crazy site anymore — the social revolution is omnipresent.

So as the pink slips are delivered tomorrow, I’m going to raise a glass to MySpace and indulge in nostalgia. I’m going to relive the glory days, when I was fresh out of college and bored at my first office job, killing time by promoting my new band and sending friend requests to pretty young women who lived nearby and seemed to have good taste in music.

Feel free to share your MySpace memories below.

There was plenty of media rubbernecking (Live-blogging the layoffs? Really?) and cut employees lashing out on Twitter and other social mediums, with the common sentiment best represented by a five-year veteran and pink-slip receiver telling TechCrunch he’d “never seen this place in such shambles.”

Oh, but he didn’t know about the services being “sunset” — leak of an internal post-layoff presentation showed that social bookmarking product Del.icio.us is getting shelved, along with Altavista, MyBlogLog, Yahoo Bookmarks and Yahoo Picks. While eight products are getting killed, services such as Upcoming, FoxyTunes, Sideline and FireEagle were listed under “Merge.” Internet users were outraged; Business Insider has a great roundup of some of the Twitter responses.

Alas, with these latest staff and service cuts, the “Yahoo Is So Over” headlines are coming out in force. Many similar headlines appeared last year after another round of layoffs… You know what? I think I see a “Yahoo Is Dead! DEAD DEAD DEAD!” headline every two weeks.

Just about every service getting the ax is outdated, hasn’t been updated or frankly irrelevant. Think of them as residents at a Web 2.0 nursing home — many were great ideas that had run their course or been perfected or improved by startups or other Internet giants. Just like with MySpace and News Corp., the Yahoo acquisition of MyBlogLog and other startups might have been the death knell.

(For some reason I can’t help thinking about StumbleUpon, which bought itself back from acquirer eBay and is now more successful than ever. The social discovery service could have easily inhabited the Web 2.0 nursing home up the street.)

Many of the just-cut services were just waiting to die. The Flickr department was once again smacked with pink slips, which isn’t surprising considering Facebook’s domination of photo sharing.

Yahoo keeps stripping down, but the company was an unfocused behemoth (unlike Google only in that Google is a highly successful unfocused behemoth). Now it’s focusing on what it does best — serving as an Internet portal and media company. It still has a 16.2% of all display dollars (though that share is getting chewed into by Facebook and Google).

The real question — one that AOL is pondering as well — is whether being a portal is a viable enterprise in the current climate, especially as Facebook yearns to become the access point to the web. Is Yahoo getting too skinny? Will its services seem too slight to warrant attention? Or does it still have more fat to trim?

That’s 10% of 6,500 employees — and while 650 is no small number of pink slips, it’s a lot lower than TechCrunch’s estimate of 2,800 cuts out of all 14,100 employees. Yahoo put out a statement calling TechCrunch’s reporting “misleading and inaccurate,” but Arrington is sticking by his guns — or rather his anonymous sources.

Layoffs have been a seasonal thing at Yahoo — 700 employees were shown the door in spring 2009 shortly after CEO Carol Bartz took the reigns and the Search Group took a hit this summer before the Microsoft search integration. After these most recent staff cuts, Yahoo reportedly will outsource lost U.S. development and operations jobs to Bangalore and other locations.

Axing 10% of the product team is not going silence the ongoing media and investor cries that Yahoo is suffering because Bartz’s lack of innovation. And of course Arrington had to make a dig at her reported $39 million in total compensation in 2009.

Let’s take a closer look at that number: that $39 million includes unrecognized stock options allowing her to purchase stock at prearranged prices when it meets certain targets. Considering the slump Yahoo’s stock has been in (14% dip this year), I doubt any of those have been met. That lump sum also includes $10 million in restricted stock and cash used to lure her away from her position at Autodesk, a place I’m sure she’s missing right now. According to a Yahoo spokesperson, stock she buys cannot be sold until 2013 unless circumstances change — e.g., a CEO switch.

So, no, Yahoo did not give Bartz an oversized check for $39 million check last year — her actual salary was $5 million, which makes my paycheck look pretty paltry, but it’s not a ridiculous amount for a CEO.

However, the addition of former Fox Interactive bigwig Ross Levinsohn in the position of EVP for the America probably means Yahoo is going to let Bartz ride out her contract and decline to renew it. It’s not kicking her to the curb like many loudmouthed investors want, but Levinsohn will likely be the strong no. 2 who transitions into the captain’s chair.

It seems like Bartz has taken a lot of flack for cofounder, former CEO and board member Jerry Yang’s massive missteps. Bartz’s first (and not-so-simple job) was to streamline a bloated company that was sprawling aimlessly — a goal she’s accomplished. The tech jackals like to snort, “Yahoo has no idea what kind of company it is,” but I can tell you it’s a massive Internet media company and a portal that features mail as well as integrated social networks.

What’s your “elevator pitch” for Google? It’s almost like the Internet-based version of Yamaha, which makes everything from jet skis to acoustic guitars. When is the Google-branded line of sneakers coming out? (On a side note, I did receive a pair of YouTube tube socks in my 2010 CMJ Festival shwag bag.)

The search deal with Microsoft allowed Yahoo to withdrawal from its search war with Google and the company has made a series of smart acquisitions just in the last year, including dynamic ad creative specialist Dapper and content resource Associated Content. Despite the sinking stock, Bartz has kept the ship afloat during rough times — Yahoo’s still bringing in ad revenue, which can’t be said for rival portal AOL.

Some will argue you have to fix what’s broken before you can work on something new, and some will say you can mend and create at the same time. Bartz has simply lost the public image contest, though I think she was handicapped from the start.

Then again, maybe I just like rooting for the underdog — yet after suffering for so long through various versions of Windows, I just can’t get into Microsoft’s corner….

To reach profitability in 2011, newer CEO Matt Williams — who took over about six weeks ago when founder Kevin Rose abdicated the throne in the midst of a massive revolt regarding the revamped version of the site — said trimming the staff was necessary for significantly cutting expenses. “The fact is our business has a burn rate that is too high,” he wrote in an email to the staff.

Williams is Digg’s third CEO this year — Jay Edelson gave up his five-year reign in April, reportedly under pressure from Rose over the slow-developing site relaunch and static traffic. One of Williams’ first public acts was to apologize for the massive FAIL known as Digg v4 and announce the return of beloved features such as the “Upcoming” section.

Interestingly, Williams noted then that Digg traffic in August was 23 million uniques, which means the network had taken a significant dive from its 32 million peak in September 2009 even before the v4 debacle. The slip in popularity began in fourth quarter 2009 and was widely attributed to the rise of Twitter.

Even by slimming down and re-introducing popular features, do you think Digg can return to its former luster?

AOL is asking for 2,500 volunteers to accept buyouts; layoffs will follow if not enough people sign up to be sacrificed. Currently the company employs 6,900 people after parting with 800 over 2009. In addition to restructuring charges of $200 million, the company aims to slash operating expenses by $300 million.

The company did not mention where layoffs would be implemented; while it’s headquartered in New York, AOL also has a large presence in Northern Virginia.

COO Kim Partoll is out, as is John Kannapell, SVP of search and local media, according to AllThingsD. Kara Swisher says that Kannapell’s departure wasn’t a surprise, but Partoll was because she was promoted to her new/old position recently.

As for Liberty Media Corp., the cable company controlled by billionaire John Malone, it is still interested in the dial-up Internet business owned by Time Warner’s AOL. This is in line with past comments from officials of the company, which has about $800 million in Time Warner, saying they would consider trading it for AOL or other assets. Time Warner has said it plans to spin AOL off as a publicly traded company.

Any long-speculated AOL layoffs, which even Armstrong acknowledged would eventually happen, still awaits. The two departing executives will not be replaced and you wonder if this is the beginning.

The Audience Development Group, headed by co-founder Tim Shey, will now drive all audience building efforts. Entertainment producer Kathleen Grace, who has worked with Next New Networks’ producer team since late 2008, will lead the company’s programming group. Grace will manage the team producing, sourcing and publishing the company’s current and new programming for existing and upcoming networks.

According to Paidcontent, Next New Networks, which has struggled even before the global financial meltdown, has laid off about 7 staffers. Despite the expect growth in video advertising, there are too many companies and too many options for viewers.

Since it launched in early 2007, NextNew has raised about $23 million from Goldman Sachs, Spark Capital, Saban Capital, Velocity Interactive Group (now Fuse Capital), and Bob Pittman.

Joost CEO Mike Volpi is out and a majority of its employees, nearly 100, will be laid off. A much smaller crew will try to peddle the company’s hosting and distribution services. Replacing Volpi is SVP of engineering, Matt Zelesko.

The company raised $45 million but was overtaken by YouTube and Hulu, mainly because it forced people to download software on to their computers to watch video. The experience and capabilities might have been better, but the move by competitors to allow users to watch video easily through web browsers quickly trumped the superior quality. Joost later moved toward that model but it was obviously too late.

The best scenario for the company, according to Peter kafka, is a larger media company buying it.