Slashdot Mirror
The Man Behind MySpace
An anonymous reader writes "The Guardian has an article looking at the life of Chris DeWolfe, a co-founder of the popular MySpace community site. The article details some of his previous work history, and the thought process that went into creating the site." From the article: "They pinched the best bits of everybody else's sites (Craigslist, Evite, MP3.com) and put them together in a manner that made sense. Unconcerned with technological bells and whistles and geeky one-upmanship, they instead set out to appeal to the people they knew and, beyond them, the youth tribes of middle America."
We want to know about Tom, the face of myspace.
From the article: 'Perhaps the biggest threat to MySpace is the PR fallout over safety ...
Those "challenges" are being met "head on", he says, including
hiring extra staff to monitor the 4-5m photos uploaded every day'
That job has to be about as exciting as watching grass grow but let assume you can sustain a review rate of one picture/second. In an 8 hour day, this is just under 30,000 pictures a day per employee. And to handle the 4-5 million/day, you'd therefore need about 200 employees (counting vacation and holidays) doing nothing but looking at MySpace pictures - yikes!
is a rogue... and we all know why
They have alot planned. Now I wonder if they are going to change their website look. 3 years of the same plain, cluttered with tables, website. Yuck!. No wonder all the users sites look like Frontpage sites from the late 90's. Trying to style with
table table table table tr td
is always fun isn't it! And yes, who the F@#& is this DeWolfe guy, we want to hear about Tom!
-- Brought to you by Carl's JR
Unconcerned with technological bells and whistles and geeky one-upmanship ...or, y'know, testing their code or any kind of quality assurance.
I continue to be amazed at the amount that Myspace.com breaks. Messaging will sometimes go down for weeks at a time. The "chat" feature has never really worked. Pages just randomly come up with errors. And not to mention the spam and the security errors. $586 million dollars, and they can't build a decent site?
I guess that's what they get for creating a massive website using Coldfusion.
The article says myspace was founded in September 2003, but the myspace.com url existed before then. Before it was converted to a social networking site, myspace.com was a free online storage site.
They pinched the best bits of everybody else's sites and put them together in a manner that made sense.
I'm going to send these guys a few pages out of the dictionary so they can start to figure out where they went wrong.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
And that is where Peer Review comes into play. Obviously, the amount of images uploaded far outstrips their ability to monitor them. Thus, they most likely only focus on those pictures that have been reported to be inappropriate. They may also actively check the most popular profiles since an inappropriate picture on one of them would have the widest reaching impact.
Myspace is just another proof that quality is always what is important.
My impression after seeing Myspace for the first time was it was like the early days of web page design. The users were more atrracted to the cheap "gee whiz" stuff. Inline audio and video took the place of flashing/scrolling text and huge animated gifs.
I have some friends that like to use Myspace so I check it out every once in a while. It is still a horrible site from a snobby tech geek point of view. To others, it is a great thing.
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
I fucking hate Myspace. I am sorry, but everybody on the site seems to love to fuck with their background adding music, pictures and other bullshit making it first of all impossible view to their page correctly, and second the annoy the living hell out of you by playing the same music track continuously. Yes, I know you can "pause" the music, but so many people seem to fuck up their own pages that the text boxes are all screwed up and crap gets moved all over the page. A friend from college asked me join Myspace and hook up with him. I tried to add him as a friend, but his page formatting is whacked and I cannot find his contact box ANYWHERE on the page, so I just gave up.
My friends on Livejournal don't have this stupid problem.
The man who created the site causing more child abductions than AOL...
FRIENDSTER! Well, the article mentions it in passing, but doesn't give it the credit it probably deserves.
I first learned about social networking (SN) -- specifically Friendster -- from an NPR story. Checked it out, but didn't get an invite right away. However, discovered a slew of alternate SN sites -- Myspace among them. Thought it was a bit crude -- but didn't need an invite to join (IIRC) and you were immediately hooked into the entire network through our old friend Tom.
And that, in a nutshell, is why I think it succeeded. Its utter lack of discrimination. The keys to its success?
- unrestricted access (didn't need an invite, access to everyone on site)
- much, much raunchier content (i.e. photos) with little or no censorship (at least in the early days)
- affordable web hosting for your brother's tacky gararge band
- and a free crappy pop song with every page load!
I don't know if Friendster was the first SN site, but I think it deserves credit for launching the phenomenon. I still feel it's a superior site and remained truer to the spirit of SN longer. But principles don't win you big corporate buyouts, alas.
I will always think of Myspace as the Betamax to Friendster's VHS.
Innovation makes enemies of all those who prospered under the old regime... -- Machiavelli
My question for him would be:
"Why on God's green Earth did you take circa-1994 web design philosophy and foist it upon the youth of the world? We got rid of that crap for a reason, you blithering twit!"
Gifts for Geeks - Stuff that really matters!
"Unconcerned with technological bells and whistles and geeky one-upmanship"
It doesn't take much to out do craigslist. I mean, even a CSS style sheet with a few lines could improve that website greatly. Good to see nobody is striving to outdo craigslist, we wouldn't want creativity and innovation running rampant on the web now, would we.
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Yeah, I know, mod me down. My Karma is good today.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Honestly, if you ever try browsing that site, with all the animations, videos, graphics, and assorted crap, those pages will bring your computer to an instant crawl, even a powerful one. Also, you'll get nonstop error messages no matter what you're trying to do. Technologically, Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe must have flunked Software Engineering 101.
On vit, on code et puis on meurt.
LOUD SHITTY MUSIC LOUD SHITTY MUSIC LOUD SHITTY MUSIC LOUD SHITTY MUSIC
Welcome to the text edition of Myspace.
Tranparent CSS with 80 layers makes it impossible to scroll down and turn off the sound of a teenage boy in women's pants getting kicked in the balls while screaming about the girl who left him after four days of romance. Pictures of people using oblique camera angles to disguise acne and general fugliness hover above links to people singing pop songs in front of their webcams, representing the extent of their creative ability.
Enjoy your stay! Tell Rupert that 580 million was SO worth it.
MySpace tapped into youth culture in a way that cannot be planned for or predicted. The technology was adequate, and the kids were apparently looking for something like MySpace. Don't be surprised if some new service displaces MySpace in a while. After all, youngins have fickle taste.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Those who obsess over whether MySpace can be profitable on its own terms may be missing the point ... it is already worth its weight in gold.
I'm not an HTML expert or anything, but roughly how much does myspace.com weigh?
So, I notice how the article refers to Friendster as a "passing fad" but doesn't mention that MySpace "copied" Friendster feature for feature in the beginning.
Joy of Tech
I am all for people experimenting with the web and making their Myspace page their own, but I assume that people would desire substance over style. If someone like me, a fairly experienced web and computer user, can't even navigate your Myspace page and complete a simple task like making a friends request what's the point in even having a page? It's the triumph of superficiality over usabilty and in that regard Myspace is far worse than any Geocities page ever was.
I guess I can't blame Myspace completely for this phenomenon as it seems to be an attitude that is pervading our entire society: it's better to look good than actually be good. Mspace seems to reinforce that message.
1) Pedo Probability Calculator
PPC
Tool which would calculate the chance of your new online friend being a Pedo! You would be able to mark real friends as ones you have met in Meatspace, and the PPC would calculate the odds on ones you haven't. Factors would include:
-Few, or no people marking the profile as having been met in Meatspace. This one would be easy to get around by making multiple profiles, but improvements could be made.
-How often their user photo turn up on other profiles, and other websites. (You know, how instead of using a real picture, Pedos will use a picture of some other girl they found online. Pedos aren't the only ones who do it. I don't know how many dating site profiles I've seen where the girl uses pictures of Keyra Agustina's butt and pretend's it's her own)
2) Being able to view pages in Default layout, as opposed to the layouts choosen by the owner of the profile.
Too many idiots think having using a picture of a car as their tile background is cool. Too many idiots pick fonts, sizes, and colors that make their pages unreadable without highlighting the text. Too many idiots have a thing for exclaimation mark strings so long that only a 3200 X 1800 resolution monitor could display them. Wouldn't it be great to just view thier pages without such silliness... who are we kidding... anyone who does do this probably has nothing useful to say anyway...
3)Spelling and Grammar regulations.
Internet Shorthand is acceptable in one place, and only one place. Online games. WHen you need to communicate fast, you can use as many commonly accepted acronyms as you want. When you have time to actually compose your thoughts, there is no excuse for typing like an idiot. If you've ever played Kingdom of Loathing, then you know they have people complete a simple english test before they let them into the chat-room. I say we do the same thing on mySpace!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nOhEIg3cA4&search= purepwnage
"If you have 100 friends and 99 of them are on MySpace you can't just go over to another website and expect them all to follow."
If that's correct, there's only one winner in this business. On the other hand, that sounds like the early days of e-mail, when MCImail and GEnie didn't interconnect. Does Myspace do things to make external links hard?
I think we nerds, the whole world over, owe a debt of gratitude to this man, and here's why:
He helped create a place on the 'Net, where all the clueless people can gather. They don't need to know anything at all about computers, and that's a GOOD thing: They'll stay in their MySpace corral, and think themselves elite. It's a self-reinforcing thing - the more idiots that gather on MySpace, the more inclined that ALL of them are to stay there.
And the rest of us won't have to put up with them.
THIS is a GOOD THING.
We should rejoice, and be happy, that MySpace exists: It is a "pocket Universe" on the 'net, that draws in all the clueless.
If you're annoyed by personalization like "music, pictures, and other bullshit," there are sites more appropriate to your tastes, like facebook.com. Why would you bother posting a comment to this discussion bitching about myspace? I don't post to facebook discussions bitching about how facebook is bland, characterless, and full of fratboys.
And now, a PSA from David Lynch.
Great, they found him.. When do we get to kill him?
God Be Gone
Myspace is stealing Slashdot's business model.
Would you bother fixing bugs if someone just gave you $586 million for a bug-riddled pile of crap? I sure wouldn't. I suspect the QA process at myspace goes something like this...
Minimum Wage Support Monkey: "Umm, sir, we're getting lots of bug reports from users. They say chat doesn't work, and some of their pages have been down since Thursday."
Myspace Co-Owner: "Well, I'm busy drinking fine cognac and sailing my brand new 120ft yacht across the Pacific with a crew of 46 beautiful Thai girls right now. It'll have to wait until I get back sometime next year..."
0 1 - just my two bits
That was the funniest thing I have heard all week. I just spewed water everywhere. Now I can go back to being lame for reading /. on my day OFF work.
Comparing myspace to craigslist is a travesty of the highest order. Myspace has done to the Internet what AOL did to cyberspace many years ago: Provided the keys to the kingdom to the lowest common denominator in terms of technical savvy. Luckily, the mindless damage caused by myspace is restricted largely to myspace.com.
We all thought that about AOL, too, back in the day. But then they got antsy in that corral and started leaking out in larger and larger numbers into the general 'net environs. There was much gnashing of teeth, but they were eventually absorbed. They still make their own goofy sites with too many geegaws and still send emails with poisoned forwards, because they never wanted to learn constraint or finesse and so never have. The MySpace kidlets will do the same thing, I'll bet you a dollar. This comment isn't meant to cover all AOL users, as I know there are folks who started out there and became valuable contributors to the 'net over time as they got more comfortable and learned a few things. It's for those who are uncomfortable with computers in so many other ways and just want the web to be wrapped in a giant cosy to make everything softer and inexplicably blinky.
...web 2.0
most of the pages look shite.
it ignores standards.
but how many other sites will get you to the top of the charts?
Or lack there of. The site is built on Cold Fusion, an out of date language, but hardware is where I'd be seriously curious to hear what they've been doing wrong and how Rupert Murdocks billions can't fix it?
For all the tech jokes M/S does serve its purpose, it simple does it fairly incompetently. Name a single major site with such latency problems. If you in hte business of heavy traffic you'd better also be in the business of heavy hardware with big webfarms, fat pipes and geoloadbalancing ala google or anyone else serious about high availability.
I use My Space because the recording industry insiders and the outsiders do. Its like torture waiting for their databases and even regular page loads can be embarrassingly slow. And these are all issues we've worked out years ago.
Why don't I ever seem to hear anyone mentioning this, is it part of the charm or something?
Anyway, I'm with the parent post. Give me something that has the flexibility with a more serious foundation and I'd love the see these kids jump ship. Its a fine site for what it is but you've got to be high to thing incredibly slow page loads and database connection drops are acceptable.
Quack, quack.
I have to admit that the blaring music videos and songs with which people fill up their Myspace pages almost made me leave the whole thing but Greasemonkey saved the day. Using a potent combination of scripts I no longer see any: - formatting - media - ads - annoying sections like "Cool Person of the Day" If someone wants to really push Greasemonkey into the limelight, I would suggest pointing out these scripts to the millions of Myspace users.
"Anyway, I'm with the parent post. Give me something that has the flexibility with a more serious foundation and I'd love the see these kids jump ship. Its a fine site for what it is but you've got to be high to thing incredibly slow page loads and database connection drops are acceptable."
This just in! Msimm has just opened the "latests and greatest" social site for teens, preteens, and kindergarteners. Wowing noises ensue. When contacted for an interview, Msimm said he plans on making no money, because everything will be GPLed (even the hardware). Of course this wonder site is only available by BT so it may take awhile to get everything to you.
That was coffee-on-the-keyboard, +6-type funny. And so true too! Maybe there is some good to myspace after all.
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
...is now Rupert Murdoch
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Murdoch
BE AFRAID!
What I don't like with all the hype around MySpace is that we forget older community sites. Community Connect is just an example of early, mostly ignored by the press, innovators. They had AsianAvenue, MiGente, and BlackPlanet. My profile on AsianAvenue dates back to 1997!!! Back then, we were all teenagers putting our lives on our profile pages with annoying background music and raunchy pictures. It wasn't too different from what MySpace is now. This makes me think we'll probably see a Web 2.0 bust.
I'm getting really tired of this PR stories DeWolfe and Anderson keep spinning. It is complete and total b.s. A little taste of truth about DeWolfe. Once my next article hits the full truth will be known.
I don't mind so much all the terrible profiles. I don't have any vapid friends. What I mind about Myspace is the fact that it is so broken. The site is always undergoing some sort of technical difficulty or maintenance. It's also the fact that people are allowed to use their own coding and mess with the site. If they implemented a way to embed a song or add a background without fucking with the CSS on the page, and if they could spend a sliver of their millions hiring even one decent programmer to fix their horrible site (and perhaps another guy to design a decent layout), many of their problems would be solved so quickly. You think Fox would have completely redesigned the site the moment they acquired it, but apparently not.
Keep your eye on People Aggregator (you can give them your email for updateds) - it's going to be a sort of meta social networking tool, with the ability to create "ad hoc" networks of your own, as well as manage all of your other social networking (myspace, flickr, etc.).
I think it's going to be the ultimate in social networking - one place to manage all your blogs and profiles.
My hope is that the universality of this tool will eventually draw people off of myspace and into corporate-free networks of their own.
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
Youngins are extremely fickle but recreating friend lists, repopulating interests, etc. is a tedious and thankless process. People have too much invested in myspace. Now, if there was some type of myspace scraperbot that took your info and friends and ported that info into an open XML doc--that would be cool. I've wished for a while that there was some type of basic standard XML doctype for containing basic profile information and perhaps relationships as well. Then, in much the same way Flickr allows use of its APIs to export albums to other services as long as the other services allow the same, people could migrate across different social networks without losing everything. Different social sites could differentiate themselves with service, layout and perhaps extensions to the basic doctype. Now THAT's web 3.0. Google? Bueller?
harmonious design
Chris DeWolfe is bound to fail due to his lack of decency. The article lists the following as part of his CV:
n ey/23myspace.html). Can you trust a spammer? Can you trust someone who made a living making popups?
1997 vice president of marketing, FBBH
1999 vice president of marketing, Xdrive Technologies
2001 chief executive, ResponseBase
2002 president, ResponseBase Marketing
His experiences involved email (read: spam) and pop-up marketing, as cited in the NY Times (archived behind stone wall at http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/23/business/yourmo
No way. There is no way this guy can succeed. He is doomed to fail, not because he lacks any professional skills, luck, or foresight. But, rather, because he lacks common decency and will never be socially responsible in our society.
So, it's sort of like New York City, then?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
[Tom] Anderson was in the creative department at Xdrive, in charge of advertisement design and later became an assistant in DeWolfe's marketing department. According to sources, while at Xdrive, Anderson rarely showered, spent an unusually high amount of time with DeWolfe, and took the bus everywhere despite the rumor that he was making an additional $5,000 a month from running a pornography website. However, no proof the porn website could be found. Most of this can be confirmed in a recent interview with Anderson on an LA radio station Indie 103.1. This article has some interesting information about both Tom and Chris DeWolfe. http://www.trentl.com/?name=News&file=article&sid= 50
... actually good? When I sent in a complaint because the music players within the site didn't work in Opera 9 - they fixed it within a day or two.
The usual response I get from sites which have issues with Opera is "well, don't only, like, two percent of the population use Opera? lol, no point then!". Yes, Lionhead, fuck your forum.
I suspect it's just you...
I had a MySpace page for a while: a band page, with uploaded music, album shots, stuff like that.
One day, it just vanished: deleted, removed.
I emailed MySpace support asking what had happened: robot reply, telling me what to do if I'd forgotten my password.
I emailed them again: robot reply, telling me what to do if I wanted to delete my account.
I emailed them again: robot reply, claiming that, if the account was removed, it was for violation of terms and conditions, which is somewhat ludicrous (and I had read the T's & C's).
I also told them that some of my friend accounts now had a mismatch in the number of friends linked to their pages, since mine had disappeared. No reply.
So: they're clearly not doing support at all, as one can tell by the proportion of the site that appears to be nonfunctional at any one time. (Music playback is currently totally broken.) I would certainly recommend that any prospective user doesn't put too much time and effort into uploading content, since MySpace seem happy to just delete it all for no reason. Oh, and they can't restore anything once that's done.
The one thing that I see that myspace has brought back to us is a sense of community.
When I started getting on the internet I felt completely alone. I saw almost no one then internet that I knew. On the BBSs there was a community. Myspace has brought that back for me. I use it to keep in touch with people that I know personally all over the world. It is nice having pics of their friends that they may talk about when we chat or talk on the phone or whatever.
Also, it has really helped out with finding people that have simular interests that I would have never found, even in my local area.
yeah, it has its flaws, but damn, what doesn't?
I thank these people for giving back to the internet a sense of community
"...they instead set out to appeal to the people they knew and, beyond them, the youth tribes of middle America."
"Youth tribes of middle America?"
I mean, I've heard Kansas is pretty f'ed up in some places, but have they really descended into tribal barbarism there, and if so, why are they posting crappy webpages?
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Didn't we use to have AOL for this?
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Would I be off track in thinking that this is a thinly-veiled attack on slashdot? Unfortunately, still a little too thick for some...
Everyone needs to make their living (don't anyone DARE say Paris Hilton).
Since when is your occupation the final word on you?
Since feudal times really, but we have progressed a little since then.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
It is a "pocket Universe" on the 'net, that draws in all the clueless.
What we may have here is the beginnings of our own "Golgafrincham Ark Fleet Ship B", or at least an early passenger manifest.
Myspace isn't on the way up, it's on the way down. Check alexa.com
The bell curve is heading towards the downslope.
He knows it. Vidilife.com seems to be on the uprise though. Anything the former Intermix/eUniverse guy Brad Greenspan touches seems to turn to gold, whether it's crap or not.
All the other social networking sites are on the way down and Greenspan's is on the way up. I run sitespaces.net and sell social networking software, so I'm pretty much on top of these types of things.
Greenspan has some secret and it has nothing to do with popularity.
Taken from experience, after hunting around trying to find where to contact support to report a bug, I get a canned response that doesn't help at all. Reply to the message, with the canned response in the reply, saying that is of no help, and get a reply back with the exact same canned message! Maybe they really do have monkey's working there. At least that would be one cool thing about myspace.
I just find it funny myspace initially came about because friendster's site was slow and crappy (they've sinced moved over to php and the site is extremely stable, probably because no one uses it). Now that myspace is slow and crappy all the emo wannabe's just mope and be all emo like and put up with it.
People can rip on myspace for whatever reason. I like it because I can search for new and exisisting local bands and further away also. I actually found a band on myspace to play a show coming up. I've also ran into old friends. Myspace is not pretty for the most part. MS give the user freedom to totally screw up aesthetics of a site and break every design rule ever made. So what. It still provides users the ability to stay within their own group and use it as they see fit. You can deliver information of all sorts, not just your bust size and slang vocab. I guess the 'lameness' of myspace represents the decline of western civilization. Garbage in=Garbage out. ...but if you use it as a tool and not a dating/popularity service- then it is what it is. ...a tool to: keep in touch, find lost friends, network, find new music and more. ...there will always be negatives when people are involved- and myspace as a service doesn't force people to act the way they do (imho). So the servers are slow- and there are a few political opinions because of the current owner-....but what is so wrong with posting your wares on MS and Ms in general?? Is it design? Functionality? Other? Or the people that use MS that make you hate it?