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."

Comments

Oh, yeah, they didn't care about any of that.

[dominion]

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.

Myspace is bullshit. Sorry.

[Hamster Lover]

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.

Re:Myspace is bullshit. Sorry.

[cluke]

Saw a good comment recently, that MySpace is nothing new, just Geocities 9 years on.

Re:Myspace is bullshit. Sorry.

[Zphbeeblbrox]

Myspace is nothing like Geocities. Geocities let people design decent web sites. Myspace just forces people to use crappy web technology giving them no choice but to have crappy websites unless they send a significant portion of their life hacking the system. That comparison is an insult to geocities.

Proof that luck is a huge factor

[Infonaut]

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.

That is an excellent observation.

[Hamster Lover]

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.

Re:That is an excellent observation.

[apflwr3]

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.

Well, why do you think teens are flocking to it in droves? You think they care more about substance than style? They (and by "they", I don't mean Web 2.0 geeks, I mean the unwashed masses) love it because Myspace is the closest approximation we've seen yet of the (junior) high school experience. Mucking with layout with editors, tacking up animated GIFs and music bits is the not much different than putting stickers or writing band names all over their notebooks and lockers. Sure, it's clunky but isn't everything at that age?

But the real genius of Myspace is the friends system. Friendster missed the mark by making it all-inclusive (if you're one person's friend, you're everyone's friend.) With Myspace, you have to actively collect them (or be so popular that people are asking you.) The friends system is not that much different than the little cliques that form in school-- and the ability to "deny" lets you deal out the sting of rejection with as much pain as in real life. And the "top 8" is like choosing who to sit with at the lunch table (forget the "interests" section, you can gather the most sense of who a person is by seeing who their best friends are.)

Of course it's all very juvenile-- but it's for kids. And for adults who stil have that junior high mentality.

Re:Peer Review

[tashanna]

I don't even think it'll take monitoring all the most popular profiles - look for sudden spikes in traffic to a profile or image. If it's a double-plus-ungood photo, it'll probably draw a crowd. It won't take long to rule out /. effect (heck, getting posted on slashdot may be a good indicator that its inappropriate) or a genuinely interesting/funny photo.

- Tash
Vrooom...

Re:Behind myspace? eew

[kpaul]

But he's my only friend!