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!
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.
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.
-
-
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.
The man who created the site causing more child abductions than AOL...
Don't you mean "more frivolous lawsuits by spoiled brats who willingly disobey the terms of service and lie about their age"?
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?
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!
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.
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
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.
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.
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
[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
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.
Either you're kidding, or you're new to "our society." Hell, that's a RECIPE for success.
Don't beleive me? One word: Lawyers.
... 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.
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