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.
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...
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.
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
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 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.