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."
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!
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.
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?
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