Slashdot Mirror
Inside MySpace.com
lizzyben writes "Baseline is running a long piece about the inner workings of MySpace.com. The story chronicles how the social networking site has continuously upgraded its technology infrastructure — not entirely systematically — to accommodate more than 26 million accounts. It was a rocky road and there are still hiccups, several of which writer David F. Carr details here." From the story: "MySpace.com's continued growth flies in the face of much of what Web experts have told us for years about how to succeed on the Internet. It's buggy, often responding to basic user requests with the dreaded 'Unexpected Error' screen, and stocked with thousands of pages that violate all sorts of conventional Web design standards with their wild colors and confusing background images. And yet, it succeeds anyway."
Seriously, I had a look at a few pages, and when I eventually managed to CTRL-ALT-DELETE my browser into submission, I made damn well sure never to go back there. Are there people that actually have enough computing power to handle some of those profiles?
I like to place meaningful quotes in my sig, so people will know that I know what meaningful quotes are.
I think the milestones are a little behind... the last they mention is 26 million. Last I noticed they're nearly 150 million. Maybe that was the last significant upgrade worth mentioning? TFA didn't seem to mention... or I skipped over it. Very possible.
It's not the stability or the design,it's just that people now adays say "what's your myspace" rather than "what's your phone number" There's tons of other sites out there with more functionality and more stable servers, but...no one uses those, do they?
I agree. Keeping up with all of the pedophiles is something that most businesses rarely have to deal with.
'Loose' is when your pants are three sizes too big. 'Lose' is when you misuse 'loose'.
article here with no ads
And yet, it succeeds anyway.
All that "power" that they've given to the users, coupled with the nasty CSS it takes to use it, will be their undoing. There's no way that they can change now without breaking millions of profiles and really annoying a huge number of their users. It's a textbook example of poor long term vision. MySpace is a huge success now, and it will continue to be for a while. One day though someone will make a social network that is quick, easy, and customisable in a well-thought out way. Then MySpace will empty very, very quickly.
Mind you, there's no reason why that site wouldn't be MySpace2 or something. I'm only refering to the network, not the company.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
MySpace has the stranglehold on the niche market. Any and every person who just wants their own pegboard, office cubicle side, or office wall to decorate can do so in cyberspace, especially students who otherwise have no way to really express themselves (at least in their own opinion). It takes very little experience to develop your own page that does exactly what you want. It's the Google Gadget system for the common user, or Geektools for High Schoolers, if you want to call it that. Unless someone can find a good way to draw a significant userbase away from MySpace (and I haven't seen anything that will come close), they will continue to succeed.
... they click on the pictures of the hot girls, only to get a "You must be logged in to do that!" message.
Web application technology -- Microsoft Internet Information Services, .NET Framework
Server operating system -- Windows 2003
Programming language and environment -- Applications written in C# for ASP.NET
Database -- SQL Server 2005
Before someone else beats me to it and is wholly serious, I'd better say:
Running on M$ Winblows? No wonder it runs so poorly!!!1
Just fucking deal with it and stop pointing out that ==--~~L0N3rz1124~~--=='s blog does not validate. We know, and they don't give a shit.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
Informative article but no pretty pictures. I want to see if they got their shtick together in the server room. Is it nice and orderly like a sterile hospital ward, or haphazard with wires strung all over the place like a college dorm room? Inquiring minds want to know...
I want everyone to remember that when Google came out, there were quite a few well-known search engines out already. Google was simply better enough than the others that it took over.
If anyone is reading this, and has the resources to do it -- or maybe has some 20% time at Google -- the only real solution to MySpace (other than praying that they fix it themselves) is to offer a competing service that is so ridiculously much better than MySpace that it will do what Google did. Anyone remember Facebook? In college, not a single person used MySpace, yet everyone was in Facebook -- if Facebook was open to the public (not just people in school), it would likely kick MySpace's ass around the block.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
As far as personal profiles go, I'd suspect most people are pretty young, like 20s. But I know of many people in their 30s with MySpace sites also.
So, in other words, MySpace's chief demographics are "20-somethings" and "people trying to sleep with 20-somethings."
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
In my opinion MySpace's success is due in large part to strategic product placement style advertising in television and movies popular amongst their target demographic.
The kids don't care if its buggy or ugly, if its on TV and in the movies, then it must be cool.
His keyboard repeat rate probably couldn't keep up with the exponential browser pop ups.
Myspace is a cesspool full of self-important, attention whoring bargain basement people. It's this generation's Geocities, complete with the brain meltingly offensive designs but enhanced with the ability to connect with more self-important attention whoring bargain basement people. It's practically a microcosm of the internet as a whole, wrapped up in one ugly centralized location.
You mean like Orkut?
Sorry! an unexpected error has occurred.
This error has been forwarded to Slashdot's technical group.
Cthulhu Saves.
It's funny just a few nights ago I gave into the My space fad. Not just to be cool or something but to find some old friends I knew from high school. I was nearly slamming my mouse into the wall because the website was so unstable. I thought "Sure I'll write my first blog about the icy weather here in Waco" It took me nearly an hour just to try and post it. The farking Unexpected error came up more than I can count. When allow as said and done it posted the article like 30 times...So then I get to try and delete the 29 articles that I don't want there...Yeah needless to say it was a nightmare. It was hell. I don't see how others manage to put up with it.
The greatest revenge in life is massive success.
I keep hearing references to horribly designed myspace profiles. For the benefit of those Slashdotters who haven't see this dreck, please post your most egregious examples in reply.
I am amazed it runs on Windows and does as well as it does.
Now I do not run a website that gets millions of hits a day, so maybe I am not one to speak -- but MySpace IMO is pretty poor. If you have ever used it, you must be familiar with its inability to accurately track sessions and frequently mistakenly log you out. Not to mention if you use it for an period of time you will generally fail to reach your intended page multiple times with a plethora of possible errors or blank screens. If this was a service people paid for, it would have no users. However, since it's become one of the number one de facto social stop (and it's FREE) it manages to keep the subscriber base.
I am not complaining as I could honestly careless.. but it runs very very poorly.
Surely it'd be better to start with information which is understandable by humans before we put energies into making the nonesense machine readable? ;-)
MySpace.com hit 63,114,796 U.S. unique visitors in December alone.
Chart: http://snapshot.compete.com/myspace.com?int=1032
...but that doesn't mean I feel the need to attend a WWE event.
Fair and just copyright of materials according to international laws. It makes me sick that it is all going into Rupert's pockets. Musicians (and other artists) don't realise that they are effectively signing their rights and ownership away. Why should MySpace be all about raising profits for Rupert? MySpace should be about making money for its members also. It is a form of marketplace as well afterall...
Look at the comments on MySpace pages. How often do you see spam?
Now consider telling these people to use email and blogs to communicate. You will launch into a discussion of email hygene, how to cope with email and comment spam, etiquette, etc.
If you know little or nothing about computers, which would you choose?
(normal people) don't give a dead rat's ass about CSS, DOM, XHTML, microformats, "mashups" or any of that other stuff
You must be pretty clueless, this is slashdot. Where 'normal people' are in short supply.
Hmmm... there ought to be a t-shirt "/. where normal people are in short supply", sell it on 'ThinkGeek'. Size XXL and XXXL only....
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
It certainly wouldn't be any less popular if it wasn't buggy. What's happened is that MySpace somehow managed to carve a space in the collective conscious. So, it's the place people go in the US to do social networking. People just deal with the fact that it's buggy because that is the place where you go. It's kind of like people use Windows because that is the only OS they know (or like AIM, etc.). They don't know of anything better, and even if they did, their friends probably wouldn't know of it / use it. MySpace could improve the user experience, but they likely won't until someone starts sucking people out of MySpace and into something better.
This is a pretty good article, and accurate too. I was one of maybe 20 people that went to this presentation at the SQL Server Connections Conference last November, and this article summarizes what was covered... and then some.
Nerdy as it was, most of us didn't want to leave the room once it was over because it was such interesting stuff, plus we got to ask the MySpace people direct questions.
I left thinking it was a shame that so few people saw this (out of the thousands of people that went to the conference, not to mention the general web world), so I'm glad to see this summary of the information.
- Jon
myspace can be annoying at times. i don't tend to look at other people's profiles anymore, but when I do, I use the "de-uglify" button in Toolbar MS for firefox. i personally like the site. it's a great way to keep up with old and current friends, and make new ones. i actually found my girlfriend on myspace. 2.3 months and still going strong!
People who can't stand MySpace's (or for that matter Orkut's) errors and general suck, and thus scout around to find the social-networking/media sharing site that sucks least, but leave a little something behind on MySpace as a "pointer" for their herd-behaving acquaintances. (I'm in this category)
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
1) Use Firefox (more secure) with pop-up blocker
2) Use Adblock plugin for Firefox (blocks most ads) with auto filter updating
3) Use Flashblock for Firefox (blocks most movies and survivor ads)
4) Block CSS/JavaScript if your eyes hurt or you're getting dizzy
5) Use Web Developer toolbar for Firefox if you need more control
6) Get a 13-year-old to translate the pages for you (old people hack)
Enjoy
Check out Pandora by Music Genome Project
For the love of god! MOD PARENT DOWN!
The inside of MySpace is a black hole of sinews of pain and sorrow spiraling down with a red bleeding rose at the very end of the abyss.
"Words of wisdom: drop that zero and get with the hero" -- Vanilla Ice
Look at it this way: The more people use MySpace, the fewer "OMG FWD THIS TO EVERY 1 U NO!!!" emails you'll get. It's like a ghetto for annoying people on the Internet.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
MySpace shouldn't have allowed their users to modify the pages so heavily. They shouldn't have allowed people to have music that plays when you visit the page. They shouldn't have made a system that can't talk to other stuff (like del.icio.us tags or RSS readers). They shouldn't have made it so freaking hard to use. (It takes three times as many clicks to do on something on MySpace than what it should take.)
If myspace were to prevent people from exhibiting their stupidity, how would I know who the stupid people are?
paintball
I've seen a lot of community sites come and go. MySpace is a pig. But the very thing that makes it so awful gives its users flexibility and freedom that far exceeds anything that would typically be considered responsible (fishing scandals/css hacks/etc).
Basically its like a slightly structured Geocities only without mommy or daddy for the most part. You get a template, you get a dating service, you get a highschool popularity contest, and you can even plug in music that doesn't belong to you. All that and if you get really excited you can make it look just about as ugly or fancy as you can or like.
Hell, they did *everything* wrong and thats what made it right.
Quack, quack.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
WHAT?!
So, Windows 2003 has a "feature" that deals with denial-of-service attacks - it shuts down! Brilliant!
umm yeah, for every 3 times I sign in I experience around 20 errors. The site is a piece of shit. How the fuck did this become a story on slashdot
that myspace likes to have unexpected errors at almost every moment as it is that myspace IS an expected error!
.02
just my
b1zarr0
Haha. Yes. I hate myspace. I'm on there just to keep up with the local music scene. Place renders like shit, does slow up my computer, and is so loud and annoying with their music playing system that I installed flash mute to shut it up. If a song is going to start playing, it should play to the end without my having to hang out on the same page until the end. I was thinking just the other night that a social networking system which relayed individuals' content via RSS or somesuch and where the mainpage just renders the various fields. I obviously have no idea what I'm talking about.
I'm a bit surprised that at the sequence of stages that their architecture went through. They bought expensive servers, mega-expensive SAN's, completely changed their platform from ColdFusion to ASP.NET, tried data segmentation...
And then finally implemented a caching layer in front of the databases!
That should have been the very first thing that they tried, as any experienced developer would have known. Instead of buying that SAN for a billion dollars, maybe they should have just invested in some competent employees.
They (college students) say are you on facebook? Because all you need is the persons name and you can find them and easily stay in touch.
MySpace founders Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson had previously founded an e-mail marketing company called ResponseBase that they sold to Intermix in 2002. The ResponseBase team received $2 million plus a profit-sharing deal, according to a Web site operated by former Intermix CEO Brad Greenspan. (Intermix was an aggressive Internet marketer--maybe too aggressive. In 2005, then New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer--now the state's governor--won a $7.9 million settlement in a lawsuit charging Intermix with using adware. The company admitted no wrongdoing.)
In 2003, Congress passed the CAN-SPAM Act to control the use of unsolicited e-mail marketing. Intermix's leaders, including DeWolfe and Anderson, saw that the new laws would make the e-mail marketing business more difficult and "were looking to get into a new line of business," says Duc Chau, a software developer who was hired by Intermix to rewrite the firm's e-mail marketing software.
Fancy that.
qz
If "success" to you means that people are willing to keep using your product despite crippling errors, then Myspace is a success. To me, this is not success. Success for me would that they REDUCE the number of "sorry, a technical error has occured this error has been forwarded to the Myspace group" pages.
stuff |
That sounds like what LiveJournal did when they launched their spangly-new object-oriented style system. Under the new system the templates expose a bunch of settings the users can choose to customize within the limits of the style. They now have an option where you can choose whether you want to use the old system or the new. Guess what? Most of the sort of users that make those obscene pages on MySpace continue to use the old system because it makes it easier for them to do that sort of stuff.
Now they have two template systems to maintain rather than just one. Once you get above the data access layer everything seems to be completely separate with no chance of uniting them. Whenever they add new features, some of them get added to the old system, some to the new and occasionally both. So much wasted effort.
Of course, it could be argued that if they'd never had the hacky old system most people who got into LiveJournal never would have, because they wouldn't have been able to make their journals "express their individuality" with limited technical knowledge.
my only complaint is that there is not manadatory code, which should be uneditable by any user that should state to be ignored by google (and all other search sites) indexing bots, in otherwords please for the love of anything include by force robots.txt onto EVERY myspace page, asides from thier main login. it has become aboslutely horrible to find anything in searches now without 10,000 entries of useless myspace pages to look through. it was hard enough as it was. otherwise if myspace cant be responsible and do something like this, google im looking at you, an option in advanced search to block all hits from *.myspace/*?
As someone who scorns it and uses it I couldn't agree more. :)
(I don't use it for popularity/dating/etc, but I do a music/arts site, so it becomes something of a necessary evil)
Quack, quack.