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."
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.
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Tons of bands use it, small independent movie studios and film productions, etc. etc. Basically, anyone with anything to promote.
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.
Facebook has been open to the general public for months, much to its old userbase's dismay. They introduced the no-network and the regional accounts last September somewhere, IIRC.
It's the same that's happening with MSN Instant Messaging: It's broken, the official client is the worst IM client I've ever seen, and it does not support important features as formatted text (multiple formatting in a single message), but people use it.
Also, when somebody wants to discuss something, or just talk, over the Internet, he/she asks "What's your MSN?".
Talking about MySpace, I've only visited it a couple of times (to see a football (soccer) player's myspace (which, probably, was just built by some fans), and Nick Sagan's one), and I told myself "I've never seen a site like this one - how can they call this a web page?".
But I know this sort of sites. At school my colleagues don't use myspace, they use hi5. And I've used it some times when I was still accessing it from public computers, with Portable Firefox. But when I accessed it with my laptop (i686 300Mhz 64Mb), it was *very* slow to load.
Solution? A member of the INDUCKS project invited me to their forum at orkut, so I started exploring that social network. It had the same sort of silly server errors (sometimes you see a "Bad, bad server, no donut for you!"), but they didn't occur as frequently as in hi5, and the site design is clearer than the one used at Orkut.
Fortunately GMAIL and Orkut have Gtalk integration, which means that everyone with an account in one of these services will be able to login at gtalk. This is good for me because some of my colleagues had to change to GMAIL accounts because a (very good!) teacher told us he wanted to send important documents via e-mail and that Hotmail was not the ideal tool, and the consequency is that now I'm able to talk to them using gtalk instead of MSN.
The big problem here is "eye candy". People like myspace because it's eye candy. People like the MSN client because it's eye candy. And the same happens with hi5 and other equally bad sites.
There's tons of other sites out there with more functionality and more stable servers, but...no one uses those, do they?May you tell us which better sites do you know? I'd like to know :-)
As an ex-myspacer, I know of the ocular and mental angish caused by some of the pages on myspace. However, greasemonkey and the myspace custome style remover script make using myspace bearable.
"Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs. We have a protractor."
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.
Oh, for crying out loud, just install FlashBlock.
Yeah, I think GP had just the slightest bit of exaggeration there. While I've been sent to some hellish MySpace profile pages in my time, with dozens of animated GIFs and Flash videos, I have yet to have it threaten my "computing power." Much less have I had to resort to using (and I quote) "OS-level controls (CTRL-ALT-DEL)."
;)
Also, who that's been on Slashdot this long has never even seen MySpace before? There have been at least hundreds (counting dupes) of stories about it over the years.
But at least I learned something today, I suppose. The window close command ALT-F4 is apparently not as "OS-level" as CTRL-ALT-DEL. Good to know the hotkey caste system.
Xbox reviews.. We think they're funny.
See https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/722/
An add-on for Firefox:
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/722/
"Only the small secrets need to be protected. The big ones are kept secret by public incredulity." - Marshall McLuhan
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
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
Ditto, but until you get that dialog, Firefox can be pretty much non-responsive.
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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.