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."
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.
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?
Who are you talking about? Teenagers and college students? You must be, because as an adult, I don't know anyone that says anything of the sort and if they did I would ignore them from that point on. Please note, I'm only slightly outside of the age range where that site is most popular.
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
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.
I believe it is open now.
Do you really want the people on MySpace taking over Facebook?
You mean like Orkut?
Surely it'd be better to start with information which is understandable by humans before we put energies into making the nonesense machine readable? ;-)
...but that doesn't mean I feel the need to attend a WWE event.
Firefox doesn't respond to a normal application close signal when stuck in intensive Javascript loops. I run into similar problems in some articles on Slashdot.
They really need to break the Javascript engine into a separate thread and avoid hinging all browser response on it. Or maybe that's just a flaw with the XUL way of doing things. Dunno.
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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.
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.)
I write web apps for a living. I know what a good app looks like. I could write a better MySpace clone in the space of a weekend. However, nobody would use it. Why? Because it's not "MySpace." For chrissakes: IT CAN'T REMEMBER THAT YOU WANT TO STAY LOGGED IN! That checkbox on the login page, as far as I can tell, DOES. NOTHING.
It's no wonder they had so much trouble keeping the system up and running, because they're obviously not professionals.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
im out of the age range everyone is throwing around here and yet, i both depend on MySpace for a lot AND enjoy its nuances. i am an independent bass player with good credentials and i like freelancing my musical skills. i have had a HUGE number of contacts come through with higher paying gigs. i have met interesting women on MySpace, too. one of which i am now seeing.
MySpace is all about looking around. its a FUN place! i have found insane humor, interesting conspiracy nutcases, fine art, great music, and some incredible design workarounds to beat the default styles in place on MySpace.
Saying you found nothing of value after a couple profile views on MySpace is like saying you found nothing of interest in the Kennedy Assassination after reading page 1732 of the Warren Commission Report (OK, i love conspiracy theorists! the Illuminati are well represented on MySpace. so are the 9-11, holocaust, and kennedy folks.).
its sad when you see readers of slashdot trashing something so 'unmarketable', unpredictable, and out of the ordinary as MySpace. and isnt it cool that something so 'wrong' could make it. it baffles science! Sure, its a little buggy now and then (as is eslasher's wunderkind, Linux), but who hasnt had trouble with traffic doubling every 3 months? theyve done a great job.
give it a chance. go look around. check out some of my top friends. like Erin. she has an AMAZING site!
kip www.myspace.com/kipmartin
This isn't the first time I've heard this. Almost EVERYBODY around here (Montana) uses MSN Messenger instead of AIM, of which I am VERY grateful for. I find it odd that nobody else seems to use MSN elsewhere, but my contact list is well over 100 people. Go figure.
I used to have both clients installed on my home PC until an ad started AUTO-PLAYING sound. The ads also cycle. I refuse to allow anything to run on my PC that will puke sound out of my speakers all willy nilly.
On top of that, AOL's latest (Triton?) version is the most bug ridden piece of shit software I've ever used. Not only does it install some craptacular AOL browser (hijacked IE? Probably), but for several months it wouldn't show as I modified the text input area for chat (GUI redraw issue). The only option was to migrate to the prior version, which has a UI dating back to the early 90's.
MSN's service, by contrast, DOES have ads. These ads don't auto-play sound, and I seriously can't think of a real bug in the client itself. This is far less invasive than AOL's client, and accomplishes the purpose I intend to use it for; to bounce a message off of a friend of colleague.
Naturally, using gaim for either/both services nullifies any of these arguments and you only need to worry about the chat service itself holding water.
Damn them for letting people do what they WANT to do with their own personal page that you DO NOT have to go to.
Myspace SHOULDN'T be successful. That's all you're saying.
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.
It's fascinating to see such a comment modded up on Slashdot - which is normally the bastion of freedom and personal rights to do whatever the hell they want, when they want.
But here we see the truth - Slashdot who screams the loudest when $MEDIA_MEGACORP tramples on *their* (assumed) rights - bellows equally loudly when their own ox is gored.
The term you are looking for is sour grapes.
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 hope your friends know how to say YES. 30s chicks are way, way hornier and sexually uninhibited than 20s chicks.
I am a mother of three teenagers, and I am not the only graying gracefully Mom with a MySpace! Some parents are spying on their kids, but I have found it a wonderfully connecting medium with far-flung nieces and nephews.
Is MySpace annoyingly unreliable and messy? Take it as a lesson. As a developer I have found it extremely enlightening to learn how much crap users will put up with -- if the purpose of the application is compelling enough for them.
I guess the problem is not much overlap between the 'internet startups' developers and the 'corporate megasite' developers. If the developer's whole career has been building and supporting sites where they think a few million page views a month is big, they are going to really struggle when that turns into millions per day or per hour.
Would a caching layer have solved myspace server problems without also implementing SANs for storage and clustering db servers? I've no idea, not having any experience with such large sites, but I sort of doubt it. Would love to see some comments from people who have... anyone?
In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice; in practice there is.
The fact of the matter is, almost no website has as much traffic as MySpace (and certainly not of the sort they have). In hindsight I think it's easier to say, "X would have been better to do.", but when you're seeing traffic increase 10% per day, you need fast solutions now. I've worked on large sites, but never as large as MySpace, and I've certainly seen the best architects make decisions that you'd question, but it was the best at the time. And these are real architects that have built real large scale websites, databases, and scale out configurations -- not like most of the commenters on slashdot, whom always seem to have a critique, but yet neither have a product that generates over $10Mil in revenue per year, has over 50Mil downloads, nor is in the top 100 of websites visited.