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."

Comments

Niche market...

[djones101]

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.

Re:Everyone uses it

[garcia]

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.

Why is it so hard?

[dedazo]

Every single time I see a MySpace "analysis" there's that snide, bloghorati uber-alles comment about "web standards" and "lack of design". Holy crap. I am no fan of MySpace, but at least I'm mature enough to realize that people (normal people) don't give a dead rat's ass about CSS, DOM, XHTML, microformats, "mashups" or any of that other stuff that the self-appointed standards nannies of teh interwebs have decided everyone should observe closely or face death. A standardized and structured semantic web space is important, but please rent a fucking clue. They don't care. MySpace is never going to fix something that in their opinion is quite certainly not broken, because their users love it, and they get to dance with it all the way to the bank.

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.

Re:Why is it so hard?

[Jett]

Where is the line then? The few times I've tried to figure out what the hell is up with myspace my browser gets beaten to death by the horrific web design. I saw one page where multiple flash players loaded several video and audio files AT THE SAME TIME. The inmates can only run the asylum for so long. It's great they've managed to build a "web 2.0" version of Geocities, but when half the pages they host required a multi-ghz beast of a machine to even load I don't see how their model can really be sustainable. You either follow standards and good design or you let your users produce web pages which crash most peoples browsers.

Re:Google.

[vasqzr]

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?

Google & 20% time

[remmelt]

You mean like Orkut?

Re:I Would Have Signed Up...

[Short Circuit]

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.

The Bright Side of MySpace.

[Paulrothrock]

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.

Re:Everyone uses it

[DerekLyons]

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.)

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.
 
 

I write web apps for a living.

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.
 
 

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."

It's no wonder they had so much trouble keeping the system up and running, because they're obviously not professionals.

The term you are looking for is sour grapes.

Re:What were they thinking?

[davros-too]

That should have been the very first thing that they tried, as any experienced developer would have known.

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? ... anyone?