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.
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?
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
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!
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.
Only about 30% of all accounts are really active, accessed once every 2 weeks. (Yes I have the data)
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
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
Finally a comment on the architecture of the whole thing (which, if anyone would have bothered to RTFA - wait am on Slashdot...). What is conspicuous by its absence is the lack of consideration of other Web Server technologies. I'm sure other technologies would have been considered - any Web Server architect worth his/her salt would surely have looked at alternate Apache/Linux or Apache/FreeBSD and other database technologies.
The comments on Slashdot definitely are going downhill.... Would have expected to see more on the analysis of the movement from ColdFusion to ASP.NET...
Yeah, this quote really surprised me:
"The cache is also a better place to store transitory data that doesn't need to be recorded in a database, such as temporary files created to track a particular user's session on the Web site--a lesson that Benedetto admits he had to learn the hard way. "I'm a database and storage guy, so my answer tended to be, let's put everything in the database," he says, but putting inappropriate items such as session tracking data in the database only bogged down the Web site."
Session tracking data in the freaking database? Real geniuses they have working there. This just confirms my suspicion that they had some incompetent people working on their software.
Use of Microsoft technology for a huge website is another thing that surprises me (but confirms my suspicions), and they even admit it:
"One problem is that MySpace is pushing Microsoft's Web technologies into territory that only Microsoft itself has begun to explore, Benedetto says. As of November, MySpace was exceeding the number of simultaneous connections supported by SQL Server, causing the software to crash. The specific circumstances that trigger one of these crashes occur only about once every three days, but it's still frequent enough to be annoying"
Hurray for using unproven technology.
"Last summer, MySpace's Windows 2003 servers shut down unexpectedly on multiple occasions. The culprit turned out to be a built-in feature of the operating system designed to prevent distributed denial of service attacks"
It took them a month the figure that out.