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."
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'.
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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.
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
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."
His keyboard repeat rate probably couldn't keep up with the exponential browser pop ups.
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Cthulhu Saves.
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.
No, they went from 150 million down to 26 million. You obviously forgot this story.
"In the game of life, someone always has to lose. To me, if life were fair, that someone would always be Oklahoma." -DKR
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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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.
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.