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?
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.
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?
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."
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Cthulhu Saves.
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.