Inside MySpace.com 250
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."
Membership Milestones? (Score:2, Informative)
printer friendly (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Everyone uses it (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Google. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Everyone uses it (Score:4, Informative)
It's the same that's happening with MSN Instant Messaging: It's broken, the official client is the worst IM client I've ever seen, and it does not support important features as formatted text (multiple formatting in a single message), but people use it.
Also, when somebody wants to discuss something, or just talk, over the Internet, he/she asks "What's your MSN?".
Talking about MySpace, I've only visited it a couple of times (to see a football (soccer) player's myspace (which, probably, was just built by some fans), and Nick Sagan's one), and I told myself "I've never seen a site like this one - how can they call this a web page?".
But I know this sort of sites. At school my colleagues don't use myspace, they use hi5. And I've used it some times when I was still accessing it from public computers, with Portable Firefox. But when I accessed it with my laptop (i686 300Mhz 64Mb), it was *very* slow to load.
Solution? A member of the INDUCKS project invited me to their forum at orkut, so I started exploring that social network. It had the same sort of silly server errors (sometimes you see a "Bad, bad server, no donut for you!"), but they didn't occur as frequently as in hi5, and the site design is clearer than the one used at Orkut.
Fortunately GMAIL and Orkut have Gtalk integration, which means that everyone with an account in one of these services will be able to login at gtalk. This is good for me because some of my colleagues had to change to GMAIL accounts because a (very good!) teacher told us he wanted to send important documents via e-mail and that Hotmail was not the ideal tool, and the consequency is that now I'm able to talk to them using gtalk instead of MSN.
The big problem here is "eye candy". People like myspace because it's eye candy. People like the MSN client because it's eye candy. And the same happens with hi5 and other equally bad sites.
May you tell us which better sites do you know? I'd like to know :-)
Re:Everyone uses it (Score:5, Informative)
Runs Pretty Bad (Score:2, Informative)
I am not complaining as I could honestly careless.. but it runs very very poorly.
Re:Why is it so hard? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:I Would Have Signed Up... (Score:2, Informative)
Also, who that's been on Slashdot this long has never even seen MySpace before? There have been at least hundreds [google.com] (counting dupes) of stories about it over the years.
But at least I learned something today, I suppose. The window close command ALT-F4 is apparently not as "OS-level" as CTRL-ALT-DEL. Good to know the hotkey caste system.
Re:I Would Have Signed Up... (Score:3, Informative)
See https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/722/ [mozilla.org]
Re:I Would Have Signed Up... (Score:3, Informative)
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/722/ [mozilla.org]
tips for browsing myspace (Score:3, Informative)
2) Use Adblock plugin for Firefox (blocks most ads) with auto filter updating
3) Use Flashblock for Firefox (blocks most movies and survivor ads)
4) Block CSS/JavaScript if your eyes hurt or you're getting dizzy
5) Use Web Developer toolbar for Firefox if you need more control
6) Get a 13-year-old to translate the pages for you (old people hack)
Enjoy
Re:Everyone uses it (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I Would Have Signed Up... (Score:2, Informative)
What were they thinking? (Score:5, Informative)
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.