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."
I Would Have Signed Up... (Score:3, Interesting)
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?
Everyone uses it (Score:5, Interesting)
For now. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Blah... (Score:2, Interesting)
Google. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Everyone uses it (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, some of the sites on myspace are crap, but thats totally up to the user. The default white myspace page loads pretty quickly. Myspace hosts the content, they can't control what the pages look like. I have friends who have horrible pages, and I tell them that. But its up to them to host whatever content they want, and up to me to decide to view it.
I don't want to sound like a myspace fanboy, but I think it gets a lot of unneeded bad press because of things like child stalkers and bad page design. While these things suck, they happen because people exploit and abuse the system. Let's face it, myspace is still new and immature, but will probably get better and more polished given time and money.
Examples of horrible MySpace design? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Membership Milestones? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Examples of horrible MySpace design? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Examples of horrible MySpace design? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Everyone uses it (Score:4, Interesting)
Because it allows users to heavily modify their pages. Hell, there's a cottage industry built up of hacks and codes to change a users profile around.
Because it lets users put songs on their profiles to hear, so that they can feel like their profile is their own (neverminding the other 20,000 profiles with the same song)
User blogs are published to RSS... i don't know about bulletins or other functions, probably not, because then it'd have to store the user name and password somewhere in order to get it right...
So, go ahead, write a "better" myspace... and no one will come.
However, if you look at what users WANT and give them something better, they will... Myspace is nothing but the next generation after LiveJournal, Friendster, etc... There's going to be something new after myspace, and i'm betting there's at least 20 companies out there trying to figure out what it'll be...
Re:Everyone uses it (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Examples of horrible MySpace design? (Score:4, Interesting)
Horrible profiles are (almost *) totally irrelevant. In Firefox, just go to View/PageStyle/NoStyle, or use the "Toolbar MS" extension and dig the "de uglify" button. Instantly, the user added bullshit goes away.
MySpace's real problem is that the website just plain sucks, regardless of cosmetic issues and user-modified stylesheets. Some examples...
* That said, there is one semi-serious cosmetic problem with MySpace. Apparently users can customize their profiles to such an extreme degree, that their profile looks like a MySpace login page, submitting the form to a different server. In other words, you can connect to MySpace, thinking you're on a login page, but send your authentication credentials somewhere else. So that's why so many people post bulletins about Free Ringtones and Anime porn! ;-)
This post brought to you by the punctuation character "!"
It was founded by spammers (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Re:What were they thinking? (Score:3, Interesting)
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...
Re:Everyone uses it (Score:4, Interesting)
I am launching a tiny record label because my A and R man is MySpace. I can find all the talent I need and I can see who might be a success by seeing do they post their gigs ( i.e. they actual play gigs ) and how many people they have as fans and how often people listen to the posted tracks.
The reality is that bands might not actual need a label - they can self publish but that takes energy which a lot only put into music.
The other reality is lots of little band makeing 100K smooths out the business away from the 100 bands pulling 99% of the income to a more equitaable world where more musicians can actually make a living.
My theory is that recorded music is going to be more a teaser for live acts than a main source of income.
I am working with 4 unknowns to try and get something out this year. Thanks to MySpace.
Re:What were they thinking? (Score:1, Interesting)
"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.