Holy mother of god, no change management, staging or testing servers? On a site that big?
Appalling, if true. (Not that good technology and process would have made the product suck much less.)
Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?
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Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?
#22Its funny I don't know (can't think of one) of a high traffic site that "died" due to technical failures (particularly scaling failures). Twitter had massive problems during its growth phase, Reddit has had similar problems. Does anyone have an example of a site that got "killed" by technical issues? I'm really curious. Bad products tend to die or get replaced by superior offerings. Thats the nature of business. Not…
I've often heard people cite Friendster's outages and slow loading time as one of the reasons for its decline. But yes, it's usually a secondary issue and not a primary cause.
Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?
#23It's always been my understanding that spam is what killed MySpace. I'm sure Facebook's long-closed membership system helped make it a somewhat more manageable issue to deal with.
Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?
#24if it contributed it was a much smaller factor than it's ugly design and skanky/teen vibe.
Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?
#25No, Facebook did. And they did it with crusty old PHP which pretty much proves the platform isn't going to make or break your business. Finding good talent that's experienced with huge scale sites is not going to be easy regardless of language. It's not like MySpace could have been RoR and suddenly everything would have been simple, at their prime they were doing a ridiculous amount of traffic that only a handful of…
It's not the platform itself, but the developers that know the platform inside-out. For some platforms, the best money can get you is still not good enough for an ambitious project spanning world, and having to undergo massive changes almost in realtime. Why? Because certain platforms don't attract top-notch developers.
It's not that easy to get top talent if you stick to MSFT platforms.
From linked article:
> Silicon Valley has lots of talent like him. Think about the technology he knows. Hint, it isn’t Microsoft.
http://scobleizer.com/2011/03/24/myspaces-death-spiral-due-t...
Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?
#26No, Facebook did. And they did it with crusty old PHP which pretty much proves the platform isn't going to make or break your business. Finding good talent that's experienced with huge scale sites is not going to be easy regardless of language. It's not like MySpace could have been RoR and suddenly everything would have been simple, at their prime they were doing a ridiculous amount of traffic that only a handful of…
Facebook didn't do it with "crusty old PHP;" rather, they had to re-build their stack completely from scratch to keep up. See HipHop, their homegrown PHP-to-C compiler https://github.com/facebook/hiphop-php/wiki/ and Cassandra, their own custom database system http://cassandra.apache.org/ If they stuck with crusty old PHP, I have no doubt they would never be able to manage the load.
No kidding. They're using php as a template language to call thrift services. That's hardly "using php" in the sense that most people would think of it.
Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?
#27".Net programmers are largely Enterprise programmers whom are not constitutionally constructed to create large scalable websites at a startup pace."
This is such BS, I can't even read it without physically cringing. I work for a ~400-person business that stands up .NET websites at breakneck speed, and we do it well. People who blame their problems on technical infrastructure decisions almost ALWAYS do so because it's easier than addressing the true underlying problems.
"The biggest problem was they didn't allow the developers to have staging or testing servers -- they deployed on the production servers on the first go-around... And all this with no change management or control. No versioning either."
Oh wow. Wow. I hereby revoke my previous statement. These are some God-awful infrastructure decisions. Version control and a staging server are the most basic necessities for a scalable dev project. I even set them up when I'm working on a personal project, alone.
Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?
#28[deleted]
Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?
#29Scalability is relatively new hiccup; given the fact that only in past few years users have swarmed the internet. Sites never expected that and developers weren't prepared. They learned mostly by trail and error and reading case studies and then figured out what to do. You would find inexperienced PHP devs who don't know scaling just like you would find .Net devs.
I think the article has the right notions. Stack doesn't matter, a team of highly motivated devs who can milk the technology involved is more important.
Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?
#30I worked at MySpace on the MDP ( MySpace Developer Platform ) team. My team, MySpaceID, was the one that implemented Oauth 1, 2, 2.0a and all of the external REST libraries. We worked closely with the activity streams team and the OpenSocial Team. We also launched the MySpace JSL or MySpace Connect. We were the 1st to do a popup login flow for OpenID and several other cool things MySpace was doing to catch Facebook. We might have done it if Google did not pull the money.
Once the free parking was pulled from MySpace, 50% of every team was laid off and all of the momentum was pulled from the company.
Working with .Net was not an issue, and in some cases it was a benefit.
There were however huge cultural problems with FOX. Here are a few.
Developers used were given one display, not two. Screens were 1280x1024. I bought my own displays and had my manager order a custom computer for me with dual video card support.
Fox was a closed source company, and so when we were working on Open Tech like Oauth and OpenSocial gadget servers, we had to do it as closed source software. We had no peer review. It made it really hard to ship and test something when you don't have linkedin, google, bebo, and twitter reviewing your code. On top of that when those companies found a bug, we had to re-implement that code in .Net. On top of that MySpace and .Net were well designed for strong typing and those types work a bit different than Java.
It didn't take a lot of time to port so, we kept doing it, but you have to think about this, you are at a race with a company like Facebook who had zero profit motive at the time, and billion in funding and a ground up stack. Meanwhile MySpace was just clearing out cold-fusion and we had really old blogging platforms that could not just get ripped out.
We also had management that didn't want to piss off users and so we would have 2 or 3 versions of the site out there, and we required users to upgrade to new versions.
What MySpace had was Cultural Debt, and a fear of destroying what they had. Facebook won because they were Socratic to the core.