If a headline ends with a ?, the answer is generally "No."
Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?
61–70 of 206 posts
Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?
#62Its 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…
Friendster: http://highscalability.com/blog/2007/11/13/friendster-lost-l... VB: Can you tell me a bit about what you learned in your time at Friendster? JS: For me, it basically came down to failed execution on the technology side — we had millions of Friendster members begging us to get the site working faster so they could log in and spend hours social networking with their friends. I remember coming in to the offi…
From http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/15/business/yourmoney/15frien...
But the board also lost sight of the task at hand, according to Kent Lindstrom, an early investor in Friendster and one of its first employees. As Friendster became more popular, its overwhelmed Web site became slower. Things would become so bad that a Friendster Web page took as long as 40 seconds to download. Yet, from where Mr. Lindstrom sat, technical difficulties proved too pedestrian for a board of this pedigree. The performance problems would come up, but the board devoted most of its time to talking about potential competitors and new features, such as the possibility of adding Internet phone services, or so-called voice over Internet protocol, or VoIP, to the site.
The stars would never sit back and say, ‘We really have to make this thing work,’ ” recalled Mr. Lindstrom, who is now president of Friendster. “They were talking about the next thing. Voice over Internet. Making Friendster work in different languages. Potential big advertising deals. Yet we didn’t solve the first basic problem: our site didn’t work.”
Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
I too work with sites hitting high visitor count but I have to agree there with the article. Most .Net people I've interviewed think page load speed doesn't matter. I find this shocking and somewhat unbelievable. My wife, who isn't a tech person at all thinks that page load speed matters (she just called so I asked her) -- and sites gmail as an example of a page that takes too long to load (I think that "loading..."…
I don't think they mean like that. If something is obviously slow its a problem regardless. However, especially when you have a certain number of users, even a fraction of a second faster load time can have a visible change in your analytics. I've read before that Facebook has shown that users tend to spend a fixed amount of time on their site. Once users hit that time limit, they're done. If your site exhibits simil…
That information about fixed time usage is interesting. But even with that aside, doesn't everyone know that fraction of a second decreases in load time is important for high volume sites?
For example, MySpace was getting at one point 24 billion page views per month. If you could reduce each page view by 1/100th of a second you save 40 weeks per month for your users (assuming the model where they look at a fixed number of pages).
In the Facebook model, if you assume a page comes up in half a second, this delay results in a 2% decrease in page views -- which is a pretty huge deal when your business model indirectly revolves around page views.
I guess my point is that even for people who come from a background where page load didn't matter. it would take 30s to point out it does, and I don't think you'd get any pushback.
Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?
#64".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…
Stackoverflow uses .Net stack and scales just fine, using less hardware as well.
Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?
#65No, the fact that myspace looks ghetto killed it.
Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?
#66I 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.…
Thanks for the insider account, nice to hear in a sea of speculation and rumor.
One thing though, what do you mean when you say Facebook was 'Socratic to the core'? I'm only aware of that in context of the Socratic Method of teaching, but am not clear what it means here.
Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?
#67[deleted]
Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?
#68".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…
I too work with sites hitting high visitor count but I have to agree there with the article. Most .Net people I've interviewed think page load speed doesn't matter. They write code to satisfy the requirement and are quite good at it, but it ends there. Remember when people used ASP.Net web forms and it was hard to get rid of viewstate in the rendered page, and only the people who knew internals of platform well could…
It's not so much that certain programmers don't think that page load speed matters; it's that the culture around the platform doesn't encourage speed.
You're conditioned to not care anymore, because ASP.NET Web Forms makes it so damn hard to achieve responsive web apps, and building responsive web apps almost universally means breaking away from the standard ASP.NET Web Forms style of development. You have to abandon pretty much everything that makes the platform convenient in order to get good performance.
Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?
#69Twitter had scalability problems and they were on RoR, but it got solved. Scaling to those levels is always going to uncover problems in your architecture. What mattered was the way MySpace chose to execute, not the technology they did it with.
It got solved by moving off of RoR...
Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?
#70Scoble's thesis seems way off. The problem with MySpace wasn't the technology, or even the site. It was the users of the site. It became a place that people didn't want to be associated with, while Facebook became that place. If MySpace instantly could flip a switch and turn into Facebook (codewise) hardly anything would have changed. MySpace's problem IMO wasn't technical at all. They built a service that focused on…
I don't completely agree with you, however the fact that various gaudy, non-crossbrowser page themes could be added by third-parties was part of what drove me away. Towards the end of my time on MySpace I would make sure to disabled styles and flash in the browser to make it bearable.