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Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

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Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#101

Post by aamar »

lallysingh wrote: post #41
chaz wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

To be fair to the rest of the industry, a single glance at the front page shows size of the TRANSITIVE CLOSURE of your social network. Why would you do that? This is bread & butter algorithm analysis. Don't put O(n^2) analyses on your most-loaded page.

I have heard from insiders that the founder viewed this feature--the count of people 3 degrees away--as the central embodiment of the magic of Friendster, an absolute must-have. I.e. people added friends in great part in order to feel more connected to 100ks of people.

Others in the company begged to at least back it down to a count of people 2 degrees away; but the founder insisted that the magic was the 3-degree version. So instead the company pursued technical strategies to speed up the 3-degree count; don't know what those were precisely, but it seems that they were not pursued as zealously as they could be (due to VoIP, etc. distractions).

My understanding, by the way, is that the network size was computed on page-load until surprisingly very late, due to the perceived need for real-time. Even after it was cached, it was still computationally expensive, as your numbers were computed (roughly) every time your 3-degree network added a link.

In retrospect, A/B testing could have been used to test the executive vision. So although my first reaction upon hearing this story (years ago) was: "that's big-O insanity," now I think that it's just as much a story about willingness to subject vision to empirical data and performing clinical cost/benefit analysis (when appropriate).

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#102

Post by sajidnizami »

jcromartie wrote: post #68
sajidnizami wrote: post #32

Earlier 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. 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…

Web forms were designed back somewhere around 2002 to compete with the likes of JSP etc. They still work well for their domain, which is intranet portal etc.

MVC however is designed from grounds up to deliver speed and web standards compatibility. Building for web these days with Web Forms is just wrong. But yes, most to actually bend Web Forms to deliver requires wizardry.

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#103

Post by n_are_q »

jdavid wrote: post #30

I 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.…

Hey David :) (i'm remaining anon, just because). In fact devs always got two monitors and it was pretty easy to get more if you wanted to, but yea they were just 1280x1024's. I really don't think the dev hardware was much of an issue though, they did upgrade it fairly regularly. The testing and staging environments definitely existed. There were some deeper issues with some portions of the production infrastructure not being testable in dev, so you had to test them in stage, but the basic ability to test in dev did exist and was good enough to be pretty useful.

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#104

Post by strlen »

chollida1 wrote: post #99
strlen wrote: post #31

Platform fetishism[1] and attempts to throw developers under the bus[2] aside, the comment from Nick Kwiatkowski states a much better reason: developers weren't empowered do their jobs. The comments state that there was no staging or test environment, no ability to roll back releases, refactoring was a dirty word (engineers wanted to refactor, but couldn't), principal on technical debt was never paid (only the intere…

> Contrast this with Facebook, Google et al-- where every process (from corporate IT to production operations to HR and recruiting) is designed with needs of the engineering organization in mind: Completely agree. > Want ssh access to production? No problem. This makes me a little uneasy, I'm not sure everyone should have ssh access to the production server.

> This makes me a little uneasy, I'm not sure everyone should have ssh access to the production server.

Every _developer_ should. No question about it. Sudo should given on an is-needed basis, but ultimately, as a developer I can screw up a lot more by simply writing bad code.

Simple philosophy: you build the software, you should be involved in running it (including carrying a pager). Amazon's CTO agrees: http://twitter.com/#!/Werner/status/50957550908223490

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#105

Post by mnutt »

jcromartie wrote: post #69
thematt wrote: post #6

Twitter 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...

By moving the part that wasn't scaling off rails. From what I understand they had a giant monolithic rails app which just couldn't scale after a point. They moved to a services-based approach, with a rails frontend talking to scala services.

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#107

Post by sajidnizami »

rbanffy wrote: post #92
ww520 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stackoverflow uses .Net stack and scales just fine, using less hardware as well.

Stackoverflow has a tiny fraction of the traffic MySpace had when it was relevant. I bet it has a fraction of its traffic now.

StackOverflow's architecture these days is not just Microsoft stack. They are using Redis and whole load of other OSS tech to get things working. Here it is interesting to note that this is what they started with: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2008/09/what-was-stack-overflo... and this is what they are currently using http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/10369/which-tools-an...

I find it sad that these days MS is laggin behind. It is difficult to get Cache frameworks and other infrastructure working with MS Stack if you got a high performance website.

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#108

Post by colomon »

akmiller wrote: post #57

Am I the only who thinks a large reason why MySpace lost to Facebook was design? MySpace just gave way to much flexibility to the users to modify the look and feel of their pages that it just got way to busy and very difficult to look at. In some respects I think it was MySpace's business proposition to allow users to create their own personal spaces on the web easily, whereas, Facebook's goal was more to connect you…

I logged into MySpace the other day for the first time in quite a while. And wow, it's butt-ugly, hard to navigate around, and within ten minutes of logging in I had eight MySpace-based spam e-mails sitting in my account.

In short, it's wildly less-pleasant to use than Facebook.

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#109

Post by sofuture »

famousactress wrote: post #45
dandelany wrote: post #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…

.Net programmers are largely Enterprise programmers whom are not constitutionally constructed to create large scalable websites at a startup pace. For the record, I think it's irrelevant.. but absolutely I think it's true. It doesn't mean .NET isn't capable, or that lots of .NET programmers aren't capable... Just that .NET is way more popular in the enterprise than on the web, and that the work that gets done at most…

Do you use .Net or are you familiar with the .Net community? Or are you basing your opinions on your lack of familiarity with it?

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#110

Post by Splines »

icefox wrote: post #76
jdavid wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, for being overly creative. "free parking" is a spot on monopoly where the rules specifically state that once a user lands on the 'free parking' space no money is received. however, in almost every monopoly game i have played, players take fines/ taxes and put them in the middle of the board, and when a player lands on 'free parking' they get the funds. It's an example of not following the rules as a point of c…

Sidenote : Growing up I also played monopoly that way and various other house rules. After playing some Euro games I went back and read the monopoly rules and played a game by the rules. No free parking, no extra houses or hotels, forced auctions, etc. The game took 45 minutes and was way more fun. Made Monopoly actually enjoyable again, though not as good as most of the really good Euro games out today.

Even more OT: The electronic versions of Monopoly actually vastly improve the game. No more counting money, and strongly enforced rules make for a faster, more efficient and entertaining game.

There was a write-up by someone about how everybody hate Monopoly because it drags on, and few people fully understand that the reason it drags on is because of house rules like Free Parking, immunities and the like.

I hated playing the board game as a child, but the console Monopoly games can have some strategy applied to them that have immediate payoffs.

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