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Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

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Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#161
post #152
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just that .NET is way more popular in the enterprise than on the web It is a fallacy to think that the web is the only large network that requires scale. Goldman Sachs alone stores more data than the entire web The Visa network has had 4 seconds of downtime in decades Most airline systems took decades to engineer

> Goldman Sachs alone stores more data than the entire web Why would you believe that Goldman Sachs stores more data than can be reached by HTTP?! Only YouTube amounts to petabytes of data. http://beerpla.net/2008/08/14/how-to-find-out-the-number-of-...

I completely disagree with his calculation, and GS were storing over 1PB 8 years ago when the web was 80-150TB

the point is that it is frikkin big - and most investment firms now scan the entire web for signals

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#162
(former MySpace and former .NET team @MSFT) Let's just say the Microsoft stack probably didn't kill the beast… ASP.NET certainly didn't help though.

It's too bad that all the tech built around .NET will be lost to the annals of MySpace, MSFT should acquire the company just to open source the whole thing for the benefit of .NET.

Regardless, it's fair to say starting a company on "the Microsoft Stack" today would reflect questionable judgement. Are there any recent ex-MSFT founders on it?

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#163
post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to this link (after a few seconds of googling), Visa's network was down for 8 minutes in the five years ending 2001. Do you have citations for any of your claims? Edit: Oops, here's the link: http://www.forbes.com/global/2002/0916/038.html

The Visa figure I heard at the Computer History Museum years ago, it was first decades so that may have changed. Goldman Sachs told me when I was writing a proposal for them years ago that they have over a petabyte of data stored. The web is 80-200TB depending on who you ask. A single department there responsible for the program based trading would alone have an entire copy of the web (and parts of the deep web, and…

The web is only 200TB? That seems wrong by orders of magnitude to me. Maybe you mean Google's publicly indexed web?

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#164
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Glad I'm not the only one confused by that. I googled "define:socratic" and got "Know thyself"... So I assume he meant that facebook knew exactly what they wanted to be, as opposed to myspace, who was trying to catch up with facebook.

Socratic - as in seriously concerned with a logical journey of discovering the essence of what is important - dismissing irrelevance and having little patience for straggling or argument.

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#165

Its 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…

Digg got slow and started to loose people to reddit. This caused them to rebuild from scratch with a new strategy which ultimately failed. Yahoo was also slow.

Funnily enough, now I think about it, performance may be much more critical than periods of downtime.

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#166
post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to this link (after a few seconds of googling), Visa's network was down for 8 minutes in the five years ending 2001. Do you have citations for any of your claims? Edit: Oops, here's the link: http://www.forbes.com/global/2002/0916/038.html

The Visa figure I heard at the Computer History Museum years ago, it was first decades so that may have changed. Goldman Sachs told me when I was writing a proposal for them years ago that they have over a petabyte of data stored. The web is 80-200TB depending on who you ask. A single department there responsible for the program based trading would alone have an entire copy of the web (and parts of the deep web, and…

I think you're grossly underestimating the size of the Web. Flickr alone were storing 15TB of new photos a month back in 2006: http://blog.forret.com/2006/10/a-picture-a-day-flickrs-stora...

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#167
It's nice, in a sense, to allow people to out themselves as mistaking technology for culture. You can write slow code, and make bad choices, on any platform.

My colleagues at Stack Overflow work faster and produce more -- at obsessively fast web scale -- than any team I have observed. I also see talented people struggle to produce a viable site using (say) Ruby on Rails.

Technology correlation? None. The correlation is in discipline, understanding the tools, foresight, priorities, management...

Think of it this way...how often have you seen a headline on HN bring a site to its knees? Fair guess that many of them are on "scalable" technologies.

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#168
post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to this link (after a few seconds of googling), Visa's network was down for 8 minutes in the five years ending 2001. Do you have citations for any of your claims? Edit: Oops, here's the link: http://www.forbes.com/global/2002/0916/038.html

The Visa figure I heard at the Computer History Museum years ago, it was first decades so that may have changed. Goldman Sachs told me when I was writing a proposal for them years ago that they have over a petabyte of data stored. The web is 80-200TB depending on who you ask. A single department there responsible for the program based trading would alone have an entire copy of the web (and parts of the deep web, and…

One of my professors told me YouTube is hosting approximately 100TB of new videos every month, I think 200 TB is off by very, very much. If 200TB was the case I could afford to buy disks to store the entire web with my yearly salary...

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#169
post #166
post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Visa figure I heard at the Computer History Museum years ago, it was first decades so that may have changed. Goldman Sachs told me when I was writing a proposal for them years ago that they have over a petabyte of data stored. The web is 80-200TB depending on who you ask. A single department there responsible for the program based trading would alone have an entire copy of the web (and parts of the deep web, and…

I think you're grossly underestimating the size of the Web. Flickr alone were storing 15TB of new photos a month back in 2006: http://blog.forret.com/2006/10/a-picture-a-day-flickrs-stora...

it was 8 years ago - the numbers for both have undoubtably increased

(it was ~10x the web at the time)

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#170

".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…

Completely agree.

Maybe they should have used Azure. At least that forces them into a staged deployment. (of course not that it was around when they started MySpace).

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