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Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

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Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#181

Post by ms_throwaway »

clutchski wrote: post #125
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.…

"Fox was a closed source company" Wow. I didn't know such a thing existed. Was no open source software used? From databases to javascript libraries?

This is wrong, there are more than a few things Myspace open sourced.

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#182

Post by [deleted] »

ms_throwaway wrote: post #180
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…

There is so much garbage in those comments. The lack of staging servers was probably from 6 years ago and we use TFS, git and SVN.

[deleted]

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#183

Post by ms_throwaway »

sajidnizami wrote: post #107
rbanffy wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

http://datarelay.codeplex.com/documentation

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#184

Post by barrkel »

famousactress wrote: post #158
nikcub wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no what I am saying is that it is unusual for them to get themselves in a situation where they have to suddenly code out of a hole at 'startup pace' (whatever that means) startups don't have a monopoly on working hard or working fast, and it is arrogant to generalize about both .NET and enterprise developers in that way since we are all in one way or anther standing on the shoulders of earlier enterprise work (where…

Totally fair. First, apologies if it sounded like I was suggesting startups have a monopoly on working hard and fast. Of course I never meant anything like that at all. Second, arrogant really isn't fair because I certainly never gave an assessment of my own abilities or value. Third, totally.. .NET stands on the shoulders of the same stuff the infrastructure that runs most of the internet stands on. It's just that .…

There's a flaw in your logic which makes it seem like blasphemy. It's not enough to say that there aren't many .NET examples; you have to show that the proportion of .NET people who do good .NET work is lower than the proportion of PHP/etc. people who do good PHP/etc. work. With PHP in particular, I would guess that it's easily true that a higher proportion in .NET would be better equipped.

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#185

Post by famousactress »

barrkel wrote: post #184
famousactress wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally fair. First, apologies if it sounded like I was suggesting startups have a monopoly on working hard and fast. Of course I never meant anything like that at all. Second, arrogant really isn't fair because I certainly never gave an assessment of my own abilities or value. Third, totally.. .NET stands on the shoulders of the same stuff the infrastructure that runs most of the internet stands on. It's just that .…

There's a flaw in your logic which makes it seem like blasphemy. It's not enough to say that there aren't many .NET examples; you have to show that the proportion of .NET people who do good .NET work is lower than the proportion of PHP/etc. people who do good PHP/etc. work. With PHP in particular, I would guess that it's easily true that a higher proportion in .NET would be better equipped.

Not good work. We're not talking about good work. We're talking about fast work that runs on the web, works at scale, and allows the organization to pivot easily. You certainly won't catch me suggesting PHP is some sort of awesome language.. it's not. But it's language that lives on the web, and if I was building something on the web and had my pick of a random .NET developer and a random PHP one, I'd take the PHP one... because chances are the .NET developer has never deployed something on the internet, and chances are the PHP dev has.

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#186

Post by Goladus »

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 don't think myspace's greater flexibility was its downfall. The problem was that over time, the end-user experience stagnated while the company focused on maximizing revenue from ads and such. Based on comments above, it seems that while facebook was busy introducing incremental social networking improvements myspace was busy trying to make users click more so that more ads would load.

Myspace had some of the most annoying ads on the web. Heaven forbid you tried to use the site without adblock.

I think that was the bigger problem. Had they continued to focus on improving the end-user experience rather than extracting every last bit of value, they might still be a viable competitor to facebook. The freedom to customize would be one of a very few features facebook could not easily copy.

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#187

Post by gcr »

nikcub wrote: post #147
benologist wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back when MySpace actually mattered I don't think they had HipHop, Cassandra etc.

HipHop went live on FB last year. It didn't even go live everywhere at once. For some reason ppl think Mark created it on the 3rd day

It would be interesting to see how much load HipHop alleviated. I assumed it helped, but how much?

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#188

Post by gamble »

mikeryan wrote: post #10

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…

LiveJournal is a good example. They were forced to go invitation-only for a long time because they couldn't handle the traffic. By the time they had the technical issues under control attention had shifted elsewhere.

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#189

Post by strlen »

ianhawes wrote: post #173
flyt wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can't trust engineers to work in production, then you can't trust their code. Extensive logging, auditing, and granular access control are also critical to making this work in a large engineering org.

I don't think it's a matter of trust but rather mitigating your exposure to hackers.

How does shutting of ssh for developers mitigate exposure to hackers? Require everyone to use an ssh key with a (strong) pass phrase, require strong passwords and two factor authentication. You already should do so for the operations staff (who needs ssh access), same should happen to developers.

Ironically, if you treat production as an alien land developers aren't allowed into (and have no transparency about), you're going to create an environment where developers completely ignore operational concerns like security (e.g., having no authentication mechanism on their own services, as it's presumed production is a "magically secured" environments where no one may connect to in any way).

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#190

Post by kragen »

jdavid wrote: post #85
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…

As an ex-MySpace ID MDP employee we had staging servers. There were like 2 or 3 different levels of test, of course, that might have been unique to our team.

Did you have version control? That's the most damning accusation to me.
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