Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

highscalability.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 206 posts

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#51

Post by strlen »

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…

> 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.

Exactly. This seems to follow the Kevin Rose formula: make horrible decisions (or be entirely absent from decision making) without any understanding of technology, then blame your developers and technology choice ("Digg V4 failed to due to Cassandra").

If it weren't for Facebook's success, I can bet you'd see people blamining PHP for Digg's failure: prior to Facebook, P in LAMP also stood for Perl (and occasionally Python) and LAMP wasn't "universally" considered proven (unlike J2EE + Oracle or .NET + SQL Server), nor has Facebook been even remotely close to a "vanilla" LAMP site (since at least 2005)-- with many mission critical subsystems also being built in Java and C++ .

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#52

Post by sbov »

kenjackson wrote: post #49
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…

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 similar usage patterns, the faster your pages load (even if they're already fast), the more users can get done on your site, which, depending upon your revenue model, may result in more revenue.

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#53

Post by paul9290 »

For me the UX killed it. Allowing any user to design their myspace page was a bad decision. It was so annoying to find the information that is most important in a social network on many of my friends and general user's pages, as many just add crap on top of crap. Also, the terrible opening a MySpace page and immediately hearing a song or piece of music and madly scrolling down the page to find where to stop the awful sound. Most of the time I would just close the window in disgust.

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#54

Post by jdavid »

brown9-2 wrote: post #37
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.…

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. Can you explain what you mean by "free parking" here?

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 culture.

The deal soured with Google because the terms were around pageviews and clicks. MySpace and Fox decided to target those terms to maximize revenue. The result was that MySpace added unneeded page flow for just about every user action. It destroyed UX and pissed off Google. Our team kept joking with management that we were going to create a MySpace-Lite as a side project from our REST APIs and to get rid of all of the crap.

  WE SHOULD HAVE DONE IT.  WE SHOULD HAVE CREATED MYSPACE-LITE
The Deal with Google was worth $300 million a year on total revenue of $750 million a year. MySpace Music was loosing the company mad money, it was and is a flawed model. Our team wanted to create an API where games and sites could access the music, and to create open playlists. We wanted to make the music open, and then work to license it. We were told that it was not possible.

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#55

Post by rbanffy »

strlen wrote: post #51
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…

> 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. Exactly. This seems to follow the Kevin Rose formula: make horrible decisions (or be entirely absent from decision making) without any understanding of t…

> prior to Facebook, P in LAMP also stood for Perl

The P in LAMP has been associated with PHP for much longer than the existence of Facebook.

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#56

Post by sajidnizami »

pixelbath wrote: post #47
recoiledsnake wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Most .Net people I've interviewed think page load speed doesn't matter. Have you informed them that you work with a high traffic site? Most intranet sites are not high traffic, so if they're spending time pre-optimizing for speed instead of features/development time, they're actually wasting the company's money. And what has viewstate got to do with SEO? You lost me. For SEO friendly URLs, all you need a is URL Rewr…

SEOs prefer to have the "relevant content" as high on the page as possible. Since viewstate is just a large blob, many SEOs assume it decreases relevancy. I've never seen results that confirm this assumption. Edit: See sajidnizami's post for the relevant StackOverflow question. Though, this still doesn't make sense to me logically. Why would a search engine disregard a (reasonably) longer page?

Longer page would increase page load time. A longer page with viewstate at the beginning would delay loading of content. Google penalizes pages that load slower.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/using-sit...

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#57

Post by akmiller »

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 to your friends. In that sense MySpace followed through, although that follow through seemed to lead to their demise!

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#58

Post by joblessjunkie »

desigooner wrote: post #12

In my opinion, some of it also had to do with inconsistent and ugly hacky Myspace user experience. White / Yellow / Green / Red fonts on black backgrounds with animated gifs + glitter and broken plugins will be the response to the question "What comes to your mind when you think of Myspace UI experience?" In comparison, the facebook experience was a lot more fresh, clean and unified.

Completely agreed.

It was downright embarrassing to have a profile page on MySpace. Unless you wanted to spend an entire weekend customizing your page, it was going to look like a banner ad factory had exploded on your profile. I'm a web professional -- I can't have that as my public image.

Not only did MySpace look like an amateur web site from 1998, it was completely confusing to operate. What checkbox do I click on which page to turn off the flashing purple?

MySpace just had an inferior product, plain and simple.

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#59

Post by sajidnizami »

kenjackson wrote: post #49
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…

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..."…

It does but I think you misunderstood the point.

Most .Net developers are working on intranet sites. They don't have problem with large footprint pages.

When they move to internet and public domain websites, they are newbies. It takes them a while to adjust to the way internet sites are written. SEO optimizations, CDN usage, Ajax calls etc are pretty important on internet site than on intranet site.

Imagine using a Update Panel to code for an internet website. It would create enough junk javascript to delay a page load but it works fine on intranet. To fix this jQuery or some other Javascript framework must be brought in.

Re: Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

#60

Post by strlen »

rbanffy wrote: post #55
strlen wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Exactly. This seems to follow the Kevin Rose formula: make horrible decisions (or be entirely absent from decision making) without any understanding of t…

> prior to Facebook, P in LAMP also stood for Perl The P in LAMP has been associated with PHP for much longer than the existence of Facebook.

I've always seen it stand for Python, Perl or PHP-- with many shops specifically stating "P for PHP" or "P for Perl". Yahoo hasn't settled on PHP vs. mod_perl (as a replacement for a C based template system filo built) until early 2000s and (when I was there) still had many Perl based services in production.
Post reply on HN