The Underscore Archives

On 29/05/07, Aaron Trevena <aaron.trevena at gmail.com> wrote:
> MySpace is poorly implemented - it's a hodge podge of Coldfusion
> (worry mac, but ick ;), cold fusion accelerators, and .Net held
> together with chewing gum and rubber bands - at a recent presentation
> the technical lead stated that they don't even aim for 3 9s - i.e.
> uptime is pretty low by modern standards, they frequently lose *days*
> worth of data and don't care, and has often been unusably slow - the
> users don't seem to worry about it too much, and it doesn't affect
> their revenue streams so again, they don't really care about
> implementing it well.

Interesting. What killed Friendster (apparently) was the fact that
they chased new features rather than (boring, I know) improving
performance. Oh, and they restricted what their users could do, unlike
MySpace. So, while poor performance alone might not sound MySpace's
death knell, if starts alienating its users, it could be in trouble.

"For many teens, MySpace is the first asynchronous messaging system
that they use regularly. Sure, they have emails but those are to
communicate with parents/teachers/companies, not with friends. People
check in daily to see what messages they get. This was starting to
happen on Friendster, but server slowness killed this practice. This
will make it quite tricky for teens to fully leave MySpace while their
friends are still using it.

Identity development requires taking ownership of your presentation of
self and really being able to personalize it, morph it to be "you"
(even if you is copied from a site that tells you how to be you).
Templates are not personalization. MySpace allowed users to really
make the site their own, asking one favor: don't overwrite the
advertising. Out of respect, most users complied. Think about that:
Out. Of. Respect.

Basically, MySpace evolved with its users, building a trusting
relationship, figuring out how to meet their needs and cultural
desires, providing them with features and really trying to give them
what they were looking for. Friendster did not - it fought its users
hand and foot, telling them how to behave."
http://www.danah.org/papers/FriendsterMySpaceEssay.html

Tim