[real ​discussions]​Did the Microsoft Stack Kill MySpace?

Robert Scoble wrote a fascinating case study, MySpace’s death spiral: insiders say it’s due to bets on Los Angeles and Microsoft, where he reports MySpace insiders blame the Microsoft stack on why they lost the great social network race to Facebook.

Read on... there are some real and good discussions
http://highscalability.com/blog/2011/3/25/did-the-microsoft-stack-kill-myspace.html

Or maybe MySpace simply sucked? I don't know, blaming technology choices for horrible management is always cool but...

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2006/03/25/441074.aspx

Scott has some comments on this after they switched from ColdFusion.

It was a number of factors that brought down MySpace. Too many to go into.

Bebo also went down and much faster than MySpace.

I believe the very first MySpace was Perl and coded by this man:

http://twitter.com/ducky

Now the Vice President of Rubicon Project. An aggregator for adsense style networks.

You may also want to read this:

http://web.archive.org/web/20061111022056/www.freemyspace.com/content1.htm

It's the history of MySpace up to right before Brad was relieved, and Richard Rosenblatt, now the CEO of Demand Media( a failed content farm gone public ) took over and sold it to Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation.

I may as well list the reasons MySpace went down

http://web.archive.org/web/20060203045015/http://www.intermixedup.com/

1.     Intermix Management breached their fiduciary duties to stockholders by failing to initiate an auction process to maximize stockholder value

    News Corp.'s buyout terms radically undervalues Intermix at $12.00.

    A fairness opinion issued by Intermix' own investment bankers, Thomas Weisel Partners, indicates that Intermix stockholders deserved up to $19.50 per share.

    MYSPACE has grown in value significantly since the proposed News Corp. deal was announced, with significant increases in page views, ads shown, and unique viewers. Nielsen Netratings reports an almost doubling of online display advertising for Myspace from 6.3% of all ads in May up to 12.9% of all online advertising impressions delivered online in August.

2.     Intermix Management rushed to sell the company to protect themselves from personal liability for their massive insider trading of Intermix stock, and other acts that harmed stockholders.

Intermix was also being sued over spyware that they created and distributed by Elliot Spitzer. Later caught with a cheap hooker by the FBI and discharged of his duties as NYS attorney general.

New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer filed a lawsuit against Web marketer Intermix Media on Thursday, charging it with being a source of adware and spyware programs that hinder online commerce and security.

http://news.cnet.com/Intermix-hit-with-spyware-suit/2100-7348_3-5688609.html

When MySpace was sold to NewsCorp it was all over.

MySpace's general population was 75% Californian/Liberal. They hated Rupert and promptly left. Sure they kept their account, but no longer visited the website. They even violently campaigned against it and bought software like PHPFox to make custom social network websites of their own.

http://www.crunchbase.com/company/adultspace

One of them running PHPFox called Adultspace actually got 2.3 Million in funding. Running a $199 PHP script on a virtual private server.

You see a large number of the MySpace users were in fact perverts and going to a swinger website was not a huge leap.

The other users were leftists that hated Murdoch, who left to niche websites, and later Facebook.

Then MySpace expanded to the world, and Rupert made his far younger bride, Wendy Deng the head of Myspace China

http://gawker.com/#!5158222/wendi-deng-murdochs-myspace-problem

Of course the Chinese didn't like this and fled to Tencent's QQ social network QZone instead.

MySpace's management, the Tom mascot,  and everything they did was all wrong.

Tom lied about his age

http://www.newsweek.com/2007/10/27/is-age-just-a-number.html

and quickly became hated.

The management had no skill what so ever and ran up company expenses while they did next to nothing.

This was a company held up by old media cash that had no redeming value.

When they got in trouble over minors getting stalked they hired Hemanshu (Hemu) Nigam from Microsoft.

http://www.thehostingnews.com/news-myspace-com-appoints-chief-security-officer-heavyweight-2191.html

He basically made all the profiles private and that helped kill off the website as well as everybody simply turned on the privacy filter and they lost the Google juice from personal information being indexed.

I see MySpace this way, it would be like making Rory Blyth the president of Google.

Yes, they would have a lot of money, but no, they probably wouldn't be doing anything constructive.

http://contracts.onecle.com/intermix/myspace.apa.2003.12.17.shtml

Section 2. PURCHASE PRICE. In consideration for EUNI’s sale, transfer and assignment of a one–third (1/3) interest in the Assets, Purchaser shall pay to EUNI the sum of Fifty Thousand Dollars ($50,000.00) (the “Purchase Price”)

Fun Fact:

The original investment in MySpace was $150,000 total by eUniverse and Chris DeWolfe.

I doubt most of MySpace's members even know who Murdoch is.

@CreamFilling512: Today, but back then they really cared. Today no one cares. Agreed.

http://www.blogherald.com/2005/12/22/myspace-users-angry-over-news-corp-censorship-of-youtube/

MySpace would also threaten legal action against those who would try to create 3rd party services or competing social networks.

It was not the Twitter age. They would routinely block any website which they saw as an emerging threat. It was driven by lawyers who had NO IDEA what social media was.

If only I had the foresight to clone MySpace and sell it for $5000 a license back in 2005 when everybody was jumping to invest in social media.

Why can't I have been that smart!

I bet I would have made a sh1tload of money.

46 minutes ago, Setag_Yrneh wrote

If only I had the foresight to clone MySpace and sell it for $5000 a license back in 2005 when everybody was jumping to invest in social media.

Why can't I have been that smart!

I bet I would have made a sh1tload of money.

Real subtle there.

Facebook is written in PHP. Technology isn't the only factor. Nuff said

Facebook customize everything (PHP/MySQL) heavily, and its harder to do on .NET stack.
http://www.slideshare.net/adityaagarwal/qcon

highscalability.com said:

Facebook started with LAMP, but along the way they changed everything about it such that it would be hard to say they were still using LAMP in the end. Twitter went through a similar phase with RoR. You can't exist at this scale without transforming everything you touch to meet your specific needs.

so does this guy have a point ?
http://www.andrejkoelewijn.com/wp/2011/03/28/scaling-a-net-architecture/

MySpace died because it was an ugly mess. The only thing it was good for was finding new music.

Myspace was viewed, right-or-wrong, as lower-class than facebook and the public are fickle.  Obviously Murdoch isn't the kiss of death given the profitability of his other projects, and bad infrastructure design is bad infrastructure design regardless of the framework you use.

Facebook is already overpopulated and no longer 'cool'.  When state governments are adding pages for their various departments, you know it's only a matter of time before the decline.

8 hours ago, exoteric wrote

Facebook is written in PHP. Technology isn't the only factor. Nuff said

Facebook's PHP outdoes .NET as the PHP code is compiled to binary with C++ as an intermediate step, not IL.

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=285827321493

Haiping Zhao of Facebook:

    With HipHop we’ve reduced the CPU usage on our Web servers on average by about fifty percent, depending on the page.

HipHop for PHP transforms PHP source code into highly optimized C++. It was developed by Facebook and was released as open source in early 2010.

HipHop transforms your PHP source code into highly optimized C++ and then compiles it with g++ to build binary files. You keep coding in simpler PHP, then HipHop executes your source code in a semantically equivalent manner and sacrifices some rarely used features – such as eval() – in exchange for improved performance.

All the weak typed objects are reference counted and destroyed as needed.

There is no object memory manager to bloat the virtual memory pages. There is no ".NET Runtime".

* * * The more you know

Even the Zend Application server would be better than .NET in my opinion.

@Setag_Yrneh: You know what Setag_Ymeh, you make me thing of this

@felix9: MySpace insiders blame the Microsoft stack

It is like saying "I failed my Physics class because I took the PE class."