Again you can use this data to scale up to MySpace, and you can see why people stopped using the website after X amount of time. The data more or less shows what drove the user fatigue.

That's the kind of data that is priceless and that you can't get with any other data set.

I heard that the author had a legion of MySpace employees flood the website when they were considering legal action for copyright infringement. This included MySpace developers, moderators and more. They later disclosed themselves as Fox Media employees, but did not leave the website and continued to monitor it.

If you are not interested in purchasing the access to the data for the purposes of due dilligence priort to an acquisition, then you need to let others that are interested have the way. Otherwise you are just being destructive.

I really don't see how this should affect a website hosted on a single server so drammatically.

Assuming you missed the whole cloud computing shift these past 3 years, I guess that would be correct. Even small companies want on demand scalability now that mainstream America told them how cheap and easy it is.

So the point of this thread is now, tell your boss at X large company that there is some data that can be used for predictive analysis. Tell them its cheap compared to the price of acquisition and tell them you know how to get it. They will tell their boss, and somewhere down the line karma will visit you.

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-06-17/aol-sells-bebo-to-criterion-for-less-than-10-million-update3-.html

AOL lost 1+ billion dollars on the Bebo Acquisition. Had somebody collected a sample of Bebo users on a website similar to Bebo, and had AOL lawyers bought a dump of that anonymized data before the purchase, they could have averted a castrophe that cost shareholders more than ONE BILLION dollars.

That opportunity is knocking for this MySpace acquisition right now. Take your hands off your ears and listen.

June 17 (Bloomberg) -- AOL Inc., the Internet company spun off from Time Warner Inc., sold its Bebo social-networking service to Criterion Capital Partners LLC for less than 2 percent of what it paid for the site two years ago.

Do you want this to be you?

what my dinky roleplaying website was doing every two months in 1996

Your dinky roleplaying website didn't have myspace members or the myspace programmers or founders as members. It also doesn't have some of the most high traffic profile members from MySpace such as Tila Tequila as members.

The data from your dinky roleplaying website would be useless in a MySpace acquisition dilligence process.

http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20051013064856/http://www.sitespaces.net/

The author of this website has hard data with traffic coming directly from MySpace and rolling over their data to this website, then using the website as if they were on MySpace.

This data can be used to gauge whether it's worth buying from NewsCorp or not. Period. This is a deal worth hundreds of millions of dollars if not billions.

If an acquisition team wants to go without analysis of this data, then fine, but the price is tiny compared to what your company may lose if you don't look at it first. It would be a shame if an acquisition mistake was made leading to a multi-million dollar loss and the knowledge of the existence of 3rd party dilligence data was later made known to x purchasing company's investors.

Don't you think it's a bit hypocritical to rubbish Microsoft then use their website to advertise your shady equivalent of a crack deal in a car park?

Was this an actual question? Because my answer is no.

1. thousands of members who migrated profile information from the MySpace website in the same exact format
2. site navigation data, entrance data, exit data, profile statistics, page views, what they clicked on, on the page, how long they stared at something ect... can all be extracted from the data.
3. Google had an ad deal with MySpace for several years, but the analytics data from those advertisements does not include the behavioral data that is included in a full SQL dump.
4. The data contains about close to a million visits over close to 3 years by thousands of people.
5. Unlike Facebook data or data from other social networks, this data is truly representational of the MySpace demographic, and can be potentially scaled up mathmatically to have a data based view of MySpace before an acquisition.
6. Total data volume in the terabyte range
7. The data is a full SQL dump, static file assets, and source code for MySpace acquisition accessment only. No data can be retained by the purchaser after a due dilligence analysis has been made.
8. Personally identifiable information is stripped before it's handed over to any auditing agency for analysis. So people's first and last names, the last 3 digits of ip addresses, email addresses, ect... are removed and or obfuscated as well as any other personal data such as messages.

 I contacted the owner of the data, and he told me this. You can contact him or her directly if you have any interest in doing your job and making sure your MySpace acquisition offer is appropriate or not.

contact: myspacehomework36@yahoo.com

for more information and a friendly price quote based on your consumption needs.

At any rate, it would appear that the companies that NewsCorp sent the buyout offer to have little to go on to do any due dilligence.

Most of the members of Sitespaces were in fact MySpace members including several of the programmers at the company and one of the founders, so I've heard. Even Tila Tequila and other famous MySpace people were members of SiteSpaces before it closed.

Who would buy such a website without knowing what they're getting into?

I bet the author of SiteSpaces still has a backup of the data, and I bet a lawyer doing due dilligence on a MySpace acquisition can buy access for dilligence purposes only privately.

If it were the case that they were to access such data, they could possibly see what the pageview rate on a website like that is per visit accurately, and not from a 3rd party. See what the eCPM is, and get a feel for usage trends. In essence they could see what a test bed for the real thing looks like from a data perspective.

A passing thought...

not purchased whilst it was already on the platform/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orkut_B%C3%BCy%C3%BCkk%C3%B6kten

He developed Orkut.com as a 20% independent project while working at Google. In late June 2004, Affinity Engines filed suit against Google, claiming that Büyükkökten and Google based Orkut.com on code for InCircle, an application intended for university alumni groups. The allegation is based on the alleged presence of nine identical bugs in Orkut.com and in InCircle.

I heard that MS transplants helped on this before they moved it to South America.

Dead link

This bulletin board software added a space at the end of the uri

http://twitter.com/vicgundotra

I think I just removed it.

http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/12/exclusive-the-bleak-financial-numbers-from-the-myspace-sale-pitch-book/

We’ve gotten a copy of the confidential MySpace pitch book that parent company News Corp. has distributed to potential buyers. Notably, that pitch book doesn’t include any historical financial or user data about MySpace at all. Everything is projected out and forward looking, and even then it’s bleak.

Revenue for fiscal 2011, ending June 30, 2011, is expected to be just $109 million. Expenses for the year are projected to be $274 million, and the company will lose a whopping $165 million for the 12 month period. That’s after massive waves of layoffs, although I expect much of the costs of the layoffs are included up front in 2011 expenses.

MySpace - ($165,000,000) net in its final year. SiteSpaces +100k net

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Sitespaces

MySpace 0 - SiteSpaces 1

Game, set and match.

Flawless victory, fatality.

The original MySpace CEO Brad blew all his money on bad investments, playmate hookers and drugs and now is the CEO of this failed penny stock:

http://www.google.com/finance?q=broadwebasia

 Flawless victory, fatality.

Bob Dole thinks you should go away.

Bob Dole is right this time.

Excellent, so we'll see google move to ASP.NET, because ex-MS employees work there? Can't wait.

http://twitter.com/vicgundotra 

ready for it? 1...2....3......

....

go

http://www.orkut.com/About.aspx

DONE!

And you didn't even have to throw a chair at them!

Also, had you bothered to read the context of the sentence you responded to, I was referring to the fact that Microsoft employees at MySpace should have been able to correct the problems back in 2005-2006 since they were pros at the Microsoft platform.

I was saying that the misconfigured IIS clusters could not be blamed on simple ingorance because of the cross pollination of Microsoft and MySpace at the time of Mix 06

As far as ASP.NET on Linux with mod_mono, that scares most systems admins that don't work for Novell.

Otherwise you need really expensive licenses not only for the application servers, but also for the edge servers, as it's almost impossible to reverse proxy and load balance IIS services correctly off a Microsoft platform. Even Microsoft edge servers don't do it well.

while the young, trendy (and visually most capable) ones prefer PHP

http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-lawsuit-paul-ceglia-new-evidence-2011-4#in-late-april-2003-ceglia-and-zuckerberg-meet-in-boston-to-sign-the-contracts-ceglia-has-a-witness-potentially-important-the-agreement-says-that-ceglia-will-get-50-of-the-face-book-project-in-exchange-for-funding-its-initial-development-3

Speaking of that it looks like Zuckerberg had one final surprise for Microsoft and other Facebook investors. Dillution of shares X 2.

The Winklevoss twins, Eduardo, ect....

Now the guy from upstate NY produces hard evidence and a huge law firm. LOLZ.

If this guy wins, FB is going to go down, because the big player investment banks Microsoft et al. had pony up Facebook are not going to have any of it.

Lenn Pryor is going to have to go invade FourSquare pretty soon.

* * *  the more you know.

They were a huge joke because of their software stack. It's one of the reasons Facebook pummeled them.

Microsoft tries to work it's own employees into up and coming successful companies. When that didn't work with Facebook, they made a private investment in the company. FB was cash strapped and needed to expand so they took the money.

Where is Channel9's Lenn Pryor now? He was a Microsoft anchor in Skype, now he is a Microsoft anchor at Facebook. Eventually the Microsofties got in.

MySpace earned a reputation as a bad technology platform when they switch over to the BlueDragon servers in early 2006.

http://www.newatlanta.com/products/bluedragon/index.cfm

It helped to destroy them permanently in the course of the coming years. Their constant errors, and Rupert Murdoch made them the laughing stock of the social networking world.

 

Yes, that's his wife that he put in charge of MySpace asia. I can only liken it to Anna Nicole Smith and J. Howard Marshall. Except Marshall had the sense not to have her head a real company's global resources.

Not a tech reference, but certainly a nice anecdotal reference to compliment the technical short comings.

It's really sad but as soon as MySpace was acquired, Microsoft and it's partners used it as a financial resource to sell them every obscure technology and platform that they had. They were even stacking the Fox Media branch with MS execs. It was their NewsCorp cash cow.

How were they ever going to go up? When your company becomes an unpaid resource for another's they could only go down. And they did. They crashed like a blimp.

The good news is that now they get so little traffic, their .NET servers can finally handle the load.

Also, to be complete, the last stages of the Microsoft invasion/destruction of MySpace was when they had MySpace buy iLike which was founded by Microsoft employees.

http://www.gizmocrazed.com/2010/11/top-15-companies-founded-by-ex-employees-of-microsoft/

http://mashable.com/2009/08/19/myspace-acquires-music-sharing-service-ilike/

This was the coupe de kill for MySpace as it took 20M in budget out of the already failing Fox Media business. They had them acquired in the middle of the worst recession since the great depression.

Shortly after they had to lay off 500 people.

http://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/business/MySpace-to-Layoff-Nearly-500-113293129.html

While the Microsofties bathed in MySpace cash.

In my humble opinion it was similar to the Microsoft/IBM relationship of OS/2 minus the IBM selling OS/2 part. Eventually Aber, the guy who made the testimonial above, like the others all bailed from the company when the party was over.

Where is Microsoft now that the MySpace party is over?

Due to the nature of low-level programming two well-written pieces of code that perform the same function there will inevitably be some degree of similarity. As such it would be impossible for Phoenix to defend itself on the grounds that no part of its BIOS matched IBM's. Phoenix developed a "clean room" technique that isolated the engineers who had been contaminated by reading the IBM source listings in the IBM Technical Reference Manuals. The contaminated engineers wrote specifications for the BIOS APIs and provided the specifications to "clean" engineers who had not been exposed to IBM BIOS source code. Those "clean" engineers developed code from scratch to mimic the BIOS APIs.

Now adays Microsoft and its large partners don't even bother with the clean room anymore.

You can load balance anything with the right infrastructure. Tomcat is only shoddy when you configure it wrong or use old versions and refuse to update regularly due to being a lazy SOB IT person.

http://www.simplyhired.com/a/jobs/list/q-java+developer/c-ebay/l-sunnyvale,+ca

eBay is a Java house. It always has been. They only used IIS for their edge servers years ago, and now they use Coyote.

The top websites on the internet do not run Microsoft tech to serve pages or act as edge servers in a distributed setup. Microsoft's offerings are expensive, closed source, and hard to manage at a big company where you need totaly control over the infrastructure.

Amazon did a really nice job with AWS, and the RDS, EC2, CloudFront, ect... services. AWS actually does power a lot of the Alexa's top 100. Companies that would have never had the resources to be in the top 100 are there because of AWS and distributed open platforms.

This is a small sample of what happened at MySpace because of Microsoft on the server side.

http://worstofmyspace.com/2006/02/13/mr-nutz-gallery-of-myspace-error-messages/

This thread is extremely disturbing as it shows not only a stack trace of the error on a production server, but also shows the database credentials such as the MSSQL DB user.

http://www.pbnation.com/showthread.php?p=20123738#post20123738

http://mashable.com/2006/07/28/myspace-screws-up-again-accounts-being-deleted/

Facebook, for example, uses PHP, but not in the traditional sense. They use a precompiler.

http://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/358/

It's not a precompiler, it's a PHP->C++ transformer, the C++ is then compiled. It's not obscure and exclusive to Facebook, it's open source and on github. Anyone can use it.

How HipHop Works

The main challenge of the project was bridging the gap between PHP and C++. PHP is a scripting language with dynamic, weak typing. C++ is a compiled language with static typing. While PHP allows you to write magical dynamic features, most PHP is relatively straightforward. It's more likely that you see if (...) {...} else {..} than it is to see function foo($x) { include $x; }. This is where we gain in performance. Whenever possible our generated code uses static binding for functions and variables. We also use type inference to pick the most specific type possible for our variables and thus save memory.

The transformation process includes three main steps:

    Static analysis where we collect information on who declares what and dependencies,
    Type inference where we choose the most specific type between C++ scalars, String, Array, classes, Object, and Variant, and
    Code generation which for the most part is a direct correspondence from PHP statements and expressions to C++ statements and expressions.

https://github.com/facebook/hiphop-php/

Source code transformer from PHP to C++

Well, MySpace transitioned from ColdFusion to ASP.NET sometime around 2005. But MySpace is fast becoming irrelevant.

MySpace was originally written in Perl in 2003 by Duc Chau when he was one of the only engineers at ResponseBase LLC, which was a spam organization that started MySpace with eUniverse. His own social network Flukiest is still running today and it is all Perl.

http://www.flukiest.com/

MySpace was converted to ColdFusion when they leveraged the eUniverse dating platform that still runs vidilife today.

http://vidilife.com/

As we saw in the other thread, it's a popular misconception that eBay runs Microsoft technology for their edge servers.

http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-4.1-doc/config/coyote.html

They used to run IIS back years ago, but now run Apache Coyote in front of clustered Tomcat servers and a Java 2 app.

You can always see what edge servers a website is running if they don't use a CDN like Akamai or Cloudfront by using Firebug. That won't tell you what tech they're pulling the image from, or the real application server. For that you need to ask somebody at the company. In the case of eBay it's easy since Coyote runs against Tomcat.

I couldn't help but think, what a bunch of bastards.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16826100006

I would prefer something like this as the IDE peripheral where I can simply think the logic of the app and have it materialize into compilable source code. Preferably write once run everywhere cross platform Java code.

Inspired by:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nth_Degree_%28TNG_episode%29

"Barclay finds the Enterprise computer too slow to keep with it. He goes to the holodeck and creates a device that allows him to interact directly with the Enterprise and array computer systems, putting an end to the Array's failures. The crew finds that Barclay has become too integrated with the computer, and when they try to shut down the computer, Barclay sends the ship into a "subspace inversion", jumping the ship across a great distance faster than warp travel."