
Building the MySpace backend - stilist
http://www.metafilter.com/104479/Im-not-quite-certain-who-this-space-belongs-to-any-more#3752867
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wisty
The problem with MySpace wasn't technical.

The problem was, it was a better GeoCities. Vanity blogs for people with
internet friends.

Facebook used real names, so it helped people connect with their real friends;
even the ones they weren't confortable being "internet friends" with.

I'm not saying this was genius. It was probably just luck. Or the result of
Facebook being optimized for a single college, which was a microcosm of the
real world - getting everyone to sign-up was only possible using real names.

Of course, it helped that Facebook has stayed small, and stayed pretty close
to its pragmatic hacker roots.

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latch
I thought it would be more technical. Instead it was mostly:

The scale was a new challenge to most people back then, we did the best we
could - which most of the time was more than good enough - learnt a lot of
good lessons and had a great team. In the end, we lost because we focused on
advertisers and increasing the companies headcount for the sake of it.

~~~
te_chris
It's a reply on a general forum in a pretty non-technical thread. I thought he
actually did a good job juggling between the two audiences, fwiw.

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jbyers
The Data Relay project referenced in his comment:
<http://datarelay.codeplex.com/>

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rwg
Later in the MetaFilter comments, Erik posted a link to video+slides of a
session he co-presented at MIX 10. This session had technical content about
the architecture of some of MySpace's stack:

<http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MIX/MIX10/EX04>

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neworbit
It annoys me a bit that people talk about scaling problems as being brand new
then. A lot of the first generation of dotcoms had them too (Amazon, eBay,
Yahoo, etc).

In general they were solved similarly - build custom middleware and go as
distributed as possible.

Now I realize that's a simplistic answer to a very complicated problem but
really guys, this isn't unprecedented and the hardware is a lot more capable
and cheaper than the 1997 equivalents.

~~~
NoPiece
I think the scaling problem MySpace faced (and social sites in general face)
was somewhat different than the sites you mention. Every page is dynamic, and
requires real time updates. You could probably cache an amazon product page
for a week. Also, the information on a page in a social network in much less
siloed than a product page on amazon, or an auction on ebay. You are pulling
in user information from across your base. So it doesn't lend itself as easily
to a basic shard and cache model.

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DavidSJ
You know MySpace lost when you see a "Connect with Facebook" button on its
homepage.

~~~
beerglass
The same way Google releases iPhone version of its apps before the Android
version? :)

~~~
DavidSJ
iPhone started out with a lead, so it's not the same thing.

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speakbin
Ok, but wasn't MySpace in ColdFusion? I don't know if they had anything today
that is scalable on their backend.

Was NoSQL around back then? They're right about the custom hacking that is
required and that Facebook does (i.e. MySQL).

Good web technologies existed at the time. They may have not had Rails or
Django but servlets were certainly an option.

~~~
mikeryan
_Ok, but wasn't MySpace in ColdFusion?_

That's like saying Facebook is PHP or Twitter is Rails. Sure it started that
way but when the shit hit the fan they probably went heavy and deep into lower
level languages working much closer to the metal to solve the problems they
were having.

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cubeboy
I had to ask myself what MySpace was and clicked on the link to find out, then
I remembered. Wow. It's like remembering that other old website Digg.

MySpace and Digg, now its Facebook and Reddit, what will it be next? HN still
seems to be too intelligent for the main-mainstream to invade luckily.

~~~
neworbit
I have fond memories of Digg, at least. Loved the user activism around the HD-
DVD key days. That's kind of the last thing I remember was really awesome
about that site.

I'd be really curious to see a good analysis or even set of anecdotes about
why it went downhill. Seems like basically they ignored their userbase.

