Former MySpace executives say News Corp dragged its feet over implementing Ajax, a program that allows users to send a message, an e-mail or to post a comment on their friends’ pages without having to open a new browser window.
I'm a technical guy, that description is accurate. Minor terminology changes to be spot on:
Former MySpace executives say News Corp dragged its feet over implementing Ajax, a [set of libraries] which allow users to send a message, an e-mail or to post a comment on their friends’ pages without having to open a new browser [page].
The real problem is the hard link between page views and ad revenue. That leads to quotes like this: "We went to News Corp and said: ‘We want to change this but in the short term our revenues will drop.’ It became a long back and forth."
Bickering like that kills time and blinds you to other uses of Ajax, such as how Facebook lets users rate ads, each click loading up a new ad without another page view.
The real problem is the hard link between page views and ad revenue.
This is one of the many, many instances in which your business model can potentially collide with your user experience. When I heard AJAX could let you do things without requiring a page view, I said "HOLY COW! FREE MONEY!", because when you're selling things to customers every additional page view is just another opportunity to stop using your site.
The way I look at it is that if you are already doing the work to implement AJAX and remove the need for more page views to submit comment forms or do other things, why not go a little farther and write code to load new ads at the same time? There shouldn't be any reason why AJAX would reduce ad revenue if you simply made each major AJAX call change the ads.
My guess is that their existing ad contracts would forbid that. The contracts were probably worded to have an ad displayed for the entire duration the page was open.
Somehow I find it hard to imagine that even if the new management and technical team had gelled that they would have been able to keep up with Facebook. Their codebase was a flaming hulk of crap to start with, and you can just imagine how much improvement it would get from a biz guy "hiring a team to clean it up". Compared to Facebook which is one of the most amazing engineering organizations of all time.
The only opening would have been if MySpace was somehow smarter about what users wanted, but outside of customizable profiles and music they didn't have any new tricks.
Couldn't agree more. MySpace has always stood out for me as the popular site with the most obviously terrible implementation. Their key "personalisation" feature was originally an accidental security hole!
Meanwhile, Facebook were hiring smart engineers and building generally innovative features. I remember the first time I typed a URL in to a Facebook message - a little panel popped up showing me thumbnails that had been scraped from that page, asking me to select one to illustrate the link.
It's also interesting to contrast the process side of things. The FT article talks about MySpace having to take lists of feature proposals to News Corp for approval. Meanwhile, Facebook are leading the industry in their adoption of A/B testing and letting their own users' behaviour direct their engineering efforts.
Is the critique that they are using PHP or that they aren't using some kind of extensionless routing?
Either way it's silly to use superficial factors like that to judge large websites. Given the performance profile, data interconnectedness, complex public API, and interface richness of Facebook, the rate at which they push changes (small changes daily, weekly major pushes) and advance the product is astonishing.
At the end of the article, FT has the usual "share this" links, letting the reader share the article via email, Twitter, Digg, LinkedIn, Yahoo! Buzz, Delicious, reddit, Mixx, Facebook, stumbleupon, or Viadeo.
MySpace may have become irrelevant as a social website for ordinary users, but it is easiliy the most important site for web sites for musicians: everybody who remotely means anything in modern music, has a (heavily personalized) page up on MySpace, with a few mp3 files up for streaming; sometimes whole songs, sometimes just 30 second samples.
True for modern music as you say, but for people like me, who like classical music, MySpace has little pull if it doesn't want to play the game of competing with FB as a general-interest social networking site.
And, as the FT noted earlier, Myspace has given up competing with FB for #s.
And most classical musicians don't need the pull of a social network to gain traction - they have a track record in symphonies, typically a strong network of other musicians from a strong music school, mentors and so on and so forth. Meanwhile, someone trying to "break in" to any non-classical genre, be it pop, rock, metal, synth-groove, indie-emo-core, anti-folk, shoegaze, etc, needs the help of a social network to garner excitement about their particular brand.
You don't need a brand as a classical musician, as you're usually just playing someone else's tune. (Unless, of course, you're both a musician and a composer, and so on and so forth)
So, of course it's not going to be much of a use to you, as you completely disregard most changes in musical style and composition (I personally love classical music, but that doesn't preclude me from loving other "modern" styles) over the past century or so. Your stubbornness in not exploring new aural sensations eliminates you from their target niche, just as the discouraged unemployed are eliminated from the unemployment statistics ;)
What got me was another FT article (linked to from this one) noting that MySpace/News Corp is wasting $1-2mil per MONTH for unused office space: http://bit.ly/5wfL2V
(They committed to the lease before deciding not to move there. Now they can't sub-lease it because of the economy, but still have to pay.)
If any thing the myspace story demonstrates how important the technology underlying your web prescence is. MySpace used to be held up as a poster child for how little the Technology and presentation mattered. Now though it's obvious how much it did.
The article doesn't come right out and say it but you could see hints that the technology was a barrier tucked in here and there. I almost feel bad for the News Corp execs cause it sounded like they inherited a crappy technology platform and the myspace execs fought them tooth and nail when they tried to fix it. That combined with a misunderstanding of how web advertising works (Murdoch still doesn't get it even now) and Zero empowerment for the MySpace engineers is what caused MySpaces fall.
“There was so much data about each MySpace user, which Rupert got immediately,”
says Levinsohn. “What would you pay to get someone’s name, age, geography?
With MySpace, you would also know what car they drive, what music they
listened to, their favourite movie star.”
I know this but it still sends a chill down my spine. Even Rupert Murdoch got it.
It's almost a shame this degenerates into an overview of how management and communication collapses in a corporation, but at the same time it's a positive reminder that growing a 'Web 2.0' business doesn't automatically exclude the risks of Business 1.0.
the message i'm taking away from this is: no matter how much your acquirer assures you that they won't interfere with your business, eventually they will.
That’s one way of defining it I guess.