The End of MySpace

Ziff-Davis’ Baseline recently published an insider’s look at how MySpace functions on a technical level, and it’s quite revealing.

The common assumption among programming types about MySpace is that the system started off as somebody’s pet project and quickly mushroomed beyond the programmers’ control. Rather than cooling off growth to create a better infrastructure, the MySpace folks opted for growth at any costs. As a result, we end up with the buggy, unreliable usability nightmare that is MySpace today. Now, it’s assumed, the programmers and sysadmins are scrambling to play catchup.

This article pretty much confirms these assumptions. According to the article, MySpace started out as a ColdFusion-based project — and while ColdFusion is ridiculously easy to program, any developer can tell you it’s got a reputation (deserved or not) for being a little slow and resource-heavy on the performance scale. So as they’ve grown, MySpace has been moving to Microsoft’s ASP.Net and relying on emulators to port some of the older code over.

One can’t really blame MySpace for such logic. It’s the kind of hot-air logic that propelled companies like Pets.com to the stratosphere back in the ’90s and made a ton of people oodles and oodles of cash. It’s Web 1.0 thinking. Using such Web 1.0 thinking, MySpace has quickly vaulted to become the most visited site on the Internet and gotten snatched up by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. in the process.

But as a result, they’ve built on an unsustainable foundation. They’ve made the classic gamble that short-term gain will trump long-term stability. And like so many Web 1.0 companies that came before them, MySpace is headed for a big, clumsy fall. Here’s why.

  • Easy come, easy go. The base audience for MySpace consists of teenagers and folks in their twenties. That’s not to say this is the only demographic using MySpace, but that’s the core audience. These people flocked to the service for the same reasons young people flock to anything: it was new, it was cool, it was free, and everyone they knew was doing it. Give them an alternative that’s newer, cooler, better functioning, and more reliable — not to mention backed by big corporate dollars — and they’ll flock there just as quickly.
  • Insecurity. Recently someone came up with the grand idea of distributing malicious code through a security vulnerability in embedded QuickTime videos. Folks have been taking advantage of CSS and HTML quirks to hack MySpace almost since the place began. More and more people are complaining about hacked profiles and hijacked identities. MySpace has demonstrated time and again that they’re behind the curve when it comes to security. So I think it’s highly likely that at some point in the near future, we’ll see a series of successful crippling attacks on MySpace that will send people running in a panicky exodus.
  • Slowing pace of innovation. Adapt or die, that’s the unofficial motto of the Internet. And unlike, say, Google, which continues to pump out features and applications by the gallon, MySpace has remained largely sedentary for the past year. They released a lamentable, old-school IM client and better video integration, but otherwise the system is pretty much the same as it was 18 months ago. As MySpace’s technical problems grow and their folks spend more and more time just keeping up with demand, they’re going to fall even further behind.

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Why Does MySpace Suck So Badly?

In an effort to spread the word about my book Infoquake, I’ve been experimenting with several social networking services. I now have a LiveJournal that cross-posts what I post here, I’ve got a space at MySpace, I’m linked in to LinkedIn.

MySpace is far and away the most popular of these types of services. According to Alexa, MySpace ranks only below Yahoo and Google in terms of popularity on the web. If you’re curious, you can view my page at http://www.myspace.com/davidlouisedelman.

Screen shot of David Louis Edelman's MySpace pageHere’s the problem: MySpace is an abomination. Nothing works. The things that do work are poorly designed and shoddily implemented. Here’s just a small sampling of problems I’ve been having:

  • Member search doesn’t work. Try searching for members using multiple criteria, and watch the search go splat. (Then again, Yahoo’s member search has been broken for years and nobody seems eager to fix it.)
  • Importing contacts doesn’t work. I tried importing my online address books from Yahoo, GMail, and AIM. MySpace said it sent out a dozen or so invites. It didn’t, and I had to redo the whole thing by hand.
  • Instant messaging doesn’t didn’t work. I tried sending a friend a message just to see what it would do, only to receive a very unprofessional-looking error message stating that the instant messaging was out of commission.
  • Cross-posting from WordPress doesn’t work. I have managed to get this working with LiveJournal (http://david-l-edelman.livejournal.com if you’re curious) using a nice little plugin I found on the web. There used to be one of these for MySpace, but the plugin developer gave up because MySpace kept mucking with the API.
  • Reporting spam doesn’t work. This morning I received friend requests from kinkymonica, flirtymonica, and luvymonica. How do you report these friend requests as the porn spam they so obviously are? You can’t.
  • Approving your friends doesn’t work. I’m currently staring at my “approve/deny your friends” queue, which states that I’m looking at “Listing 1-6 of 6.” Only about an inch away, however, there’s another column that says “1 of 1.” And below, there’s nothing listed. Do I have five phantom friends? (Actually, that would explain a lot of things…)

To add to the functional problems, the site is full of the worst kind of design heresy. Boxes float around the page with seemingly no rhyme or reason. The default icons look like rejects from your old Windows 3.1 installation. Navigation seems to float around the screen in illogical places, to the point where the only button I can rely on is the browser’s Back button. Things get even worse when users start mucking with their MySpace designs and adding polls and plug-ins and garish animated GIFs. You get stuck with endless pages that take forever to load and are impossible to read.

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