The end of MySpace

"After $35 million sale, MySpace is now an advertiser's space"

I should have linked to this article when I saw it a few months ago:

Workers inside MySpace tell me that this infrastructure, which they say has "hundreds of hacks to make it scale that no one wants to touch" is hamstringing their ability to really compete.

I seem to recall another article claiming that MySpace had no dev-test-live system; developers pushed code directly onto the live system. I can't find a this article, so maybe I dreamed it. Either way, could you imagine the fear of pushing new features if you had to work like that? Could you retain a single good developer if they were expected to work that way? (Post a comment if you can confirm this is true.)

I remember back when I worked at Microsoft that folks in the evangelism department bragged that they got MySpace to switch to Microsoft technologies like ASP.NET

I remember reading about that and thinking, "Well, at least it got them off ColdFusion."

Posted by Tom Limoncelli

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wdlowry | June 30, 2011 11:10 AM

NPR's Planet Money had a story on MySpace. I seem to remember something in there about them just making changes on the live site without testing them first.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2009/08/podcast_myspace_was_born_of_to.html

darrell.fuhriman | June 30, 2011 11:39 AM

Dang, wdlowry beat me to it, but you really must listen to that podcast. It's a fascinating tale of how a couple sleazebags, who had no idea what they were doing, managed to sell their company for half a billion dollars.

Personally, I never used myspace. It was riddled with security and spam problems (see above re: no idea what they were doing), and an atrocious interface, so I'm not sad to see it die.

I am, however, somewhat sad about the slow slide of livejournal. I really liked the more long form postings that people would make and the discussions that arose in the comments (two things that FB and Twitter actively subvert) – plus much better privacy controls. Sadly, I'm as guilty as anyone re: livejournal, but that also comes in good part from lack of time/energy to maintain a blog.

Also, I miss Usenet. Now get off of my lawn.

Ray | June 30, 2011 1:41 PM

Good code can be written in most any language -- .NET and ColdFusion included.

The design, testing and quality control processes were a much larger factor in MySpace's technical failures than their choice of language.

Andrew S | July 6, 2011 3:17 AM

The ops folks at MySpace were the most fun, entertaining folks at the Velocity conference every year. Though they were resigned to the poor state of the code they had to keep running, they did their best. They perform heroic acts to keep myspace running and what they do is not all that different from what a large number of sysadmins/ops out there do; keep old clunky code working.

Awesome Conferences

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