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I think it's pretty simple. Myspace was basically just a simple webpage maker that let you "friend" other "webpages". Facebook was an actual social network wh

by vaksel 17y ago

I think it's pretty simple. Myspace was basically just a simple webpage maker that let you "friend" other "webpages". Facebook was an actual social network where you could find people. With myspace if you didn't know someone's myspace account, you couldn't find them. With facebook, all you needed to have was either your high school name, college class, or your past employer, and you could connect/reconnect with people.

jfarmer 17y ago
That's a symptom, not a cause. MySpace saw Facebook coming. I remember a quote from Rupert Murdoch in 2006-2007 saying that MySpace was losing to Facebook. There are a million ways they could have used their position to crush Facebook, but they (a) didn't have a strong engineering culture and (b) were focused strongly on revenue over growth and product. I remember a "joking" quote from a MySpace exec where he said they don't mind error pages, because it gives them the chance to serve more ad impressions! No intelligent person I know would want to work at MySpace, while Facebook successfully overcame its early stigma as a "toy website" and is now one of the best places for engineers in Silicon Valley. MySpace's stupid product decisions were a consequence of these underlying problems.
mattmaroon 17y ago
That's not true, people I hadn't talked to in years found me on Myspace. It was pretty trivial through friends of friends. And not building in simple search (rather than trying too hard to monetize through Google) would constitute blowing it.
DrSprout 17y ago
Myspace is trashy. That's all there is to it. They gave everyone full ability to do whatever they want with their pages, and ordinary people make terrible design decisions. Facebook gave everyone a standard template and told them they weren't allowed to fuck it up - which meant that people could just socialize instead of laughing at the gaudiness of it all.
- gscott 17y ago
  They could solve this by setting a preference where it hides many of the rationalizations and gives a standard look. Why they don't do something simple like that is just their mistake. Not really sure if they care.
  - 83457 17y ago
    "Why they don't do something simple like that is just their mistake" I think all of the customization started from them just not sanitizing input. People realized they could customize their page, inject javascript, etc and then that just became an expect part of MySpace. If they removed that now there would probably be little reason for many of the users still there to stay.

by vaksel 17y ago

jfarmer 17y ago

That's a symptom, not a cause. MySpace saw Facebook coming. I remember a quote from Rupert Murdoch in 2006-2007 saying that MySpace was losing to Facebook. There are a million ways they could have used their position to crush Facebook, but they (a) didn't have a strong engineering culture and (b) were focused strongly on revenue over growth and product. I remember a "joking" quote from a MySpace exec where he said they don't mind error pages, because it gives them the chance to serve more ad impressions! No intelligent person I know would want to work at MySpace, while Facebook successfully overcame its early stigma as a "toy website" and is now one of the best places for engineers in Silicon Valley. MySpace's stupid product decisions were a consequence of these underlying problems.

mattmaroon 17y ago

That's not true, people I hadn't talked to in years found me on Myspace. It was pretty trivial through friends of friends. And not building in simple search (rather than trying too hard to monetize through Google) would constitute blowing it.

DrSprout 17y ago

Myspace is trashy. That's all there is to it. They gave everyone full ability to do whatever they want with their pages, and ordinary people make terrible design decisions. Facebook gave everyone a standard template and told them they weren't allowed to fuck it up - which meant that people could just socialize instead of laughing at the gaudiness of it all.

gscott 17y ago
They could solve this by setting a preference where it hides many of the rationalizations and gives a standard look. Why they don't do something simple like that is just their mistake. Not really sure if they care.
- 83457 17y ago
  "Why they don't do something simple like that is just their mistake" I think all of the customization started from them just not sanitizing input. People realized they could customize their page, inject javascript, etc and then that just became an expect part of MySpace. If they removed that now there would probably be little reason for many of the users still there to stay.