5 ms·

I worked at MySpace on the MDP ( MySpace Developer Platform ) team. My team, MySpaceID, was the one that implemented Oauth 1, 2, 2.0a and all of the external R

by jdavid 16y ago

I worked at MySpace on the MDP ( MySpace Developer Platform ) team. My team, MySpaceID, was the one that implemented Oauth 1, 2, 2.0a and all of the external REST libraries. We worked closely with the activity streams team and the OpenSocial Team. We also launched the MySpace JSL or MySpace Connect. We were the 1st to do a popup login flow for OpenID and several other cool things MySpace was doing to catch Facebook. We might have done it if Google did not pull the money. Once the free parking was pulled from MySpace, 50% of every team was laid off and all of the momentum was pulled from the company. Working with .Net was not an issue, and in some cases it was a benefit. There were however huge cultural problems with FOX. Here are a few. Developers used were given one display, not two. Screens were 1280x1024. I bought my own displays and had my manager order a custom computer for me with dual video card support. Fox was a closed source company, and so when we were working on Open Tech like Oauth and OpenSocial gadget servers, we had to do it as closed source software. We had no peer review. It made it really hard to ship and test something when you don't have linkedin, google, bebo, and twitter reviewing your code. On top of that when those companies found a bug, we had to re-implement that code in .Net. On top of that MySpace and .Net were well designed for strong typing and those types work a bit different than Java. It didn't take a lot of time to port so, we kept doing it, but you have to think about this, you are at a race with a company like Facebook who had zero profit motive at the time, and billion in funding and a ground up stack. Meanwhile MySpace was just clearing out cold-fusion and we had really old blogging platforms that could not just get ripped out. We also had management that didn't want to piss off users and so we would have 2 or 3 versions of the site out there, and we required users to upgrade to new versions. What MySpace had was Cultural Debt, and a fear of destroying what they had. Facebook won because they were Socratic to the core.

brown9-2 16y ago
Once the free parking was pulled from MySpace, 50% of every team was laid off and all of the momentum was pulled from the company. Can you explain what you mean by "free parking" here?
- SpikeGronim 16y ago
  I believe that he's referring to the deal where Google paid MySpace for ad impressions. When that fell through MySpace lost a lot of revenue. http://www.dailyfinance.com/story/media/myspace-in-trouble-on-900-million-google-deal/19224196/ http://www.dailyfinance.com/story/media/myspace-in-trouble-o...
- eru 16y ago
  I guess it comes from Monopoly?
- jdavid 16y ago
  Sorry, for being overly creative. "free parking" is a spot on monopoly where the rules specifically state that once a user lands on the 'free parking' space no money is received. however, in almost every monopoly game i have played, players take fines/ taxes and put them in the middle of the board, and when a player lands on 'free parking' they get the funds. It's an example of not following the rules as a point of culture. The deal soured with Google because the terms were around pageviews and clicks. MySpace and Fox decided to target those terms to maximize revenue. The result was that MySpace added unneeded page flow for just about every user action. It destroyed UX and pissed off Google. Our team kept joking with management that we were going to create a MySpace-Lite as a side project from our REST APIs and to get rid of all of the crap. WE SHOULD HAVE DONE IT. WE SHOULD HAVE CREATED MYSPACE-LITE The Deal with Google was worth $300 million a year on total revenue of $750 million a year. MySpace Music was loosing the company mad money, it was and is a flawed model. Our team wanted to create an API where games and sites could access the music, and to create open playlists. We wanted to make the music open, and then work to license it. We were told that it was not possible.
  - icefox 16y ago
    Sidenote : Growing up I also played monopoly that way and various other house rules. After playing some Euro games I went back and read the monopoly rules and played a game by the rules. No free parking, no extra houses or hotels, forced auctions, etc. The game took 45 minutes and was way more fun. Made Monopoly actually enjoyable again, though not as good as most of the really good Euro games out today.
billpaetzke 16y ago
By the way, if there's any MySpacers reading that got laid off or looking to jump ship... I'm a developer at Leads360 in El Segundo, CA. We're hiring right now. I've already interviewed several MySpacers and have extended offers to a few. We hope to get more :) Email me your resume, if interested: bpaetzke@leads360.com
SkyMarshal 16y ago
Thanks for the insider account, nice to hear in a sea of speculation and rumor. One thing though, what do you mean when you say Facebook was 'Socratic to the core'? I'm only aware of that in context of the Socratic Method of teaching, but am not clear what it means here.
- blhack 16y ago
  Glad I'm not the only one confused by that. I googled "define:socratic" and got "Know thyself"... So I assume he meant that facebook knew exactly what they wanted to be, as opposed to myspace, who was trying to catch up with facebook.
  - dingle_thunk 16y ago
    Socratic - as in seriously concerned with a logical journey of discovering the essence of what is important - dismissing irrelevance and having little patience for straggling or argument.
n_are_q 16y ago
Hey David :) (i'm remaining anon, just because). In fact devs always got two monitors and it was pretty easy to get more if you wanted to, but yea they were just 1280x1024's. I really don't think the dev hardware was much of an issue though, they did upgrade it fairly regularly. The testing and staging environments definitely existed. There were some deeper issues with some portions of the production infrastructure not being testable in dev, so you had to test them in stage, but the basic ability to test in dev did exist and was good enough to be pretty useful.
- jdavid 16y ago
  This was a stark contrast from having worked at hi5 just prior where I had a killer Macbook Pro, and (2) 1080p 22" displays. Sometimes while visiting dropboxes offices in those days I remember them having (2-4) 27" displays. Just a difference between SV and LA. At hi5 I remember some nights working till 5am in the morning going home, and then being at work by 10am for a meeting. At MySpace I tried to get a few people together on weekends to hack on cool demos, but management didn't want people to burn out. They did however buy a few people blackberries and expect them to remote in and fix anything that might be a fire. A few of our team members had them and they would have to log in a 2am and fix shit. I am still very proud of the work I did there and respect every one of my team mates as fantastic developers. I hope to work again one day with many of them. If there was one place MySpace didn't fail it was hiring great talent, and bringing them to LA to work. The partying in LA might have been a bit of a distraction but, it's also what made LA a ton of fun. It was so easy to date down there vs. SF where it's impossible to meet a gal.
clutchski 16y ago
"Fox was a closed source company" Wow. I didn't know such a thing existed. Was no open source software used? From databases to javascript libraries?
- megablast 16y ago
  You are kidding me right? There are loads of Microsoft shops, who see open source as evil, and have severe problems in using anything that is not Microsoft. Scary, I know.
- ms_throwaway 16y ago
  This is wrong, there are more than a few things Myspace open sourced.
kragen 16y ago
The article claims you didn't use version control. That's hard to believe. Is it true?

by jdavid 16y ago

brown9-2 16y ago

Once the free parking was pulled from MySpace, 50% of every team was laid off and all of the momentum was pulled from the company. Can you explain what you mean by "free parking" here?

SpikeGronim 16y ago
I believe that he's referring to the deal where Google paid MySpace for ad impressions. When that fell through MySpace lost a lot of revenue. http://www.dailyfinance.com/story/media/myspace-in-trouble-on-900-million-google-deal/19224196/ http://www.dailyfinance.com/story/media/myspace-in-trouble-o...
eru 16y ago
I guess it comes from Monopoly?
jdavid 16y ago
Sorry, for being overly creative. "free parking" is a spot on monopoly where the rules specifically state that once a user lands on the 'free parking' space no money is received. however, in almost every monopoly game i have played, players take fines/ taxes and put them in the middle of the board, and when a player lands on 'free parking' they get the funds. It's an example of not following the rules as a point of culture. The deal soured with Google because the terms were around pageviews and clicks. MySpace and Fox decided to target those terms to maximize revenue. The result was that MySpace added unneeded page flow for just about every user action. It destroyed UX and pissed off Google. Our team kept joking with management that we were going to create a MySpace-Lite as a side project from our REST APIs and to get rid of all of the crap. WE SHOULD HAVE DONE IT. WE SHOULD HAVE CREATED MYSPACE-LITE The Deal with Google was worth $300 million a year on total revenue of $750 million a year. MySpace Music was loosing the company mad money, it was and is a flawed model. Our team wanted to create an API where games and sites could access the music, and to create open playlists. We wanted to make the music open, and then work to license it. We were told that it was not possible.
- icefox 16y ago
  Sidenote : Growing up I also played monopoly that way and various other house rules. After playing some Euro games I went back and read the monopoly rules and played a game by the rules. No free parking, no extra houses or hotels, forced auctions, etc. The game took 45 minutes and was way more fun. Made Monopoly actually enjoyable again, though not as good as most of the really good Euro games out today.

billpaetzke 16y ago

By the way, if there's any MySpacers reading that got laid off or looking to jump ship... I'm a developer at Leads360 in El Segundo, CA. We're hiring right now. I've already interviewed several MySpacers and have extended offers to a few. We hope to get more :) Email me your resume, if interested: bpaetzke@leads360.com

SkyMarshal 16y ago

Thanks for the insider account, nice to hear in a sea of speculation and rumor. One thing though, what do you mean when you say Facebook was 'Socratic to the core'? I'm only aware of that in context of the Socratic Method of teaching, but am not clear what it means here.

blhack 16y ago
Glad I'm not the only one confused by that. I googled "define:socratic" and got "Know thyself"... So I assume he meant that facebook knew exactly what they wanted to be, as opposed to myspace, who was trying to catch up with facebook.
- dingle_thunk 16y ago
  Socratic - as in seriously concerned with a logical journey of discovering the essence of what is important - dismissing irrelevance and having little patience for straggling or argument.

n_are_q 16y ago

Hey David :) (i'm remaining anon, just because). In fact devs always got two monitors and it was pretty easy to get more if you wanted to, but yea they were just 1280x1024's. I really don't think the dev hardware was much of an issue though, they did upgrade it fairly regularly. The testing and staging environments definitely existed. There were some deeper issues with some portions of the production infrastructure not being testable in dev, so you had to test them in stage, but the basic ability to test in dev did exist and was good enough to be pretty useful.

jdavid 16y ago
This was a stark contrast from having worked at hi5 just prior where I had a killer Macbook Pro, and (2) 1080p 22" displays. Sometimes while visiting dropboxes offices in those days I remember them having (2-4) 27" displays. Just a difference between SV and LA. At hi5 I remember some nights working till 5am in the morning going home, and then being at work by 10am for a meeting. At MySpace I tried to get a few people together on weekends to hack on cool demos, but management didn't want people to burn out. They did however buy a few people blackberries and expect them to remote in and fix anything that might be a fire. A few of our team members had them and they would have to log in a 2am and fix shit. I am still very proud of the work I did there and respect every one of my team mates as fantastic developers. I hope to work again one day with many of them. If there was one place MySpace didn't fail it was hiring great talent, and bringing them to LA to work. The partying in LA might have been a bit of a distraction but, it's also what made LA a ton of fun. It was so easy to date down there vs. SF where it's impossible to meet a gal.

clutchski 16y ago

"Fox was a closed source company" Wow. I didn't know such a thing existed. Was no open source software used? From databases to javascript libraries?

megablast 16y ago
You are kidding me right? There are loads of Microsoft shops, who see open source as evil, and have severe problems in using anything that is not Microsoft. Scary, I know.
ms_throwaway 16y ago
This is wrong, there are more than a few things Myspace open sourced.

kragen 16y ago

The article claims you didn't use version control. That's hard to believe. Is it true?