3 ms·

Technical solutions, such as the friend muting, can't solve cultural problems - of which Facebook has aplenty. MySpace was destroyed by cultural problems. The

by majika 15y ago

Technical solutions, such as the friend muting, can't solve cultural problems - of which Facebook has aplenty. MySpace was destroyed by cultural problems. The technology wasn't at fault. If it was populated with HN-types, we'd see clean typography and beautiful blogs - not the epileptic-fit-causing profile pages that caused everyone to migrate to Facebook. Culture is the difference between MySpace and Tumblr. Building a community is everything. That's my thesis, at least.

gambler 15y ago
Technical solutions, such as the friend muting, can't solve cultural problems - of which Facebook has aplenty. Very, very true. I would even expand on this. Problems people encounter online can be divided into technical, social (involving groups) and interpersonal. Problems from one category cannot be effectively solved via methods from another. Attempting to do so inevitably results in many undesirable side-effects.
Terretta 15y ago
Sometime try listing Tweets by geo proximity when you're downtown. The MySpace culture is alive, well, and on Twitter in numbers that far outweigh the "HN-types". Twitter seems no worse for it, and a failure to cater to elitists wasn't MySpace's problem either. MySpace, AOL, Yahoo, HP -- their problems are cultural, but not their users' culture, their managements'.
Raphael 15y ago
MySpace had a great community. The software was slow and ugly. Now it's faster and a little less ugly, but the community is gone.
william42 15y ago
No, the difference between MySpace and Tumblr is that the latter has a dashboard that gets rid of everyone's theme and by extension their autoplaying music, etc.
saturdaysaint 15y ago
The technology wasn't at fault. Myspace could have survived myriad cultural problems on the strength of their once unparalleled social graph if they could have kept pace with Facebook's technology. Facebook had many things right - the news feed, valid identities, speed - that would have required Myspace to essentially start from scratch to even emulate. Myspace tried, but couldn't pull it off. So my argument is that Facebook has room to experiment in areas where tastes may differ (i.e. culture) as long as they have great technology and an adaptable design. If the timeline/ticker turns out to be completely overwhelming and they see usage drop, Zuckerberg could practically issue an apology, flip a switch and basically turn Facebook back to yesterday's Facebook by Monday. As their experiences with failure (Beacon) and success (the news feed!) have shown, there's way more upside than downside.

by majika 15y ago

gambler 15y ago

Technical solutions, such as the friend muting, can't solve cultural problems - of which Facebook has aplenty. Very, very true. I would even expand on this. Problems people encounter online can be divided into technical, social (involving groups) and interpersonal. Problems from one category cannot be effectively solved via methods from another. Attempting to do so inevitably results in many undesirable side-effects.

Terretta 15y ago

Sometime try listing Tweets by geo proximity when you're downtown. The MySpace culture is alive, well, and on Twitter in numbers that far outweigh the "HN-types". Twitter seems no worse for it, and a failure to cater to elitists wasn't MySpace's problem either. MySpace, AOL, Yahoo, HP -- their problems are cultural, but not their users' culture, their managements'.

Raphael 15y ago

MySpace had a great community. The software was slow and ugly. Now it's faster and a little less ugly, but the community is gone.

william42 15y ago

No, the difference between MySpace and Tumblr is that the latter has a dashboard that gets rid of everyone's theme and by extension their autoplaying music, etc.

saturdaysaint 15y ago

The technology wasn't at fault. Myspace could have survived myriad cultural problems on the strength of their once unparalleled social graph if they could have kept pace with Facebook's technology. Facebook had many things right - the news feed, valid identities, speed - that would have required Myspace to essentially start from scratch to even emulate. Myspace tried, but couldn't pull it off. So my argument is that Facebook has room to experiment in areas where tastes may differ (i.e. culture) as long as they have great technology and an adaptable design. If the timeline/ticker turns out to be completely overwhelming and they see usage drop, Zuckerberg could practically issue an apology, flip a switch and basically turn Facebook back to yesterday's Facebook by Monday. As their experiences with failure (Beacon) and success (the news feed!) have shown, there's way more upside than downside.