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Hold on... You think Facebook took over from Friendster because of scaling problems?! MySpace was the one that took the lead over Friendster and it withered af
by kristopolous 3y ago
Hold on... You think Facebook took over from Friendster because of scaling problems?!
MySpace was the one that took the lead over Friendster and it withered after it got acquired for $500 million by news corp because that was the liquidity event. That's when Facebook gained ground. Your timeline is wrong.
The MySpace switch was because of themes and other features the users found more appealing. Twitter had similar crashes with its fail whale for a long time and they survived it fine. The teen exodus of Friendster wasn't because of TTLB waterfall graphs.
Also MySpace did everything on cheap Microsoft IIS 6 servers in ASP 2.0 after switching from Coldfusion in Macromedia HomeSite, they weren't genuises. It was a knockoff created by amateurs with a couple new twists. (A modern clone has 2.5 mil users: see https://spacehey.com/browse https://spacehey.com/browse still mostly teenagers)
Besides, when the final Friendster holdout of the Asian market had exponential decline in 2008, the scaling problems of 5 years ago had long been fixed. Faster load times did not make up for a product consumers no longer found compelling.
Also Facebook initially was running literally out of Mark's dorm room. In 2007, after they had won the war, their code got leaked because they were deploying the .svn directory in their deploy strategy. Their code was widely mocked. So there we are again.
I don't care if you can find someone who agrees with you on the Friendster scaling thing, almost every collapsed startup has someone that says "we were just too successful and couldn't keep up" because thinking you were just too awesome is the gentler on the ego than realizing a bunch of scrappy hackers just gave people more of what they wanted and either you didn't realize it or you thought your lack of adaption was a virtue.
- esafak 3y agoHow sure are you that they switched because of themes? Did you see user research? I left because of its poor performance, and MySpace was no substitute for friendster; it targeted an artsy demographic. But Facebook was.
- kristopolous 3y agoYes. I worked in social networks 15 years ago. It was a heavy research topic for me. You're a highly technical user. Non-technical people are weird - part of the MySpace exodus was the belief that it spread "computer viruses", really There was more to the switches but I'd have to dredge it up probably through archive sites these days. The reasons the surveys supported I considered ridiculous but it doesn't matter it's better to understand consumer behavior - we can't easily change it. Especially these days. It was not possible for me to be a teenager with high speed wi-fi when I was one 30 years ago. I've got near zero understanding of the modern consumer youth market or what they think. Against all my expectations I've become an old person. Anyways, the freeform HTML was a major driver - it was geocities with less effort, which had also exited through a liquidity event and currently has a clone these days https://neocities.org/browse https://neocities.org/browse