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Zuckerberg Tells Startup School: MySpace Had Chance To Succeed
- flxmglrb 14y agoSo did Friendster. But they both f'd it up. Facebook has held on ... so far.
- capkutay 14y agoBen Horowitz noted the importance of being 10x better than your competitors..friendster was better than fb, but not so much better that it made people switch.
- Evbn 14y agoFriendster was more popular than FB, and worked great, until they deployed a catastrophic JSP rewrite that was 10x slower than before and everyone left.
- didip 14y agoWow, didn't know that they rewrote from PHP to JSP. Got any articles/blog post to share? I'm curious.
- adambrod 14y agohttp://lmgtfy.com/?q=friendster+rewrite http://lmgtfy.com/?q=friendster+rewrite
- jhowell 14y agoWas it Java to PHP? Seems like it's usually the other way around. This could also provide insight into their decision making procesd. http://www.quora.com/Friendster/What-were-the-key-mistakes-that-Friendster-made http://www.quora.com/Friendster/What-were-the-key-mistakes-t...
- bromley 14y agoTo clarify, their system was Java/JSP running on Tomcat, and they rewrote it in PHP: http://troutgirl.wordpress.com/2004/06/29/friendster-goes-php/ http://troutgirl.wordpress.com/2004/06/29/friendster-goes-ph... I found it both enjoyable and disappointing to read the many opinions shared in the comments as to why PHP is faster/better than Java (mostly), Java is faster/better than PHP, and perhaps most insidious, why both are every bit as good as each other (let's all just get along!).
- stfu 14y agoI am still a big fan of MySpace for music. If I see a listing for a band that I don't know, I just google band name+myspace, and know that I will get an instant stream. Websites make it often painfully difficult to find an instant stream, and before officially releasing a record most band are not listed on iTunes. The only somewhat adequate replacement became YouTube.
- jamestc 14y agoSoundcloud > Myspace. Bandcamp > Myspace. Myspace could have salvaged themselves as a music community, but they somehow screwed it up. I'm guessing nepotism is involved in some way, with some of the worst user interface decisions I've ever seen come from a company on its way out. Pop-up music players? Going directly to "Myspace radio" after streaming a song you selected? Horrible, backwards-thinking decisions. Music profiles benefit from being simple and looking simple. People just want the names of the songs and a play button and they're happy. This is why the indie community has generally shifted over to Soundcloud and Bandcamp. The best thing Myspace has done in the past five years is allow people to delete their old profiles without gaining access to the profile itself (via the declaration of ownership).
- quahada 14y agoUser's old profiles were very valuable. Back in the day, most bands were heavy MySpace users. They built up a huge number of followers. Now that customers have moved on, bands can't access their old fan base. They had to rebuild their online fan base for outreach & engagement.
- utunga 14y agoAnd right now, twitter is, incomprehensibly doing the same thing - copying Facebook to try and become a walled garden with rich content from your 'friends' instead of sticking with their anti-facebook strengths - the open API, open data, developer friendly platform that was once their genius idea and special point of difference.
- wickedbass 14y agoZuckerberg is arrogant and full of himself... I want to see the new myspace succeed...
- quattrofan 14y agoTired of these badly written articles by so called "journalists" on tech news sites, I read it twice and still don't entirely understand what Zuck was really saying.
- mdonahoe 14y agoAnyone know when a video of the talk will be online? I missed the livestream.