9 ms·

MySpace: what went wrong – by its former VP of online marketing

135 points by century19 12y ago

walterbell 12y ago
Good history transcript. Has the Guardian given any other conference speeches this quality of transcript?
- rhblake 12y ago
  Steve Albini (the noted musician and producer) had a great talk about the Internet and the music industry at a conference a few months ago. The Guardian wrote a nice a recap [0] and published a full transcript (enriched with pull quotes and some images) [1]. [0] http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/nov/17/steve-albini-at-face-the-music-how-the-internet-solved-problem-with-music http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/nov/17/steve-albini-at... [1] http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/nov/17/steve-albinis-keynote-address-at-face-the-music-in-full http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/nov/17/steve-albinis-k...
Fiahil 12y ago
It amazes me how they could manage to keep that thing alive for all these years.
- davemel37 12y ago
  It was the classic "spend a billion to make a million." It works every time!
nakedrobot2 12y ago
" “They went to Friendster and found all the hot girls who got kicked off Friendster. You may remember Tila Tequila. She was a very very big deal on MySpace. But she was a Friendster user,” he said. “They kicked her off because she was just too damn sexy. " UH OK? I think that we are missing part of the story here. I mean, come on! I stopped reading at this point.
- wodenokoto 12y ago
  Why do you find it unthinkable that Friendster might ban users for posting racy pictures? Of course he is painting in broad strokes in the interview, but MySpace's 'in' was that they started by attracting creative people, such as wannabe models, musicians and photographers.
  - agumonkey 12y ago
    I don't remember anything even remotely shocking on MySpace, but the mere presence of people like Tila Tequila was a 'important' factor in MySpace fame at that point. Wasn't it the first breach between remote celebrities and you on the web ? Before that all you had was tiny bits of medias, and all of a sudden, you get to comment on their page. Not even an official website, but the same website you have a profile on.
    - dec0dedab0de 12y ago
      They used to allow nudity, but then their sponsors started cracking down on them.
  - jccalhoun 12y ago
    Personally I've always found it unbelievable that anyone found Tila Tequila sexy.
PhilipA 12y ago
What destroys a lot of huge companies? Lack of focus.
netcan 12y ago
When FB went public at that "insane market cap," the IPO kerfuffle and all that followed, I had a few interesting conversations. I had been working for a while in online advertising, a lot of adwords and other ad platforms so I had a fairly good understanding of the forthcoming advertising product that was supposedly going to determine FB's actual value. Anyway, my take on it was this: FB stock (at the time) is mostly a bet on two questions. (1) Can they remain the major social network where everyone has a profile and logs in regularly? (2) Can they build an ad platform that makes money off that position. Most people were curious about #2, I think because FB delayed really finding out the answer until after the IPO. For the second question, I thought 'yes' was most likely. I had (and still have) a lot of confidence in the power of scale to add value to an ad network. The bigger the userbase, the more targeting opportunities you have. If you can limit your audience to people in their 30s, with kids, within 5 miles^ and still end up with enough people to bother I think you have a valuable ad platform.^^ Anyway, the answer is yes. FB advertising is one of the world's blue ribbon cash cows. That's the difference between millions and billions. The first question though, I was (and am) less confident about. For FB to be a good investment it needs to last decades. Google has maintained its search position for a decade, but who knows if Facebook can in social. A lot of the forces at work are more cultural than economic or technological and unpredictable. Will it become uncool, unpopular. Will popular focus shift to some new shiny thing. It's a much harder question. Maybe a reason to think that it can is if you think FB-size and network effects locks a service into position in ways that Myspace-size doesn't. Maybe FB's deep pockets will let them acquire, innovate, advertise and otherwise spend their way to long term survival. I don't really have and educate way of guessing at this question. ^Add in "who are within 2 degrees of people that have visited your site" and you're really cookin. ^^tangent: if you could combine a streaming TV service with Netflix-like penetration using FB login and FB ad targeting, I'd wager you could make more in ad revenue using only a small fraction of airtime than traditional TV. IE 10 second "preroll" ads, unobtrusive banner ads (on pause, buffer, etc) with FB's targeting would earn more per viewer than traditional TV's.
- davemel37 12y ago
  > if you could combine a streaming TV service with Netflix-like penetration using FB login and FB ad targeting, I'd wager you could make more in ad revenue. Facebook already serves up 3 Billion video views per day and has a great video ad unit. They also have a mobile app partner network where they serve ads on third party apps. I think everyone in advertising thinks mobile video ad units will surpass every other ad unit and media due to its massive scale and proven effectiveness. If you aren't running video ads on mobile through Facebook in 2015... You are stuck in the past.
bshimmin 12y ago
"The baggage was really intense." What an odd metaphor!
rwmj 12y ago
I went to a marketing conference in the UK in around 2004 or 2005 where someone from MySpace was talking about what a great opportunity it was for marketing to their audience. At the time I was using http://mixi.jp http://mixi.jp which was way ahead in terms of usability and reliability than MySpace (mixi later lost out to Facebook too, mainly because of their own missteps). But it was obvious even in ~ 2005 that a reliable, usable social network would kill MySpace dead.
ssharp 12y ago
I may be off on the timeline a little bit, but this guy started off at MySpace in 2009. From what I remember, Facebook had clearly "won" at that point as the personal social network (like, where you interacted with your friends) and had been for at least a year or two. MySpace was largely regarded, at that point, as a cesspool, but still had the appeal of being the place to interact with famous people and the platform famous people used to interact with their fans. In that sense, MySpace had already lost to Facebook in one aspect and was about ready to lose to Twitter in the other.
- gregd 12y ago
  The article clearly states, "By 2009, MySpace was still the biggest website in terms of traffic, but Facebook was growing fast by this point, and according to Percival the atmosphere was defeatist when he joined the company. “I remember the first meeting they had me set up with the whole team, and it was the saddest, most awkward meeting I’ve ever been in, in my life. And I’ve been in some really sad meetings. Literally sat there and everyone was so defeated,” he said. “The analogy I use is like you were the half-time [basketball] coach, and I walk in and it’s half-time, and you’re down by 100 points … They had been beat down by that corporate bureaucracy, they knew they were about to lose to Facebook. They knew that the end was near. They could smell it.”"
conradfr 12y ago
I never understood the website besides listening to band songs. But at least it was a feature that Facebook has never really done and it took some time (for me) for Spotify, Grooveshark or Youtube to fill in. You heard about about a band and you could listen to some songs instantaneously without downloading it on eMule or Torrent, it was great.
- Mahn 12y ago
  That was also the only use I ever got out of MySpace, checking out new bands/musicians quickly to decide whether I wanted to hear more. IIRC facebook did try a similar feature but never really catched on.
  - undefined0 12y ago
    This is where I think Vkontakte has got it right. It's basicly Facebook but allows audio to be uploaded into your profile. As a result, I find it to be a perfect replacement for discovering new bands in the same way I used Myspace. It's mainly russian bands who use the site, however.
  - tragic 12y ago
    For me it was also the 'groups', which were basically a free one-click alternative to PHPBB, albeit more primitive. For many niche interests, it was actually livelier than reddit is today. Persistent security holes plagued them, though, and it sort of disappeared shortly after the News Corp buyout. Nothing I've read paints a picture of Myspace as a classic feat of software engineering.
- conradfr 12y ago
  edit: should have read the whole link before posting :)
aaronchall 12y ago
I was an early user of both MySpace and Facebook. MySpace came first. It seemed like an easy way to create a rather customizable web presence. I created a page myself. But the experience sucked. Most customizers turned their MySpace page into a really bad website, with (loud) music that would automatically start up, and you were always a click away from a near-pornographic image (uh, Dad, Mom, no it's just MySpace, I'm not surfing for porn!) The article seems off base. I don't get how Facebook avoids being all over the place. But, yeah, they did avoid the obnoxious ads (at first), and I can visit someone's page without blasting music or getting an eyeful of html poop. Could they have avoided losing out to Facebook? I think if they created MySpace 2.0 without all the crap (essentially what Facebook did) and made it easy to migrate your accounts and activity, they could have prevented Facebook from taking over social. But they didn't, and it was crap, and I basically put up a MySpace message saying I was moving to Facebook for all the reasons, and that's where people could find me. And I think a lot of other people followed suit.
- catshirt 12y ago
  "I can visit someone's page without blasting music or getting an eyeful of html poop." i hated auto-playing music until it didn't exist anymore. now i miss the individuality. not specifically the music but also the other ways you could customize the page. in case anyone isn't familiar, you could basically just embed arbitrary html/css/js.
  - somerandomone 12y ago
    I wonder how they prevent Remote Code Execution. Because >just embed arbitrary html/css/js is THE definition of RCE.
    - duskwuff 12y ago
      Poorly: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samy_(computer_worm) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samy_(computer_worm)
  - hbosch 12y ago
    Tumblr now fills this void, and in a much more free and customizable way than MySpace did.
kevando 12y ago
I was kind of hoping a Panic at the Disco song started playing when I opened the article/
acheron 12y ago
Here's the Guardian in 2007 worrying about how Myspace will never lose its monopoly: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2007/feb/08/business.comment http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2007/feb/08/business.c...
aninteger 12y ago
Maybe related.. http://www.businessinsider.com/myspaces-death-spiral-insiders-say-its-due-to-bets-on-los-angeles-and-microsoft-2011-3 http://www.businessinsider.com/myspaces-death-spiral-insider...
frik 12y ago
There a good book about the whole history of MySpace: http://www.amazon.com/Stealing-MySpace-Control-Popular-Website-ebook/dp/B001VT3L3C/ http://www.amazon.com/Stealing-MySpace-Control-Popular-Websi...
- softdev12 12y ago
  It was a good read. The most interesting parts were the backstory behind how MySpace got started. In particular, how the company pivoted a number of times before getting the social network idea to really catch on. It was fascinating to see how they went from selling these cheap toys at kiosks in the mall to becoming a tech media network. I'm just finishing reading another book called Click by Bill Tancer written around the same period. And Myspace had 3 out of the top 10 searches for brand websites (myspace, myspace.com, and www.myspace.com). Facebook had just appeared on the scene and was in the 10th search spot.
spyspaceruled 12y ago
They should have sold Spyspace as ten bucks a month feature. That was a great hack, loved seeing who had visited my page and the gotcha of catching some weird things in my friends cliboards when they visited my page.
dec0dedab0de 12y ago
They messed up the show listings. It went from the definitive listing of every event in the country, to being unusable overnight.
hiphopyo 12y ago
I wonder what would happen if MySpace were to suddenly revert back to the old version. What would they have to lose? It would make the headlines the world over, and people would be getting back the MySpace they signed up for.
markbnj 12y ago
>> “It was one of the most annoying things you could do with an ad, but they just didn’t care: they had no respect for the users. It was all about monetisation. Making money, squeezing every dollar out of it,” said Percival. You can say this about pretty much every traditional news site out there today. Most of them are just horrible.
davidst 12y ago
Great article but it misses an essential difference between MySpace and Facebook. Facebook was built for Mark Zuckerberg and MySpace was built for News Corporation. Zuckerberg understood the interests and tastes of his generation. MySpace only understood the interests of their advertisers.
- tdumitrescu 12y ago
  Is that true? I recall myspace creator "tom" being its very public face in the early days, and it only got sold to newscorp after it was already big.
- ripter 12y ago
  MySpace launched in 2003, News Corporation bought it in 2005. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myspace http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myspace
- cbsmith 12y ago
  > Facebook was built for Mark Zuckerberg and MySpace was built for News Corporation. Wow. That is a huge difference. Kind of like the difference between fact and fiction? MySpace was built by a bunch of knuckle heads. It was _destroyed_ by News Corporation.
enbrill 12y ago
In the article I find these two statements, from Percival, contradicting: "Percival talked about what the company might have done differently, and admitted that by the time he arrived in 2009, it was possibly unsaveable – not least because by that time, it was difficult to hire the most talented engineers against competition from Facebook, Google and other rising tech companies." “There are companies that do not get social and they never will. Apple’s one of them, Google is the other: they’ve failed with Google+. When your culture is engineering-focused, you do not understand social. Social is a very emotional experience. Engineers are not so much, in a lot of cases,”
- theandrewbailey 12y ago
  Not contradictory to me. The second statement does not say nor imply anything about Myspace, or anything about an engineering culture at Myspace.
  - enbrill 12y ago
    Maybe I didn't make it clear enough. In the first quote he basically says MySpace didn't have the engineers to save the company. In the second quote he basically says engineers are not what make the social industry tick. Yes, he's talking about Apple and Google here, but he's contradicting what he said. Regardless I'm not sure why he said the first quote in the at all. The problem they had, had nothing to do with Engineers, but had everything to do with the company culture.
    - theandrewbailey 12y ago
      The first quote is there for the benefit of people who aren't in the industry, and did not realize that Myspace wasn't hot among engineers in 2009. You are misconceiving the second quote. That quote is the end of the article, where it has moved on from the topic of "What happened at Myspace", and is talking about the social networking industry at large. I do not interpret it as being a stab at Myspace specifically, nor about what happened there.
- gojomo 12y ago
ajays 12y ago
He's a "VP of online marketing", not a VP of UX. He wouldn't know what went wrong. MySpace had a horrible UX. You felt _dirty_ after browsing a few pages. Everything was all over the place; the form (UI) destroyed the function (social network). It was like Geocities and Friendster had a love-child that was addicted to LSD.
- djcapelis 12y ago
  Stereotypically, no one on LSD would be nearly so tasteless. MySpace felt more like a raging alcoholic to me.
- cbsmith 12y ago
  If only UX was all that was wrong. ;-) Seriously, he got there in 2009. MySpace's active user base hadn't grown since 2006 (hey, that year rings a bell, did something happen? ;-).
tootie 12y ago
I don't understand this notion that "Google and Apple don't get social". What's to get or not get? Google+ beats FB for features and usability by a mile. Who could have possibly thought that Twitter would be a huge success? I still don't get it! What does Instagram do that FB didn't already do? I love all these analysts tripping over themselves to come up with a formula for a business model that at it's core relies on dumb luck.
- visarga 12y ago
  And if it weren't about luck, why would Google have had to close Google Video and buy YouTube? Clearly, making a website is not enough. It has to be launched at the right moment.
- joshuahutt 12y ago
  G+ also beats FB for memory consumption by a mile.
- dredmorbius 12y ago
  Google have repeatedly gone to the mat to fight what its users want and request, overridden those requests, and/or taken what people consider to be absolutely and beyond any call theirs and made clear it was Google's. Nymwars, Real Names, spamming contacts with G+ Circles, spamming Calendar with G+ events selected by other people, Notifications spam, forced integration of products, an absolutely deaf ear on any privacy issues or concerns, an insistence that "you're doing it wrong" (Circles, various settings, lord knows what), forced YouTube integration with G+, make-work interfaces, and more. Experiences with Glass, Streetview, WiFi snooping, Do Not Track bypassing, or the many, many, many other killed Google products only hammer home how Google simply fails to comprehend issues of privacy. They're not defined by technology, they're not defined by law. They're defined by social norms, and the boundaries people define. Boundaries Google crosses all the fucking time. The conflicts between what Google does, and what their former Director of Privacy, Alma Whitten, said, is staggering. Look up her old talks. I've got a few quotes on my G+ profile ("Edward Morbius"). People's use-cases differ, but in a nutshell, I'm looking for a way to have good an interesting conversations with people, without a tremendous breach in my personal privacy. Google ultimately wants to sell ads, but I'm 1) not buying those and 2) really not a choice target regardless. There's an inherent conflict in the "social" space, and I don't really see any way around it.
cbsmith 12y ago
Yeah, this is a guy getting a lot of press about something he was at best tangentially involved with.
encoderer 12y ago
I think you can't look at the "how MySpace" lost story without considering the "how Facebook won" angle. Myspace lost, in part, because it found itself in competition with a company run by a very talented team with big ambitions and ample connections.
iblaine 12y ago
Former MySpace engineer here. Got there when it was 1500 people and left when it was 300. The company failed for these reasons: * MySpace sold ads to Google when they didn't have ad inventory to sell. MySpace had to meet impression thresholds each month or pay penalties to Google. To meet those requirements, MySpace added ads where they should not have been. Impression ads were put up in odd places. MySpace forced users to log in for the sake of generating an impression. The result was a poor user experience. * Tom & Chris were from an email spam shop background. eUniverse bought Tom & Chris email spam company. Once eUniverse had the emails, Tom & Chris had nothing to do, so they put their effort into creating something new. Friendster was doing well at the time, they decided to clone it, the result was MySpace. Spam and poor user experiences were part of their upbringing and it showed in MySpace. * There were no coding standards. Engineering teams worked in silos with each team having their own standards. For example, at one time someone put a picture of all the different submit buttons in the break room. Tom & Chris shared this brake room. I'm not sure if the poster was motivational or insulting. We all knew the site looked ugly and this picture of all the different submit buttons quantified it. * MySpace didn't leverage an API. FB users had the ability to add plug ins like calendars and classified ads from a myriad of sources. The result was users were able to choose the best solution. MySpace users were given the same tools built internally. Those tools were pushed out in rapid succession, without much effort, and users were left with poorly created solutions. * MySpace cherished metrics that had no meaning. Your number of friends, for example, were meaningless. People like Percival created companies to help people add friends under the guise that having friends meant something. MySpace bought into that snake oil, Percival perpetuated it, then they hired him on as a VP. * MySpace thought allowing users to create their own unique page was a competitive advantage. Users were given the ability to embed their own HTML within their own page. The result was ugly bloated pages. At MySpace, we had an internal message board to debate ideas. This idea was debated and people in product defended the ability to customize pages as a competitive advantage. * Chris & Aber were distracted by 'partying'. Hang out at the bars on Wilshire Blvd, you'll hear things and I'll leave it at that. * Employees were not given stock. Given salaries were great, people did not seem to be emotionally invested in the companies success.
- aaronbrethorst 12y ago
wickedlogic 12y ago
The customizable web presence is what killed it.

135 points by century19 12y ago

walterbell 12y ago

Good history transcript. Has the Guardian given any other conference speeches this quality of transcript?

rhblake 12y ago
Steve Albini (the noted musician and producer) had a great talk about the Internet and the music industry at a conference a few months ago. The Guardian wrote a nice a recap [0] and published a full transcript (enriched with pull quotes and some images) [1]. [0] http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/nov/17/steve-albini-at-face-the-music-how-the-internet-solved-problem-with-music http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/nov/17/steve-albini-at... [1] http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/nov/17/steve-albinis-keynote-address-at-face-the-music-in-full http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/nov/17/steve-albinis-k...

Fiahil 12y ago

It amazes me how they could manage to keep that thing alive for all these years.

davemel37 12y ago
It was the classic "spend a billion to make a million." It works every time!

nakedrobot2 12y ago

" “They went to Friendster and found all the hot girls who got kicked off Friendster. You may remember Tila Tequila. She was a very very big deal on MySpace. But she was a Friendster user,” he said. “They kicked her off because she was just too damn sexy. " UH OK? I think that we are missing part of the story here. I mean, come on! I stopped reading at this point.

wodenokoto 12y ago
Why do you find it unthinkable that Friendster might ban users for posting racy pictures? Of course he is painting in broad strokes in the interview, but MySpace's 'in' was that they started by attracting creative people, such as wannabe models, musicians and photographers.
- agumonkey 12y ago
  I don't remember anything even remotely shocking on MySpace, but the mere presence of people like Tila Tequila was a 'important' factor in MySpace fame at that point. Wasn't it the first breach between remote celebrities and you on the web ? Before that all you had was tiny bits of medias, and all of a sudden, you get to comment on their page. Not even an official website, but the same website you have a profile on.
  - dec0dedab0de 12y ago
    They used to allow nudity, but then their sponsors started cracking down on them.
- jccalhoun 12y ago
  Personally I've always found it unbelievable that anyone found Tila Tequila sexy.

PhilipA 12y ago

What destroys a lot of huge companies? Lack of focus.

netcan 12y ago

When FB went public at that "insane market cap," the IPO kerfuffle and all that followed, I had a few interesting conversations. I had been working for a while in online advertising, a lot of adwords and other ad platforms so I had a fairly good understanding of the forthcoming advertising product that was supposedly going to determine FB's actual value. Anyway, my take on it was this: FB stock (at the time) is mostly a bet on two questions. (1) Can they remain the major social network where everyone has a profile and logs in regularly? (2) Can they build an ad platform that makes money off that position. Most people were curious about #2, I think because FB delayed really finding out the answer until after the IPO. For the second question, I thought 'yes' was most likely. I had (and still have) a lot of confidence in the power of scale to add value to an ad network. The bigger the userbase, the more targeting opportunities you have. If you can limit your audience to people in their 30s, with kids, within 5 miles^ and still end up with enough people to bother I think you have a valuable ad platform.^^ Anyway, the answer is yes. FB advertising is one of the world's blue ribbon cash cows. That's the difference between millions and billions. The first question though, I was (and am) less confident about. For FB to be a good investment it needs to last decades. Google has maintained its search position for a decade, but who knows if Facebook can in social. A lot of the forces at work are more cultural than economic or technological and unpredictable. Will it become uncool, unpopular. Will popular focus shift to some new shiny thing. It's a much harder question. Maybe a reason to think that it can is if you think FB-size and network effects locks a service into position in ways that Myspace-size doesn't. Maybe FB's deep pockets will let them acquire, innovate, advertise and otherwise spend their way to long term survival. I don't really have and educate way of guessing at this question. ^Add in "who are within 2 degrees of people that have visited your site" and you're really cookin. ^^tangent: if you could combine a streaming TV service with Netflix-like penetration using FB login and FB ad targeting, I'd wager you could make more in ad revenue using only a small fraction of airtime than traditional TV. IE 10 second "preroll" ads, unobtrusive banner ads (on pause, buffer, etc) with FB's targeting would earn more per viewer than traditional TV's.

davemel37 12y ago
> if you could combine a streaming TV service with Netflix-like penetration using FB login and FB ad targeting, I'd wager you could make more in ad revenue. Facebook already serves up 3 Billion video views per day and has a great video ad unit. They also have a mobile app partner network where they serve ads on third party apps. I think everyone in advertising thinks mobile video ad units will surpass every other ad unit and media due to its massive scale and proven effectiveness. If you aren't running video ads on mobile through Facebook in 2015... You are stuck in the past.

bshimmin 12y ago

"The baggage was really intense." What an odd metaphor!

rwmj 12y ago

I went to a marketing conference in the UK in around 2004 or 2005 where someone from MySpace was talking about what a great opportunity it was for marketing to their audience. At the time I was using http://mixi.jp http://mixi.jp which was way ahead in terms of usability and reliability than MySpace (mixi later lost out to Facebook too, mainly because of their own missteps). But it was obvious even in ~ 2005 that a reliable, usable social network would kill MySpace dead.

ssharp 12y ago

I may be off on the timeline a little bit, but this guy started off at MySpace in 2009. From what I remember, Facebook had clearly "won" at that point as the personal social network (like, where you interacted with your friends) and had been for at least a year or two. MySpace was largely regarded, at that point, as a cesspool, but still had the appeal of being the place to interact with famous people and the platform famous people used to interact with their fans. In that sense, MySpace had already lost to Facebook in one aspect and was about ready to lose to Twitter in the other.

gregd 12y ago
The article clearly states, "By 2009, MySpace was still the biggest website in terms of traffic, but Facebook was growing fast by this point, and according to Percival the atmosphere was defeatist when he joined the company. “I remember the first meeting they had me set up with the whole team, and it was the saddest, most awkward meeting I’ve ever been in, in my life. And I’ve been in some really sad meetings. Literally sat there and everyone was so defeated,” he said. “The analogy I use is like you were the half-time [basketball] coach, and I walk in and it’s half-time, and you’re down by 100 points … They had been beat down by that corporate bureaucracy, they knew they were about to lose to Facebook. They knew that the end was near. They could smell it.”"

conradfr 12y ago

I never understood the website besides listening to band songs. But at least it was a feature that Facebook has never really done and it took some time (for me) for Spotify, Grooveshark or Youtube to fill in. You heard about about a band and you could listen to some songs instantaneously without downloading it on eMule or Torrent, it was great.

Mahn 12y ago
That was also the only use I ever got out of MySpace, checking out new bands/musicians quickly to decide whether I wanted to hear more. IIRC facebook did try a similar feature but never really catched on.
- undefined0 12y ago
  This is where I think Vkontakte has got it right. It's basicly Facebook but allows audio to be uploaded into your profile. As a result, I find it to be a perfect replacement for discovering new bands in the same way I used Myspace. It's mainly russian bands who use the site, however.
- tragic 12y ago
  For me it was also the 'groups', which were basically a free one-click alternative to PHPBB, albeit more primitive. For many niche interests, it was actually livelier than reddit is today. Persistent security holes plagued them, though, and it sort of disappeared shortly after the News Corp buyout. Nothing I've read paints a picture of Myspace as a classic feat of software engineering.
conradfr 12y ago
edit: should have read the whole link before posting :)

aaronchall 12y ago

I was an early user of both MySpace and Facebook. MySpace came first. It seemed like an easy way to create a rather customizable web presence. I created a page myself. But the experience sucked. Most customizers turned their MySpace page into a really bad website, with (loud) music that would automatically start up, and you were always a click away from a near-pornographic image (uh, Dad, Mom, no it's just MySpace, I'm not surfing for porn!) The article seems off base. I don't get how Facebook avoids being all over the place. But, yeah, they did avoid the obnoxious ads (at first), and I can visit someone's page without blasting music or getting an eyeful of html poop. Could they have avoided losing out to Facebook? I think if they created MySpace 2.0 without all the crap (essentially what Facebook did) and made it easy to migrate your accounts and activity, they could have prevented Facebook from taking over social. But they didn't, and it was crap, and I basically put up a MySpace message saying I was moving to Facebook for all the reasons, and that's where people could find me. And I think a lot of other people followed suit.

catshirt 12y ago
"I can visit someone's page without blasting music or getting an eyeful of html poop." i hated auto-playing music until it didn't exist anymore. now i miss the individuality. not specifically the music but also the other ways you could customize the page. in case anyone isn't familiar, you could basically just embed arbitrary html/css/js.
- somerandomone 12y ago
  I wonder how they prevent Remote Code Execution. Because >just embed arbitrary html/css/js is THE definition of RCE.
  - duskwuff 12y ago
    Poorly: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samy_(computer_worm) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samy_(computer_worm)
- hbosch 12y ago
  Tumblr now fills this void, and in a much more free and customizable way than MySpace did.

kevando 12y ago

I was kind of hoping a Panic at the Disco song started playing when I opened the article/

acheron 12y ago

Here's the Guardian in 2007 worrying about how Myspace will never lose its monopoly: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2007/feb/08/business.comment http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2007/feb/08/business.c...

aninteger 12y ago

Maybe related.. http://www.businessinsider.com/myspaces-death-spiral-insiders-say-its-due-to-bets-on-los-angeles-and-microsoft-2011-3 http://www.businessinsider.com/myspaces-death-spiral-insider...

frik 12y ago

There a good book about the whole history of MySpace: http://www.amazon.com/Stealing-MySpace-Control-Popular-Website-ebook/dp/B001VT3L3C/ http://www.amazon.com/Stealing-MySpace-Control-Popular-Websi...

softdev12 12y ago
It was a good read. The most interesting parts were the backstory behind how MySpace got started. In particular, how the company pivoted a number of times before getting the social network idea to really catch on. It was fascinating to see how they went from selling these cheap toys at kiosks in the mall to becoming a tech media network. I'm just finishing reading another book called Click by Bill Tancer written around the same period. And Myspace had 3 out of the top 10 searches for brand websites (myspace, myspace.com, and www.myspace.com). Facebook had just appeared on the scene and was in the 10th search spot.

spyspaceruled 12y ago

They should have sold Spyspace as ten bucks a month feature. That was a great hack, loved seeing who had visited my page and the gotcha of catching some weird things in my friends cliboards when they visited my page.

dec0dedab0de 12y ago

They messed up the show listings. It went from the definitive listing of every event in the country, to being unusable overnight.

hiphopyo 12y ago

I wonder what would happen if MySpace were to suddenly revert back to the old version. What would they have to lose? It would make the headlines the world over, and people would be getting back the MySpace they signed up for.

markbnj 12y ago

>> “It was one of the most annoying things you could do with an ad, but they just didn’t care: they had no respect for the users. It was all about monetisation. Making money, squeezing every dollar out of it,” said Percival. You can say this about pretty much every traditional news site out there today. Most of them are just horrible.

davidst 12y ago

Great article but it misses an essential difference between MySpace and Facebook. Facebook was built for Mark Zuckerberg and MySpace was built for News Corporation. Zuckerberg understood the interests and tastes of his generation. MySpace only understood the interests of their advertisers.

tdumitrescu 12y ago
Is that true? I recall myspace creator "tom" being its very public face in the early days, and it only got sold to newscorp after it was already big.
ripter 12y ago
MySpace launched in 2003, News Corporation bought it in 2005. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myspace http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myspace
cbsmith 12y ago
> Facebook was built for Mark Zuckerberg and MySpace was built for News Corporation. Wow. That is a huge difference. Kind of like the difference between fact and fiction? MySpace was built by a bunch of knuckle heads. It was _destroyed_ by News Corporation.

enbrill 12y ago

In the article I find these two statements, from Percival, contradicting: "Percival talked about what the company might have done differently, and admitted that by the time he arrived in 2009, it was possibly unsaveable – not least because by that time, it was difficult to hire the most talented engineers against competition from Facebook, Google and other rising tech companies." “There are companies that do not get social and they never will. Apple’s one of them, Google is the other: they’ve failed with Google+. When your culture is engineering-focused, you do not understand social. Social is a very emotional experience. Engineers are not so much, in a lot of cases,”

theandrewbailey 12y ago
Not contradictory to me. The second statement does not say nor imply anything about Myspace, or anything about an engineering culture at Myspace.
- enbrill 12y ago
  Maybe I didn't make it clear enough. In the first quote he basically says MySpace didn't have the engineers to save the company. In the second quote he basically says engineers are not what make the social industry tick. Yes, he's talking about Apple and Google here, but he's contradicting what he said. Regardless I'm not sure why he said the first quote in the at all. The problem they had, had nothing to do with Engineers, but had everything to do with the company culture.
  - theandrewbailey 12y ago
    The first quote is there for the benefit of people who aren't in the industry, and did not realize that Myspace wasn't hot among engineers in 2009. You are misconceiving the second quote. That quote is the end of the article, where it has moved on from the topic of "What happened at Myspace", and is talking about the social networking industry at large. I do not interpret it as being a stab at Myspace specifically, nor about what happened there.
gojomo 12y ago

ajays 12y ago

He's a "VP of online marketing", not a VP of UX. He wouldn't know what went wrong. MySpace had a horrible UX. You felt _dirty_ after browsing a few pages. Everything was all over the place; the form (UI) destroyed the function (social network). It was like Geocities and Friendster had a love-child that was addicted to LSD.

djcapelis 12y ago
Stereotypically, no one on LSD would be nearly so tasteless. MySpace felt more like a raging alcoholic to me.
cbsmith 12y ago
If only UX was all that was wrong. ;-) Seriously, he got there in 2009. MySpace's active user base hadn't grown since 2006 (hey, that year rings a bell, did something happen? ;-).

tootie 12y ago

I don't understand this notion that "Google and Apple don't get social". What's to get or not get? Google+ beats FB for features and usability by a mile. Who could have possibly thought that Twitter would be a huge success? I still don't get it! What does Instagram do that FB didn't already do? I love all these analysts tripping over themselves to come up with a formula for a business model that at it's core relies on dumb luck.

visarga 12y ago
And if it weren't about luck, why would Google have had to close Google Video and buy YouTube? Clearly, making a website is not enough. It has to be launched at the right moment.
joshuahutt 12y ago
G+ also beats FB for memory consumption by a mile.
dredmorbius 12y ago
Google have repeatedly gone to the mat to fight what its users want and request, overridden those requests, and/or taken what people consider to be absolutely and beyond any call theirs and made clear it was Google's. Nymwars, Real Names, spamming contacts with G+ Circles, spamming Calendar with G+ events selected by other people, Notifications spam, forced integration of products, an absolutely deaf ear on any privacy issues or concerns, an insistence that "you're doing it wrong" (Circles, various settings, lord knows what), forced YouTube integration with G+, make-work interfaces, and more. Experiences with Glass, Streetview, WiFi snooping, Do Not Track bypassing, or the many, many, many other killed Google products only hammer home how Google simply fails to comprehend issues of privacy. They're not defined by technology, they're not defined by law. They're defined by social norms, and the boundaries people define. Boundaries Google crosses all the fucking time. The conflicts between what Google does, and what their former Director of Privacy, Alma Whitten, said, is staggering. Look up her old talks. I've got a few quotes on my G+ profile ("Edward Morbius"). People's use-cases differ, but in a nutshell, I'm looking for a way to have good an interesting conversations with people, without a tremendous breach in my personal privacy. Google ultimately wants to sell ads, but I'm 1) not buying those and 2) really not a choice target regardless. There's an inherent conflict in the "social" space, and I don't really see any way around it.

cbsmith 12y ago

Yeah, this is a guy getting a lot of press about something he was at best tangentially involved with.

encoderer 12y ago

I think you can't look at the "how MySpace" lost story without considering the "how Facebook won" angle. Myspace lost, in part, because it found itself in competition with a company run by a very talented team with big ambitions and ample connections.

iblaine 12y ago

Former MySpace engineer here. Got there when it was 1500 people and left when it was 300. The company failed for these reasons: * MySpace sold ads to Google when they didn't have ad inventory to sell. MySpace had to meet impression thresholds each month or pay penalties to Google. To meet those requirements, MySpace added ads where they should not have been. Impression ads were put up in odd places. MySpace forced users to log in for the sake of generating an impression. The result was a poor user experience. * Tom & Chris were from an email spam shop background. eUniverse bought Tom & Chris email spam company. Once eUniverse had the emails, Tom & Chris had nothing to do, so they put their effort into creating something new. Friendster was doing well at the time, they decided to clone it, the result was MySpace. Spam and poor user experiences were part of their upbringing and it showed in MySpace. * There were no coding standards. Engineering teams worked in silos with each team having their own standards. For example, at one time someone put a picture of all the different submit buttons in the break room. Tom & Chris shared this brake room. I'm not sure if the poster was motivational or insulting. We all knew the site looked ugly and this picture of all the different submit buttons quantified it. * MySpace didn't leverage an API. FB users had the ability to add plug ins like calendars and classified ads from a myriad of sources. The result was users were able to choose the best solution. MySpace users were given the same tools built internally. Those tools were pushed out in rapid succession, without much effort, and users were left with poorly created solutions. * MySpace cherished metrics that had no meaning. Your number of friends, for example, were meaningless. People like Percival created companies to help people add friends under the guise that having friends meant something. MySpace bought into that snake oil, Percival perpetuated it, then they hired him on as a VP. * MySpace thought allowing users to create their own unique page was a competitive advantage. Users were given the ability to embed their own HTML within their own page. The result was ugly bloated pages. At MySpace, we had an internal message board to debate ideas. This idea was debated and people in product defended the ability to customize pages as a competitive advantage. * Chris & Aber were distracted by 'partying'. Hang out at the bars on Wilshire Blvd, you'll hear things and I'll leave it at that. * Employees were not given stock. Given salaries were great, people did not seem to be emotionally invested in the companies success.

aaronbrethorst 12y ago

wickedlogic 12y ago

The customizable web presence is what killed it.