Ziff-Davis’ Baseline recently published an insider’s look at how MySpace functions on a technical level, and it’s quite revealing.
The common assumption among programming types about MySpace is that the system started off as somebody’s pet project and quickly mushroomed beyond the programmers’ control. Rather than cooling off growth to create a better infrastructure, the MySpace folks opted for growth at any costs. As a result, we end up with the buggy, unreliable usability nightmare that is MySpace today. Now, it’s assumed, the programmers and sysadmins are scrambling to play catchup.
This article pretty much confirms these assumptions. According to the article, MySpace started out as a ColdFusion-based project — and while ColdFusion is ridiculously easy to program, any developer can tell you it’s got a reputation (deserved or not) for being a little slow and resource-heavy on the performance scale. So as they’ve grown, MySpace has been moving to Microsoft’s ASP.Net and relying on emulators to port some of the older code over.
One can’t really blame MySpace for such logic. It’s the kind of hot-air logic that propelled companies like Pets.com to the stratosphere back in the ’90s and made a ton of people oodles and oodles of cash. It’s Web 1.0 thinking. Using such Web 1.0 thinking, MySpace has quickly vaulted to become the most visited site on the Internet and gotten snatched up by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. in the process.
But as a result, they’ve built on an unsustainable foundation. They’ve made the classic gamble that short-term gain will trump long-term stability. And like so many Web 1.0 companies that came before them, MySpace is headed for a big, clumsy fall. Here’s why.
- Easy come, easy go. The base audience for MySpace consists of teenagers and folks in their twenties. That’s not to say this is the only demographic using MySpace, but that’s the core audience. These people flocked to the service for the same reasons young people flock to anything: it was new, it was cool, it was free, and everyone they knew was doing it. Give them an alternative that’s newer, cooler, better functioning, and more reliable — not to mention backed by big corporate dollars — and they’ll flock there just as quickly.
- Insecurity. Recently someone came up with the grand idea of distributing malicious code through a security vulnerability in embedded QuickTime videos. Folks have been taking advantage of CSS and HTML quirks to hack MySpace almost since the place began. More and more people are complaining about hacked profiles and hijacked identities. MySpace has demonstrated time and again that they’re behind the curve when it comes to security. So I think it’s highly likely that at some point in the near future, we’ll see a series of successful crippling attacks on MySpace that will send people running in a panicky exodus.
- Slowing pace of innovation. Adapt or die, that’s the unofficial motto of the Internet. And unlike, say, Google, which continues to pump out features and applications by the gallon, MySpace has remained largely sedentary for the past year. They released a lamentable, old-school IM client and better video integration, but otherwise the system is pretty much the same as it was 18 months ago. As MySpace’s technical problems grow and their folks spend more and more time just keeping up with demand, they’re going to fall even further behind.
Here’s the problem: MySpace is an abomination. Nothing works. The things that do work are poorly designed and shoddily implemented. Here’s just a small sampling of problems I’ve been having: