Zuckerberg Tells Startup School: MySpace Had Chance To Succeed(thenextweb.com)
thenextweb.com
Zuckerberg Tells Startup School: MySpace Had Chance To Succeed
http://thenextweb.com/facebook/2012/10/20/zuckerberg-to-startup-school-myspace-was-great-earlier-on-but-felt-threatened-by-facebook/
7 comments
Soundcloud > 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).
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).
User'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.
Ben 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.
Friendster was more popular than FB, and worked great, until they deployed a catastrophic JSP rewrite that was 10x slower than before and everyone left.
To clarify, their system was Java/JSP running on Tomcat, and they rewrote it in 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!).
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!).
Was 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-t...
Wow, didn't know that they rewrote from PHP to JSP. Got any articles/blog post to share? I'm curious.
And 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.
Zuckerberg is arrogant and full of himself... I want to see the new myspace succeed...
Tired 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.
So did Friendster. But they both f'd it up. Facebook has held on ... so far.
Anyone know when a video of the talk will be online? I missed the livestream.
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.