The Man Behind MySpace

An anonymous reader writes "The Guardian has an article looking at the life of Chris DeWolfe, a co-founder of the popular MySpace community site. The article details some of his previous work history, and the thought process that went into creating the site." From the article: "They pinched the best bits of everybody else's sites (Craigslist, Evite, MP3.com) and put them together in a manner that made sense. Unconcerned with technological bells and whistles and geeky one-upmanship, they instead set out to appeal to the people they knew and, beyond them, the youth tribes of middle America."

Behind myspace? eew

We want to know about Tom, the face of myspace.

"Review Pictures" job would get old really fast

From the article: 'Perhaps the biggest threat to MySpace is the PR fallout over safety ... Those "challenges" are being met "head on", he says, including hiring extra staff to monitor the 4-5m photos uploaded every day'

That job has to be about as exciting as watching grass grow [watching-grass-grow.com] but let assume you can sustain a review rate of one picture/second. In an 8 hour day, this is just under 30,000 pictures a day per employee. And to handle the 4-5 million/day, you'd therefore need about 200 employees (counting vacation and holidays) doing nothing but looking at MySpace pictures - yikes!

Peer Review

And that is where Peer Review comes into play. Obviously, the amount of images uploaded far outstrips their ability to monitor them. Thus, they most likely only focus on those pictures that have been reported to be inappropriate. They may also actively check the most popular profiles since an inappropriate picture on one of them would have the widest reaching impact.

Re:"Review Pictures" job would get old really fast

In an 8 hour day, this is just under 30,000 pictures a day per employee.

I pretty much do this now in my free time. Might as well get paid for it...

Sounds like

They have alot planned. Now I wonder if they are going to change their website look. 3 years of the same plain, cluttered with tables, website. Yuck!. No wonder all the users sites look like Frontpage sites from the late 90's. Trying to style with

table table table table tr td

is always fun isn't it! And yes, who the F@#& is this DeWolfe guy, we want to hear about Tom!

Oh, yeah, they didn't care about any of that.

Unconcerned with technological bells and whistles and geeky one-upmanship ...or, y'know, testing their code or any kind of quality assurance.

I continue to be amazed at the amount that Myspace.com breaks. Messaging will sometimes go down for weeks at a time. The "chat" feature has never really worked. Pages just randomly come up with errors. And not to mention the spam and the security errors. $586 million dollars, and they can't build a decent site?

I guess that's what they get for creating a massive website using Coldfusion.

Why would they care? They just got half a B...

Would you bother fixing bugs if someone just gave you $586 million for a bug-riddled pile of crap? I sure wouldn't. I suspect the QA process at myspace goes something like this...

Minimum Wage Support Monkey: "Umm, sir, we're getting lots of bug reports from users. They say chat doesn't work, and some of their pages have been down since Thursday."

Myspace Co-Owner: "Well, I'm busy drinking fine cognac and sailing my brand new 120ft yacht across the Pacific with a crew of 46 beautiful Thai girls right now. It'll have to wait until I get back sometime next year..."

myspace.com url

The article says myspace was founded in September 2003, but the myspace.com url existed before then. Before it was converted to a social networking site, myspace.com was a free online storage site.

The Redefinition Coalition

They pinched the best bits of everybody else's sites and put them together in a manner that made sense.

I'm going to send these guys a few pages out of the dictionary so they can start to figure out where they went wrong.

Re:The Redefinition Coalition

When I skimmed the summary, my mind re-wrote that line as "they pinched out Myspace from the best bits of everybody else's sites." I think the excretory analogy works better.

Proof

Myspace is just another proof that quality is always what is important.

My impression after seeing Myspace for the first time was it was like the early days of web page design. The users were more atrracted to the cheap "gee whiz" stuff. Inline audio and video took the place of flashing/scrolling text and huge animated gifs.

I have some friends that like to use Myspace so I check it out every once in a while. It is still a horrible site from a snobby tech geek point of view. To others, it is a great thing.

Myspace is bullshit. Sorry.

I fucking hate Myspace. I am sorry, but everybody on the site seems to love to fuck with their background adding music, pictures and other bullshit making it first of all impossible view to their page correctly, and second the annoy the living hell out of you by playing the same music track continuously. Yes, I know you can "pause" the music, but so many people seem to fuck up their own pages that the text boxes are all screwed up and crap gets moved all over the page. A friend from college asked me join Myspace and hook up with him. I tried to add him as a friend, but his page formatting is whacked and I cannot find his contact box ANYWHERE on the page, so I just gave up.

My friends on Livejournal don't have this stupid problem.

Re:Myspace is bullshit. Sorry.

Saw a good comment recently, that MySpace is nothing new, just Geocities 9 years on.

That is an excellent observation.

I am all for people experimenting with the web and making their Myspace page their own, but I assume that people would desire substance over style. If someone like me, a fairly experienced web and computer user, can't even navigate your Myspace page and complete a simple task like making a friends request what's the point in even having a page? It's the triumph of superficiality over usabilty and in that regard Myspace is far worse than any Geocities page ever was.

I guess I can't blame Myspace completely for this phenomenon as it seems to be an attitude that is pervading our entire society: it's better to look good than actually be good. Mspace seems to reinforce that message.

Re:That is an excellent observation.

I guess I can't blame Myspace completely for this phenomenon as it seems to be an attitude that is pervading our entire society: it's better to look good than actually be good. Mspace seems to reinforce that message.

Well, why do you think teens are flocking to it in droves? You think they care more about substance than style? They (and by "they", I don't mean Web 2.0 geeks, I mean the unwashed masses) love it because Myspace is the closest approximation we've seen yet of the (junior) high school experience. Mucking with layout with editors, tacking up animated GIFs and music bits is the not much different than putting stickers or writing band names all over their notebooks and lockers. Sure, it's clunky but isn't everything at that age?

But the real genius of Myspace is the friends system. Friendster missed the mark by making it all-inclusive (if you're one person's friend, you're everyone's friend.) With Myspace, you have to actively collect them (or be so popular that people are asking you.) The friends system is not that much different than the little cliques that form in school-- and the ability to "deny" lets you deal out the sting of rejection with as much pain as in real life. And the "top 8" is like choosing who to sit with at the lunch table (forget the "interests" section, you can gather the most sense of who a person is by seeing who their best friends are.)

Of course it's all very juvenile-- but it's for kids. And for adults who stil have that junior high mentality.

Re:Myspace is bullshit. Sorry.

Myspace is nothing like Geocities. Geocities let people design decent web sites. Myspace just forces people to use crappy web technology giving them no choice but to have crappy websites unless they send a significant portion of their life hacking the system. That comparison is an insult to geocities.

Ummm, I think they forgot to mention someone...

FRIENDSTER! Well, the article mentions it in passing, but doesn't give it the credit it probably deserves.

I first learned about social networking (SN) -- specifically Friendster -- from an NPR story. Checked it out, but didn't get an invite right away. However, discovered a slew of alternate SN sites -- Myspace among them. Thought it was a bit crude -- but didn't need an invite to join (IIRC) and you were immediately hooked into the entire network through our old friend Tom.

And that, in a nutshell, is why I think it succeeded. Its utter lack of discrimination. The keys to its success?

- unrestricted access (didn't need an invite, access to everyone on site)
- much, much raunchier content (i.e. photos) with little or no censorship (at least in the early days)
- affordable web hosting for your brother's tacky gararge band
- and a free crappy pop song with every page load!

I don't know if Friendster was the first SN site, but I think it deserves credit for launching the phenomenon. I still feel it's a superior site and remained truer to the spirit of SN longer. But principles don't win you big corporate buyouts, alas.

I will always think of Myspace as the Betamax to Friendster's VHS.

Bah!

My question for him would be:

"Why on God's green Earth did you take circa-1994 web design philosophy and foist it upon the youth of the world? We got rid of that crap for a reason, you blithering twit!"

Yeah, because craigslist is bleeding edge

"Unconcerned with technological bells and whistles and geeky one-upmanship"

It doesn't take much to out do craigslist. I mean, even a CSS style sheet with a few lines could improve that website greatly. Good to see nobody is striving to outdo craigslist, we wouldn't want creativity and innovation running rampant on the web now, would we.

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Yeah, I know, mod me down. My Karma is good today.

MySpace Always Breaks My Computer to a Halt

Honestly, if you ever try browsing that site, with all the animations, videos, graphics, and assorted crap, those pages will bring your computer to an instant crawl, even a powerful one. Also, you'll get nonstop error messages no matter what you're trying to do. Technologically, Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe must have flunked Software Engineering 101.

OMG

LOUD SHITTY MUSIC LOUD SHITTY MUSIC LOUD SHITTY MUSIC LOUD SHITTY MUSIC

Welcome to the text edition of Myspace.

Tranparent CSS with 80 layers makes it impossible to scroll down and turn off the sound of a teenage boy in women's pants getting kicked in the balls while screaming about the girl who left him after four days of romance. Pictures of people using oblique camera angles to disguise acne and general fugliness hover above links to people singing pop songs in front of their webcams, representing the extent of their creative ability.

Enjoy your stay! Tell Rupert that 580 million was SO worth it.

Proof that luck is a huge factor

MySpace tapped into youth culture in a way that cannot be planned for or predicted. The technology was adequate, and the kids were apparently looking for something like MySpace. Don't be surprised if some new service displaces MySpace in a while. After all, youngins have fickle taste.

It's worth how much?

Those who obsess over whether MySpace can be profitable on its own terms may be missing the point ... it is already worth its weight in gold.

I'm not an HTML expert or anything, but roughly how much does myspace.com weigh?

Re:It's worth how much?

I'm not an HTML expert or anything, but roughly how much does myspace.com weigh?

Two Libraries of Congress - filled entirely with obscene crayon drawings and angst-filled teenage diaries.

Yes, weep for the future of humanity. Weep for us all.

Then blog about it.

Friendster?

So, I notice how the article refers to Friendster as a "passing fad" but doesn't mention that MySpace "copied" Friendster feature for feature in the beginning.

MySpace does have its uses

Joy of Tech [geekculture.com]

New features we could really use!

1) Pedo Probability Calculator
PPC
Tool which would calculate the chance of your new online friend being a Pedo! You would be able to mark real friends as ones you have met in Meatspace, and the PPC would calculate the odds on ones you haven't. Factors would include:
-Few, or no people marking the profile as having been met in Meatspace. This one would be easy to get around by making multiple profiles, but improvements could be made.
-How often their user photo turn up on other profiles, and other websites. (You know, how instead of using a real picture, Pedos will use a picture of some other girl they found online. Pedos aren't the only ones who do it. I don't know how many dating site profiles I've seen where the girl uses pictures of Keyra Agustina's butt and pretend's it's her own)

2) Being able to view pages in Default layout, as opposed to the layouts choosen by the owner of the profile.
Too many idiots think having using a picture of a car as their tile background is cool. Too many idiots pick fonts, sizes, and colors that make their pages unreadable without highlighting the text. Too many idiots have a thing for exclaimation mark strings so long that only a 3200 X 1800 resolution monitor could display them. Wouldn't it be great to just view thier pages without such silliness... who are we kidding... anyone who does do this probably has nothing useful to say anyway...

3)Spelling and Grammar regulations.
Internet Shorthand is acceptable in one place, and only one place. Online games. WHen you need to communicate fast, you can use as many commonly accepted acronyms as you want. When you have time to actually compose your thoughts, there is no excuse for typing like an idiot. If you've ever played Kingdom of Loathing, then you know they have people complete a simple english test before they let them into the chat-room. I say we do the same thing on mySpace!

MySpace lock-in

"If you have 100 friends and 99 of them are on MySpace you can't just go over to another website and expect them all to follow."

If that's correct, there's only one winner in this business. On the other hand, that sounds like the early days of e-mail, when MCImail and GEnie didn't interconnect. Does Myspace do things to make external links hard?

I think we all owe a debt of gratitude to this man

I think we nerds, the whole world over, owe a debt of gratitude to this man, and here's why:

He helped create a place on the 'Net, where all the clueless people can gather. They don't need to know anything at all about computers, and that's a GOOD thing: They'll stay in their MySpace corral, and think themselves elite. It's a self-reinforcing thing - the more idiots that gather on MySpace, the more inclined that ALL of them are to stay there.

And the rest of us won't have to put up with them.
THIS is a GOOD THING.

We should rejoice, and be happy, that MySpace exists: It is a "pocket Universe" on the 'net, that draws in all the clueless.

Apples and prunes

They pinched the best bits of everybody else's sites (Craigslist, Evite, MP3.com)

Comparing myspace to craigslist is a travesty of the highest order. Myspace has done to the Internet what AOL did to cyberspace many years ago: Provided the keys to the kingdom to the lowest common denominator in terms of technical savvy. Luckily, the mindless damage caused by myspace is restricted largely to myspace.com.

Myspace is so....

...web 2.0

geek elitism

most of the pages look shite.

it ignores standards.

but how many other sites will get you to [myspace.com] the top of the charts [myspace.com]?

Greasemonkey can save Myspace

I have to admit that the blaring music videos and songs with which people fill up their Myspace pages almost made me leave the whole thing but Greasemonkey saved the day. Using a potent combination of scripts I no longer see any: - formatting - media - ads - annoying sections like "Cool Person of the Day" If someone wants to really push Greasemonkey into the limelight, I would suggest pointing out these scripts to the millions of Myspace users.

The man really behind MySpace...

...is now Rupert Murdoch

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Murdoch [wikipedia.org]

BE AFRAID!

This story is PR bull

I'm getting really tired of this PR stories DeWolfe and Anderson keep spinning. It is complete and total b.s. A little taste of truth about DeWolfe [trentl.com]. Once my next article hits the full truth will be known.

People Aggregator coming soon

Keep your eye on People Aggregator [peopleaggregator.org] (you can give them your email for updateds) - it's going to be a sort of meta social networking tool, with the ability to create "ad hoc" networks of your own, as well as manage all of your other social networking (myspace, flickr, etc.).

I think it's going to be the ultimate in social networking - one place to manage all your blogs and profiles.

My hope is that the universality of this tool will eventually draw people off of myspace and into corporate-free networks of their own.

The man is bound to fail

Chris DeWolfe is bound to fail due to his lack of decency. The article lists the following as part of his CV:

1997 vice president of marketing, FBBH
1999 vice president of marketing, Xdrive Technologies
2001 chief executive, ResponseBase
2002 president, ResponseBase Marketing

His experiences involved email (read: spam) and pop-up marketing, as cited in the NY Times (archived behind stone wall at http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/23/business/yourmon ey/23myspace.html [nytimes.com]). Can you trust a spammer? Can you trust someone who made a living making popups?

No way. There is no way this guy can succeed. He is doomed to fail, not because he lacks any professional skills, luck, or foresight. But, rather, because he lacks common decency and will never be socially responsible in our society.

Want to know more about Tom?

[Tom] Anderson was in the creative department at Xdrive, in charge of advertisement design and later became an assistant in DeWolfe's marketing department. According to sources, while at Xdrive, Anderson rarely showered, spent an unusually high amount of time with DeWolfe, and took the bus everywhere despite the rumor that he was making an additional $5,000 a month from running a pornography website. However, no proof the porn website could be found. Most of this can be confirmed in a recent interview with Anderson on an LA radio station Indie 103.1. This article has some interesting information about both Tom and Chris DeWolfe. http://www.trentl.com/?name=News&file=article&sid= 50 [trentl.com]

Am I the only one who found MySpace's tech support

... actually good? When I sent in a complaint because the music players within the site didn't work in Opera 9 - they fixed it within a day or two.

The usual response I get from sites which have issues with Opera is "well, don't only, like, two percent of the population use Opera? lol, no point then!". Yes, Lionhead, fuck your forum.

MySpace And BBSs

The one thing that I see that myspace has brought back to us is a sense of community.

When I started getting on the internet I felt completely alone. I saw almost no one then internet that I knew. On the BBSs there was a community. Myspace has brought that back for me. I use it to keep in touch with people that I know personally all over the world. It is nice having pics of their friends that they may talk about when we chat or talk on the phone or whatever.

Also, it has really helped out with finding people that have simular interests that I would have never found, even in my local area.

yeah, it has its flaws, but damn, what doesn't?

I thank these people for giving back to the internet a sense of community
 

Look at alexa.com people

Myspace isn't on the way up, it's on the way down. Check alexa.com
The bell curve is heading towards the downslope.

He knows it. Vidilife.com seems to be on the uprise though. Anything the former Intermix/eUniverse guy Brad Greenspan touches seems to turn to gold, whether it's crap or not.

All the other social networking sites are on the way down and Greenspan's is on the way up. I run sitespaces.net and sell social networking software, so I'm pretty much on top of these types of things.

Greenspan has some secret and it has nothing to do with popularity.

Re:The man behind all the abductions...

The man who created the site causing more child abductions than AOL...

Don't you mean "more frivolous lawsuits by spoiled brats who willingly disobey the terms of service and lie about their age"?

Re:The man behind all the abductions...

A website does not cause child abductions. Get over this "OMG teh kiddies!!" bullshit and take some responsibility for yourself and your kids. Not only will they be safer, the world will be a better place for it.