Web 2.0 is great for webmasters -It lets them do all the work and Myspace is right they did start off Web 2.0

http://webiztoday.com - Web2.0 Markting
-Jack

MySpace is god awful. A few years down the road this idiotic fad will be over, then what MySpace? Stop bragging about nothing. You have no clear indication that this site will continue it’s popularity at the current rate. They diss YouTube so much, yet they completely copied it with their own video hosting service within MySpace? Right. Screw you MySpace, I’m sick of 1995 designs showing up again on the web.

A pretty bold statement that’s for sure! I think some of these Web 2.0 companies helped MySpace grow as well.

myspace - a high quality product
I figure ISPs are also only parasites that only have customers because they want to surf myspace all day.

biofusion, I completely agree with you. MySpace sucks so bad, it is just not tolerable.

The only reason why it is so big is because it has the majority market share, and people use social sites because everyone else is using them. This itself was kickstarted by their spamming ways.

Personally, I myself could never start a generic social network such as MySpace, one that appeals to “everyone”. It’s just irresponsible, given the fact that so many children have been abused and taken advantage of as a result of that, and other social networks like it.

I could not have that on my head, and frankly, MySpace is a parent’s worse nightmare. This is another issue though.

I have two things to say about myspace. Let me start off with the technical side:

Myspace as a site is quite bad. We have all seen the scaling issues due to the hodge podge of coldfusion, asp, and IIS. (Not trying to start a flame war, but the fact is, it [myspace] doesn’t scale ) Once the American teen population realizes that it can’t customize their myspace “page” how they want, due to the commercial lock-ins, they are going to be mad. Hopefully this will increase the amount of users on facebook, especially after talk of open registration.

The last time I used myspace was to completely cover up all of the ads on the page and attempt to do it decently. (See my post here. ) It saddens me that simple stuff like that doesn’t spread. If people were covering up the ads, they would be getting rid of a source of income for myspace (granted, it violates the terms of service).

After I made that demo account, I realized that quite a few of the people on myspace are spam bots. That demo account gets bombarded with spam messages for adult chat rooms, spam sales, v1c0d1n, etc. Not to mention half of the people on the site are pedophiles, which leads me to my next rant.

The last time I was at the local public library, there were two guys that were in their mid to late thirties, sending teenage girls messages for at least three hours straight. One of them was still on the site when I left after the three hours. People really need to sit down and think about using that site…

~Cody
http://www.threadbound.com

wow. arrogance cometh before the fall…

I love it!!! everyone hates myspace…

“it doesn’t scale”
“cover the ads and kill them”
“pages look awful”
“spam”

Why do people love to say things are bad/gonna disappear/fad?

Get real. Myspace is a hit.
Too bad none of us thought of it or did it.

You know.. The “design, look, feel, colors, etc” of myspace must be dismissed.. as someone who hated it from the beginning I now understand how most people feel that it allows them to be creative and personal with their profile.. unlike say facebook.. even though my eyes are pleased by the organization and simplicity of facebook… the profiles are not near as personal..

One thing I did hear that eased my mind is that the poor code structure of myspace is on purpose.. to how help cut down on screen scraping and tools that could pull people from myspace… that might be an acuse but it sounds good.. good for business too..

mySpace will AOL themselves if they pursue an isolationist path. Facebook and others who take an open approach will defeat the myspace beast by encouraging a 2.0-style community.

If I was working at Facebook or any of the other sites, I’d begin a “we’re widget-friendly” campaign now. And if security becomes an issue again (spyware/virusus), I’d create a certification program and make sure new widgets are reviewed and added quickly and nimbly.

Pulling up the ladder to the tree fort is not a good business strategy at this point. I hope Chernin is just talking out his ass, and the smart folks at Newscorp actually know what they are doing.

@Narendra, oh yeh, MySpace is going down alright. I can feel it - really.

The fact is, the MySpace guys (ex spammers) are not cutout for this new Web, that we call 2.0. Their ideas are bad, bad, bad, but because so many people feel locked into using the service (because their friends are using it), they can’t ever get any real sense of what works and what doesn’t.

I am confident that if asked, would MySpace users move to another network if their friends did, they would say Yes. Because that’s the point.

MySpace will be the failure story of the Web 2.0 era - I just hope people will remember that they were never “one of us”, that they were not a part of the Web 2.0 movement, and that it was this that led to their demise.

Yes Will, none of us thought to create a crappy site. MySpace was originally designed for bands, so obviously they didn’t even think the site would get this big.

MySpace is so badly setup it’s seriously beyond. Especially in the navigation side of things, the user interface is like stepping back 20 years. Everything is scattered and it’s really hard to manage things. Then I have to wait a couple minutes for pages to load with glitter images, 2 songs playing at once, and 5 movies that turn on at the same time. There’s not one useful feature MySpace has, there are plenty of better alternatives.

Get real. MySpace blows.

@Will:

“Too bad none of us thought of it or did it.”

Eh? There were social networks before MySpace, and will be after. MySpace has not innovated…if you look into how they got their userbase, you’ll understand. (Spam.)

This blog really is for Web guys, and tech enthusiasts…can we please keep it that way? Not to be rude.

@Tim:

I assure you, their poor code is not good for business. They can save millions upon millions in bandwidth costs every year, if they just coded properly.

I’m not being rude.. .just when I read these comments, they seem a bit like sour grapes… The site does look “odd” and is down often, but it is a success… I wish I put something out like that, and had it be a rocket like myspace has.

Myspace will go down in time. They have failed to build the priceless loyalty needed to retain users once a superior alternative emerges. Moreover, they give incentive to the folks building complementary apps to go elsewhere or create competing apps.

I’ve been on myspace damn near since inception. My friends have grown bored with it. We don’t interact nearly as often and we never visited the advertisers in the first place. Eventually a greatly superior alternative (facebook?) will come along and the users will convert in mass.

@Chris

I agree with you. I think that once Facebook opens up to the masses, I will migrate over. Even if this means having only a few contacts. If I’m getting a better service I’m all up for it. MySpace has nothing unique to offer, it’s a total mess.

Lets face it there are 3 things about myspace that made it work:

1) Half-naked teenagers and folks who like that sort of thing
2) Music
3) Eveyone got their URL! Yep, before myspace people had to figure out how to find other people. Given that most folks can’t spell, that was a big problem. My space solved this problem by getting rid of URL.

Web 2.0 elegance, drag and drop, clever responsive UI, this is not what most people want. Look at my space pages they are not ugly, they are VERY ugly. In fact today I was shown a preview of another new social network. Its beautiful, and the moment I saw it, I knew its not going to work.

So why are we surprised, that MySpace is acting like a monopoly? Remember the one we had for sometime called MSFT? It took sometime to dethrone that one…

Alex

http://www.adaptiveblue.com

All of the mega-hit social netoworks will eventually fade away. That just’s what happens to anything popular. It will be the networks that cater to niches that last.

Facebook needs to hold its horses. It should expand its brand with other products instead of trying to battle myspace.

think about the two points though..

No scraping of profiles.. (keep the business you have)
- no “come to my myspace look alike.. our wizard will move your profile”
- no extra bandwidth from other apps
- no ability to mass download peoples profiles (helpes keep the bad people out)

Whats wrong with that.. and I bet its worth the cost of bandwidth to keep this many people on board.

Someone just has to create a myspace thats actually does something on the next level of social interaction. It can’t be that hard.. and the navigation could be a hundred times better…

Just remember.. people on myspace (who arn’t geeks) think of their profile as their life online.. and by saying you hate their glitter and videos you would be more directly interpreted as hating their… well… life.. and thats not a very nice thing.. surely not the accusers intention..

myspace has brought a whole different group of computer users online.. the “social” type that could care less about computers.. not a bad thing but it shows that myspace has something special…

dblones: well I hope they don’t fade away.. we have turned a page in personal interation online in a large scale.. myspace its self might go away but we need to creat an atmosphere of different people together in a common place.. without predijuce

Hmmm. This has triggered strong emotions from people.

Arrogant statement: maybe
Correct statement: definately

Clearly YouTube and others have used MySpace to bootstrap their services. No one can deny that. Whether it is for the overall good of the industry that MySpace allows an open policy, that’s clearly an open debate.

@Paul: MySpace as poster child of “Web2.0 failure”?!? I think not after being acquired for $580mm in *cash*. That’s what %90 of Web2.0 Founders are looking for: that big acquisition check. Don’t be so naive and take those CEO’s bait. They just want your traffic to sell off for their retirement funds. It’s the same old story…

Let MySpace think it has a monopoly on teenagers. That type of arrogance is exactly how they will lose it.

MySpace is a fad for 14 yr old girls. MySpace will pull a Friendster within 2 years. Mark my words.

MySpace grew because of it’s openness. That was the difference between it and friendster - the loosely connected bits. Don’t you just love it when they get bought and the corporate boys say “Well, first thing we have to do is put up some walls to stop these people leeching offa us. Thieves!” What part of community don’t they understand? Community is about connections.

Some good info here;
http://www.startup-review.com/.....-start.php

BTW, Zapr is (trying to be) one of those leeches.

Cooqy has just completed yet another technical workaround to the MySpace Flash “security” that disables dynamic linking to other web pages from widgets.

Back in July Cooqy was first to find an exploit that allowed Flash widgets to open popup windows, after MySpace implemented “security” measures that had blocked popup windows from Flash widgets. MySpace quickly fixed the hole we found within 24 hours of it being reported, as reported here: http://mashable.com/2006/07/31.....ce-update/.

The new workaround uses a combination of a Flash widget and an HTML button to allow the redirection of the browser to specific eBay items being advertised. We do not anticipate that MySpace can defeat our new solution, unless they should choose to not allow any Flash widgets at all on profiles.

You can test drive the workaround at http://www.myspace.com/cooqy

Merchants are actively exploring new ways to reach customers, especially on MySpace. Widget providers like Cooqy will continue to innovate in spite of MySpace’s attempts to stifle competition and suffocate a thriving widget community.

Robert Yeager
Founder
Cooqy

“I’m sick of 1995 designs showing up again on the web”

amen!

This is such great news for the “Web 2.0″ companies. MySpace is broadcasting to the world that they don’t “Get it”. They are behaving exactly as the big old-telecom companies are with “It’s my pipe”.

Who is going to win? The users of course, as competitors (me) scramble to offer the fleeing MySpacians what MySpace won’t give them anymore.

The Om Malik article was in Business 2.0, not Business Week.

>>Chernin’s statements may make business sense, but they don’t bode well for innovation.

No, they don’t make business sense. For example, YouTube videos embedded on a myspace page increase the value of that myspace page. “Yes, but we’ll replace all those videos with myspace videos!!” Perhaps they’ll let the market decide. Or block them. Which makes bad business sense: http://tinyurl.com/f2c73

Beautiful design: Flickr
Beautiful code: Digg
A world of choice: Youtube
For everything else there’s Myspace…

@biofusion: MySpace fills a void. Sure the site could have been designed and implemented a little better - but the concept of social networking MySpace was shooting for isn’t an awful one

Weird, people posting comments here were trying to defend that MySpace was Web 2.0 before and I was argueing with them that it’s not. Now that they say they aren’t, all of the lambasting comes out. Typical.

All this wonderful debete over Web 2.0. Personally I don’t care how a site works, only that it is intuitive and fun! I won’t waste my time on those old 1995 website designs. I perfer to stick in the new and more fun interfaces. (Whether they are Web 2.0 or not.).

I’m very curious to see how the Avarice: GE website site comes out personally. (http://www.playavarice.com/). - The concept looks neat but will it be fun? Guess I’ll just have to wait and see.

Jim Holts

Ahhh, now *this* is the Web 2.0 echo chamber that makes the culture so entertaining!

Don Wilson: You were right all along. MySpace was *never* Web 2.0 — everyone saying that it was were just desperately trying to glom onto a real success story so they could say that there’s actual substance behind Web 2.0 instead of just a bunch of hype.

Maybe someone should actually explain why Web 2.0 would benefit MySpace or its users, because right now, the percentage of MySpace users who give a shit about Web 2.0 and other buzzwords is hovering right around 0.0 percent. “Oh, but if only they realized all that they’re missing out on, they’d fall in love with Web 2.0!!” Because we all know how Facebook users really embraced those recent changes that Web 2.0 fanboys thought were so great, right?

“Those dumb Facebook users, they don’t understand how cool this stuff is. They should just take a deep breath and relax.” Hah, and the *MySpace* guy is the one getting accused of arrogance.

It’s a wonder so many people here have their panties in a bunch about the whole thing anyway, seeing how they apparently can’t stand anything about MySpace. The 20 or so posts decrying what a horrible site MySpace is doesn’t sound *anything* like dorks in high school sitting in the back of the class snarking on all the people who didn’t invite them to the happening party on the weekend. No, really.

Shame to hear that MySpace doesn’t scale, though. It’s only by far the largest site of its type, I’m sure it can’t hold a candle to the latest kewl Ruby on Rails site with 50,000 users (45,000 of which haven’t returned since the day they signed up after seeing it mentioned on TechCrunch).

Was Om Malik’s piece in Business Week? Funny…I read it in Business 2.0. Enjoy your blog.

Perfect comment, n00b. Your reply to my post is exactly what I meant.

I gaurentee you that every single person that hates MySpace has a myspace profile and checks it fairly regularly.

Doesn’t really matter if the MySpace is poorly programmed or the security sucks. The point is - it attracts users. What is the meaning of Web 2.0 anyways? Building something technologically innovative or building something that attracts a large crowd of users?

I would define Web 2.0 as building something where tons of people flock to it to the point that you’re ranked up there on Alexa…myspace and youtube did it.

It’s always very interesting to see how and where the open source innovation model evolves once a product or concept is sticky enough for a corporate backer or buyer to invest heavily into it. From a business perspective all News Corp is really doing is vertically integrating Myspace to compete for all their current partner sites’ traffic.

I created a myspace profile more than 3 years ago. After adding 3 friends, I didn’t log in again because I hate how it looks.

With all the myspace talk, I logged in again after 3 years to check how it looks. Guess what? It didn’t change a bit.

@DwarfHam

So all sites that build massive amounts of traffic are Web 2.0?

That’s a pretty poor, and in my opinion, stupid, definition.

Undoubtedly MySpace is very successful in terms of its current userbase. However, Chernin might want to cut back on some of the public arrogance. Granted, Chernin’s statements weren’t arrogant so much towards users but more so in a general sense. However, if users also start to perceive MySpace as becoming arrogant then that would be a mistake by MySpace. If anything, Chernin would be well served to see how Zuckerberg’s initial arrogance this past week with Facebook snowballed pretty quickly before Facebook did some heavy duty damage control. MySpace is in a dominant position right now but with so many sites popping up it’s really hard to say how the social networking landscape will play out down the road. Web 2.0 so heavily relies on users for content which works really well when the “viral” adoption is in high gear but a userbase can just as quickly go in the opposite direction if sentiment changes. Sure, it may not be that easy to change websites if all your friends are on MySpace but MySpace would be foolish to get so arrogant. MySpace is on top of the mountain but their place on that perch isn’t a sure thing.

Bold comments about MySpace. Hopefully NewsCorp will insist that MySpace add some structure and better talent to their engineering team and start running their operation like other successful software companies. With the addition of some legitimate talent, MySpace should be able to address the problems of scalability and reliability and ultimately provide a better service to its userbase.

I like all of the buzz flouting around all of the cool new web 2.0 companies. It’s good to see the money being pumped back into the software market.

Boris Epstein
http://www.bincsearch.com

n00b nailed it. Beautiful. This is business, people — user data tells you what you need to know.

Re n00b’s point - MySpace actually likes Web 2.0 just fine - they just want to do everything themselves, it’s the REST of Web 2.0 they don’t need.

@ Kyle

So what is your definition of “web 2.0″? Who cares if you build an almighty software or a great site that has great coding when no one is going to use it

Maybe in geek definition it’s building that almighty software but to someone in business, it’s building that next innovation that is going to attract users…the whole web 2.0 hype definition depends on who you ask

web 2.0 or whatever is only web 2.0 when VCs start funding their butts off for companies out of the blue..in hope that what they are funding will attract enough users to sell or make them money…

you can build great software and not attract as many users as “sucky coding” such as myspace which attracts alot of people

@ Marshall

I wouldn’t say that MySpace is trying to do everything themselves. Look at the deal with Snocap for music downloads, the huge deal with Google for serving ads and search. It’s not like MySpace wants to build it’s own contextual advertising network (which it could on that traffic). The difference is that MySpace is trying to bring new services to their customers, pages, and business that bring them revenue as well as delivering good experiences for their customers. Is it unreasonable to suggest that MySpace gets a cut rather than making lots of other companies successful on their shoulders?

MySpacer, that is a very fair comment to make. That same logic would justify a commercial API right? i think your comment deserves serious consideration.

The MySpace founders were a shit-eating blood-thursy asshole-spammer startup in LA. They were very smart, using PowerMTA + many random colos/dedicated servers/open relays, etc. Highly techno-unethical + hard work = ~$600 million.

This is a megacorp talking from the mouth of MySpace, now. They will fuck up whatever it was that made MySpace work. Now is the time for a competitor to strike. The MySpace backlash will start at some point, and it will likely be triggered by something slightly better (and much more stable).

Definitely the US users will move on to something newer and better, the question is only when and what percentage leave.

@n00b
Re: What they provide
The widget companies, MySpace code generaters, etc companies do provide a service to MySpace. They fill a gap in what MySpace provides. It is a mistake for MySpace to one-by-one replace and then lock-out the companies that helped build them.

What do those hundreds of shunned companies do now? They need an outlet, some new large host support and feed from, in a web 2.0 symbiotic relationship.

Maybe.

Wow Norman, I can only imagine what the private thoughts you’ve kept inside about this be.