Culture & Technology 16 Aug 2006 11:54 am
Investments MySpace will need to make. Soon.
I should start out by saying that I don't like MySpace. I think it's the Mos Eisley of the Internet ecosystem. Basic ugliness aside, it does have its uses, much as I hate to admit it. But this morning it took me nearly two minutes to log in.
And this time, my Internet connection was not at fault.
You better bet your ass that MySpace will need to improve their usability now that they've got some $900 million in cash coming from Google with their new advertising and search deal. Maybe they can invest in some better infrastructure. Google will want the most for their money, and I bet they'll be putting some pressure on MySpace and its parent, News Corp, to make it happen.
You'll also notice that many movie studios are creating MySpace sites rather than registering their own domain names as was the fad for the last 3 years. They're recognizing the value of social networking: friends tend to share interests which drives success. Dane Cook would be the penultimate poster child for this phenomenon. Do you think the movie studios are going to stand for unreliable service in the long run when they're shelling out for that space? (You didn't think they got to play for free, did you?) I can assure you that they won't. Money is exchanged for a certain level of service, implicit or explicit, and while I don't doubt that they're given their own server or three, what good does it do when the same users they're looking to connect with and sell to cannot even login to participate?
MySpace is housed in the Garland Building in Los Angeles, a building which is notoriously plagued by power outages and poor fail-over systems. This is the reason MySpace went down for half a day a little while back. It might be in their best interest to move to some place that isn't plagued by rolling blackouts — even in a post-Enron power market — as a precautionary measure. Last I checked, the DirectNIC datacenter in New Orleans survived Hurricane Katrina without too much trouble.
Let's face it: LA ain't cheap when it comes to living and/or doing business. $900 million buys more in middle America than it does in Southern California. (Ignoring, for now, the costs associated with a relative dearth of knowledge workers in places outside the Coasts.)
More important than changing datacenters, though, is MySpace's apparent lack of server capacity and/or poor back-end infrastructure. If MySpace is going to be taken seriously a major Internet player — and Rupert Murdoch has bet $500 million that they are — they're going to need to start acting like a grown-up company. That means fixing basic useability issues by building a grown-up infrastructure and a more robust user platform.
What do I mean by a more robust user platform? Well, I like to open multiple tabs, especially when a site is mind-bogglingly slow, like MySpace. The idea is that if I can read one page while others are loading in the background, I'll spend more time on your site because I don't leave in frustration. It's a more efficient use of my time. As it stands now, I can't do that, because most user profiles have music playing in the background, and more than one open profile with embedded music means a browser crash. And that, my friends, is worse than simply being slow.
Two minutes to perform a simple login? Absurd.
Image from Busted Tees.
