3. ELI5: Why did Myspace fail?

ELI5: Why did Myspace fail?

I was working 'with' MySpace in 2006 and 2007. I can tell you how much MySpace sucked for us, at a hot startup that made flash widgets that could be embedded by users in their MySpace.

Our widgets were super popular and they were driving a ton of traffic your way. Then MySpace decides to block embedded flash widgets, with no reasonable warning. Wtf? We are good for you, you idiots! Luckily for us the users spontaneously revolted and forced MySpace to undo the change.

Shortly after, MySpace decides to block any outgoing links from embedded widgets. No warning. This killed half our functionality, and we had to scramble to implement fixes and workarounds. This change also hit YouTube hard. That is when they had to move their related videos from html links to the post-play grid of videos inside the video player itself.

Then Facebook opens up and releases their developer platform. We saw the writing on the wall and moved our efforts to Facebook. For a time we had the top app in almost every category. MySpace followed with their own developer platform. Developing apps for Facebook was a pain in the ass, with half assed undocumented APIs that would break backwards compatibility every release, and arbitrary TOS that were always changing on you. But compared to MySpace's dev platform, it was heaven.

The MySpace developer platform would just stop working at the worst time, version numbers meant nothing, regressions every release, simple issues that took weeks to fix.

The developer platform engineers were in San Francisco, close to our office. On more than one occasion we would call them on the phone and explain, line by line, how to fix an issue. One time I printed out a bug report and the code to fix the bug, and slipped it under their door.

We got the impression that the engineers were not very good, but maybe they were just not given the right tools.

We abandoned MySpace as soon as the majority of our users moved to Facebook.

Man I don't miss working with MySpace. Some of the most frustrating work ever.

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