Sean Parker: Facebook Should Not Have Won, MySpace Blew It | Hacker News Reader

Sean Parker: Facebook Should Not Have Won, MySpace Blew It

fastcompany.com

10 pointsAndrewWarner10 comments

And now the network effects on facebook are way stronger than they ever were on myspace, they would have to really screw up privacy(a lot more than they have) to lose to another network in the foreseeable future because I don't think they would lose on engineering given the team they have assembled.

I agree that Facebook could easily screw up on privacy but I don't think they could lose like MySpace lost. If Facebook were to screw up, where would people go? Assuming MySpace, Friendster, etc. are already a lost cause.

I think it's pretty simple.

Myspace was basically just a simple webpage maker that let you "friend" other "webpages".

Facebook was an actual social network where you could find people.

With myspace if you didn't know someone's myspace account, you couldn't find them. With facebook, all you needed to have was either your high school name, college class, or your past employer, and you could connect/reconnect with people.

That's not true, people I hadn't talked to in years found me on Myspace. It was pretty trivial through friends of friends.

And not building in simple search (rather than trying too hard to monetize through Google) would constitute blowing it.

Myspace is trashy. That's all there is to it. They gave everyone full ability to do whatever they want with their pages, and ordinary people make terrible design decisions. Facebook gave everyone a standard template and told them they weren't allowed to fuck it up - which meant that people could just socialize instead of laughing at the gaudiness of it all.

They could solve this by setting a preference where it hides many of the rationalizations and gives a standard look. Why they don't do something simple like that is just their mistake. Not really sure if they care.

"Why they don't do something simple like that is just their mistake"

I think all of the customization started from them just not sanitizing input. People realized they could customize their page, inject javascript, etc and then that just became an expect part of MySpace. If they removed that now there would probably be little reason for many of the users still there to stay.

That's a symptom, not a cause. MySpace saw Facebook coming. I remember a quote from Rupert Murdoch in 2006-2007 saying that MySpace was losing to Facebook.

There are a million ways they could have used their position to crush Facebook, but they (a) didn't have a strong engineering culture and (b) were focused strongly on revenue over growth and product.

I remember a "joking" quote from a MySpace exec where he said they don't mind error pages, because it gives them the chance to serve more ad impressions!

No intelligent person I know would want to work at MySpace, while Facebook successfully overcame its early stigma as a "toy website" and is now one of the best places for engineers in Silicon Valley.

MySpace's stupid product decisions were a consequence of these underlying problems.

Anyone know where we can get the full talk? I'd like to see Jack Dorsey and Ashton Kutcher's reactions.

I'd ask for Sean Parker's MySpace URL, but it's apparent he's never actually used the site if he thinks that they should have "won" over Facebook.

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