Sometimes I imagine it to be fun to lead a company like MySpace or Yahoo. Something, which was once enormous and is still quite big but declining.
Imagine all the cruft, which amassed over the years and you could clean up. Killing the loss making properties, applying best practices to the profitable ones. Improving efficiency of all kind of processes. Of course, you would have to be some kind of dictator immune to all the politics. But imagine the manpower you would have at hand. A small boat is more agile, but once a big ship steers in the right direction …
I once read or watched an interview from a MySpace person doing SEO, who stated, that they increased their visibility in the SERPs by some high amount (forgot the exact), just by actually using sensible title tags. I find these kind of inefficiencies/potentials in big organizations fascinating and off-putting at the same time.
You would not make the same relative increases of value you could do by starting a new company, but the risk would be much lower and absolute value created could be about the same.
My first web dev job was at a company in that situation. Trust me when I say that would never happen. By the time a company reaches the position myspace is in they usually have a penny pinching CEO that sees engineering as an expense. The entire codebase is usually put in maintenance mode until there is a drop in ad revenue. That's when the board and CEO create a panic project to refresh the site or introduce a new gimmick to fight the decline. That usually happens once a year or so.
Little thought is given to efficiency or refactoring because the decision makers don't care about that. Everything eventually becomes about quick quarterly "wins" so that executive management can earn their bonuses. In practice this means if you can't plan, complete and show the project directly increased revenue or decreased expenses for that quarter it won't become a priority.
That is the wonderful shortsighted world of a one product company in decline :-)
It's like owning your 10th or 15th laptop when many are on their 3rd to 6th.
The latter are happy with a new laptop, where as the former understand they just bought the death of their laptop the first day they take ownership of a new one.
Dealing with "cruft" is the future of any project with longevity.
Likewise, working on a codebase with a mindset of having a relationship with it for 5-10 years potentially is something there isn't enough thought conversation about clever architecture often outliving clever coding/tech/stacks.
> Likewise, working on a codebase with a mindset of having a relationship with it for 5-10 years potentially is something there isn't enough thought conversation about clever architecture often outliving clever coding/tech/stacks.
If you are referring to B2C startups, that is because users are far more valuable than code.
I wasn't referring to B2C Startups, but agree with you that users are far more valuable than code, but maintaining and refactoring said code can take away from delivering value to the users, and instead more attention can be spent on the the developers.
I imagine they would leave it alone as much as possible, because they aren't sure what's bringing in all the traffic. Wouldn't want to be another Digg.
tl;dr: Digg was the original reddit - much bigger, reddit was the underdog.
Digg did a redesign that was absolutely horrible and created a huge backlash. Because Digg did not create a backup/proper versioning, they couldn't go back to the old design, and people migrated to reddit. The rest, as they say, is history.
i actually do this kind of thing regularly: consulting big, mighty companies with huge websites (huge from a technical, content and traffic point of view) that are having a hard time or are falling behind.
and yes, it's awesome.
but god damn, it's hard - and at first very unthankful - work.
why? things are the way they are because they got the way they are.
i.e.: you wan't to do something something very sane, let's say you want that a link from the startpage links directly to another page instead of getting dragged over 16 (a real world example) redirects. oh yeah, and you have the full support by the CEO to do whatever is necessary.
now there are two possible scenarios:
a) the person / team who is responsible for the mess is still with the company. he/she will justify - with good, valid arguments - that each of these 16 redirects is necessary. this person has spent 10+ years to work with the company and was doing the best work he/she was able - under the circumstances (which were never easy) - to do. the reasoning of this person is flawless. he/she - the person which "owns" this technical part - will refuse to do it. threatens to leave the company if you do it - oh - and the CEO says that this person is "indispensable".
b) the person / team who was responsible for the mess is no longer with the company. nobody has a clue, nobody knows why it's in there and nobody knows what will happen. if you do it anyway a huge shitstorm will start where everybody is complaining about the "incompetent" consultant.
the easiest option is always not to do anything (also called "lets do something else"), but well - that's the losers way.
so what to do
I) always start with hard cold data (i.e.: perf stats, specs of how many redirect the different browsers follow, ..), because this is the best way to ->
II) get rid of personalities - technical owners are great during product development, are liability and burden during maintenance and restructuring.
III) make sure that everybody understands that things will get worse before they get better
IV) focus on execution (a.k.a. do it anway, no matter what)
V) be aware that - newly introduced - bugs that do not kill the company will not get fixed right away
VI) be aware that there will be major criticism - and a lot of pressure on the CEO
and well, this is only the process for the absolutely sane changes you want to introduce. lets imagine the process for stuff where there would be an actual need for discussion.
Couldn't those companies invest their money in a total new and fresh service/brand? We can agree that they're in fact declining, isn't it like "pulling up a car off a cliff"?
I never cease to be amazed at how old web brands can straggle on.
Excite.com is still an approximately top 3,000 US site. As is MyWay.com, which is owned by the same parent as Excite, and looks like it hasn't seen a design update in a decade plus.
Lycos still gets a modest amount of traffic.
And Digg is still a roughly top 500 site in the US. I put them in the same zombie-former-big-web-brand category as those other sites.
Mindspark are a damn malware/adware company who are infamous for 'smileycentral' and 'zwinky' etc. They're still going pushing adware extensions to the Chrome Web Store.
If you look at their website they look rather legitimate but they're far from it.
The new Digg is* awesome, and doesn't share any ties with the old Digg. It was bought for a modest amount by this pretty cool company: http://betaworks.com/
I'm familiar with the story, I just don't regard what they're doing as much more than temporarily riding on the glory of the former site, much as MySpace is doing today.
Is it a great product? An innovative product? I don't think so, every time I visit digg it comes across as just another aggregator, and there isn't much special about that.
I didn't really visit the old Digg but I visit the new Digg daily and I know of a few others in the same position. Might not be your thing, but it's clean and regular/predictable so I can see how it would attract a new audience.
> MySpace reached 50.6 million unique users in the U.S. in November.
So that is actually a hell of a lot better than the headline leads you to believe. That's about 1/6th of the entire US population that - according to the article - checked in on Myspace last November.
It's because the article literally says it's 50.6 million uniques in the US: "Between desktop and mobile devices, MySpace reached 50.6 million unique users in the U.S. in November. That’s a massive surge of 575% versus the same month in 2013."
I read this as implying their uniques (as measured by, say, Google Analytics) were 50.6 million in the US, which probably means less than 50.6 million Americans visited the site in Nov. For instance, if every one of those uniques visited on both their smart phone and their computer, then it'd actually be 25 million real people. The truth is likely somewhere between 25 and 50 million Americans visited in Nov.
I hadn't thought about how devices can double count uniques. But this is still massive. I thought 50 million world wide was a lot when I saw the headline and got very surprised when I read it was referring to only the US
In short, it is due to all of the hard links still present from all of the Instagram #throwbackThursday posts
OK I know it is way more than that. Funny when I visited Costa Rica last year and went into a coffee shop I shoulder surfed a few people and wouldn't you know: MySpace profiles. It looked like they were musicians or into musis but either way MySpace is alive and well.
I don't get it why the former big social sites don't invest in viable protocols which would allow their userbase to connect to other former walled gardens.
Their users stick to the platform no matter what. Why not give them some incentives and more flexibility?
Why don't they implement oauth, zot and tent et.al.?
sort of unreal to have a 50M number kicking around. Who are these people? If it isn't just spam/misguided links...
Seems like a user would have to have serious investment in content or community there to stick around. Perhaps some strong communities hanging on. Still seems pretty crazy since the relaunch/revamp wiped mostly everything out..... defo another one of those straggler online entities hanging on ...I always like to wonder about this 'other internet' people seem to surf that would include dead properties like this...
This is written like an advertisement. Not trying to knock them, just thought it was worth mentioning that News Corp owns both WSJ and MySpace. Smells like a (mildly informative) advert.
Apparently News Corp no longer owns MySpace. From near the top of the article:
"It’s been nearly a decade since News Corp acquired the company for $580 million and roughly three and a half years since the media company sold the fading property for $35 million to the Internet ad company Specific Media."
I'm pretty certain the article goes on to say that it was sold from News Corp 3 years ago to another advertising company. So News Corp hasn't owned it for a while.
sometimes I like to imagine what I think would have lead reporters/journalists to investigate what they do. For this one I imagine the reporter was like walking around the offices trying not to make it look like she's worried about the deadline she she needs to have another article in before. At some point she realizes the parent company also owns myspace, does some small amount of research and just writes this in one night and turns it in. Kinda like what a lot of people do with their essays in school.
No, it was BBSs and IRC. And that's probably not right either, I just don't know what was before that. I think "social networking" is an emergent phenomenon once you have some trivial, really trivial technology, and groups of people of some critical mass.
Imagine all the cruft, which amassed over the years and you could clean up. Killing the loss making properties, applying best practices to the profitable ones. Improving efficiency of all kind of processes. Of course, you would have to be some kind of dictator immune to all the politics. But imagine the manpower you would have at hand. A small boat is more agile, but once a big ship steers in the right direction …
I once read or watched an interview from a MySpace person doing SEO, who stated, that they increased their visibility in the SERPs by some high amount (forgot the exact), just by actually using sensible title tags. I find these kind of inefficiencies/potentials in big organizations fascinating and off-putting at the same time.
You would not make the same relative increases of value you could do by starting a new company, but the risk would be much lower and absolute value created could be about the same.