After MySpace...

[ATOMIC SUPLEX]

Bump for the day shift...

Alternatively, if you have a MySpace account - what does it not do that you'd like it to do?

Are you the cleverest deep cover spam bot ever?

 

[laptop]

Are you the cleverest deep cover spam bot ever?

Worse than that

 

[fractionMan]

There are a million and one myspacealikes out there, some better some worse. It's quite easy to analyse the good and the bad of them.

What myspace has got and few others have is a massive userbase and high profile. Unfortunately, those aren't things you can design into your myspace-killer web application.

 

[fractionMan]

www.mashable.com has daily updates on new "Web 2.0" sites, many of which are positioned as MySpace competitors - you could do worse than have a look round there.

Beat me to it!

 

[Wintermute]

Bandwidth's not expensive. Personally I get 1200Gb/month for about £80. All websites are about bandwidth, but MySpace et al are about heavier content - music, video, user submitted stuff. That means for them it's more about storage, and mechanisms to exploit that storage.

...and how fast do you reckon myspace gets through its 1200GB allocation? Five seconds? Ten?

Let me rephrase - SERIOUS bandwidth is expensive. Very, very expensive and it's pretty much the core issue behind the net neutrality debate. The amount of infrastructure investment that the big telcos need to put in to support IPTV and on-demand video streaming will cripple even them, and that's why they want the right to tier it. You want to run a video blog channel? Fine, but it's going to be slow as fuck unless you sign up to our corporate "pay through the fucking nose and we'll give you a piece of the new fibre line we've just laid" package.

Incidentally, storage is cheap. It's hardware. Hardware is cheap. Any big datacentre won't try to fix busted hard drives. They'll simply chuck it and swap another in.

 

[laptop]

..."pay through the fucking nose and we'll give you a piece of the new fibre line we've just laid" package.

Except that's the "we'll let you use the fibre that's been sitting dark since 1999" package.

Routers at the ends of that dark fibre are another matter...

 

[gurrier]

Except that's the "we'll let you use the fibre that's been sitting dark since 1999" package.

Routers at the ends of that dark fibre are another matter...

Network management at the high end gets incredibly complicated and closer to magic than science. People are building in all sorts of predictive and self-managing aspects into really traffic-heavy networks to try to cope with the impossible complexity of it, but it doesn't always work. For example, when Ireland played in stade de france 2 years ago, the sudden spike of mobile activity all competing for an international link from the same mobile cell caused the network to shut itself down and it took 2 days before they could figure out how to persuade it to turn itself on again. There were 60,000 Irish fans in the stadium and nobody had ever imagined that 60,000 mobiles would even simultaneously try to access the same foreign country from the same cell. The self-management components apparently thought that there had been some sort of catastrophic nuclear attack or something and just shut everything down.

The telcos are pouring research money into all sorts of network management technologies at the moment without too much success to date. It's really the most important bottleneck to expansion afaics. You can always buy as many routers / pipes / hardware as you want but trying to configure them so that they can handle arbitrary spikes and the chaotic traffic anomalies in a reasonably efficient way is really really hard. If you can't manage things like load balancing properly, your hardware / network costs increase exponentially with traffic which is a big no-no.

But, to answer laptop's question, the key to the success of myspace and the other similar 'community' sites is that they leverage pre-existing real-world communities (primarily schools). The technology and feature sets are pretty irrelevant since the one with the critical mass first is never caught. For example, myspace is not significant in Ireland - it's bebo since it got the critical mass of word-of-mouth users first in the schools and then it just took off. Sites like bebo and myspace really aren't feature driven they're community driven.

Oh, and, by the way, web 2.0 is an ill defined and ultimately meaningless marketing catchphrase.

 

[ATOMIC SUPLEX]

How about something like myspace that links interests like youtube and similar people in the same way that Amazon does. i.e. Amazon is always trying to show me things I might want to buy based on previous purchases.
Why not add and friends reunited type thing that doesn't cost money and automatically displays people that are quite probably from your past as they join (based on age/location/schools/work though the years). None of your info has to be given on sign up but as you get deeper in you can give away more if you want. If you don't include login details then no one could tell if you were ignoring them or just never using the site.

 

[fortyplus]

FWIW

The next MySpace will not be a MySpace clone. At the moment "user-generated content" means "user-generated, mogul-controlled" content. As in the moguls make the money out of it, while the users produce it and its associated metadata which actually provide most of the value. The next stage, citizens, brothers and sisters, comrades, is when we take control.

But MySpace/Web2.0 is part of the longer process. It's a step in the right direction, but it will be eclipsed soon enough. The Internet is the most important communications innovation since the invention of the printing press, because it is a read-write medium. Moguls really find that difficult to accept, since their world-view is based on us being wage-slaves during the day and couch-potato consumers the rest of the time.

So what will Web3.0 look like? Imho it will start to build on the distributed commodity bandwidth that widespread broadband connections provide. BitTorrent is a great example. Web3.0 will do to content what BitTorrent does to bandwidth; the promise of peer-to-peer technologies will finally be fulfilled.


Edited to add:

Just seen this story: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/08/17/sony_refused_p2p_patents/

The two inventions for which Sony has been refused patents seem to me to be implementations of the principles I have described.