Back in 2003, I got an invite from a friend to join friendster. I joined and found the site while interesting, completely slow and unusable. Still, somehow, everyone I knew had joined and I thought it would be fun to see the six degrees of seperation. At the time Friendster was running at "beta" which meant most of their code sucked and their servers were running at molasses. By the time they figured out that they had to dump their horrible JSP written code for a more efficient PHP design, in the process firing one of their employees for saying the old code was crap, it was too late. Everyone had jump shipped to one of the Friendster clones. Most made the transition to myspace.

Now, I'm on myspace, poking around and I'm having deja vu all over again. Its like the internet got re-introduced again, but to all the non-tech savvy people. Before, you had to know HTML, figure out how to host your "home page" but now its all done for you. Its internet for dummies that lets them carve out a little chunk of the net to call, uh...my space. However, the site is CRAP! Its like a massive mobile trailer park. Meanwhile, friendster got their crap together and built out their neighborhood to be like a nice little fenced in suburban community, albeit a deserted one.

There was one big difference between Friendster and MySpace. Rupert Murdoch. He paid 580 million bucks to buy MySpace and now MySpace is ranked in the same league as Yahoo and Google when it comes to net traffic. And yet, their code is horrible. I get an error page 25% of the time I do something on the site. And their server load-balancing is also horrible. It takes 20 seconds to minutes (eternity in net time) to load a page on a broadband connection. I heard rumblings months ago about how they were migrating the site code to something like ASP.NET.

And yet, it still sucks. I wonder who will eventually overtake myspace? Or maybe its here to stay since it has so much "old media" money backing it. Some had said that they're basically trying to set myspace up to be the new MTV of the net generation. Seeing how we're in the middle of Internet Bubble 2.0, I guess we'll have to wait and see. And I'll have to suffer through using myspace if I want to keep in touch with most people that have decided to set up home there.