MySpace’s growing pains

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Fascinating article on the difficulties MySpace engineers have had in coping with exponential growth. A long piece, but worth reading…

The “network effect,” in which the mass of users inviting other users to join MySpace led to exponential growth, began about eight months after the launch “and never really stopped,” Chau says.

News Corp., the media empire that includes the Fox television networks and 20th Century Fox movie studio, saw this rapid growth as a way to multiply its share of the audience of Internet users, and bought MySpace in 2005 for $580 million. Now, News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch apparently thinks MySpace should be valued like a major Web portal, recently telling a group of investors he could get $6 billion—more than 10 times the price he paid in 2005—if he turned around and sold it today. That’s a bold claim, considering the Web site’s total revenue was an estimated $200 million in the fiscal year ended June 2006. News Corp. says it expects Fox Interactive as a whole to have revenue of $500 million in 2007, with about $400 million coming from MySpace.

But MySpace continues to grow. In December, it had 140 million member accounts, compared with 40 million in November 2005. Granted, that doesn’t quite equate to the number of individual users, since one person can have multiple accounts, and a profile can also represent a band, a fictional character like Borat, or a brand icon like the Burger King.

Still, MySpace has tens of millions of people posting messages and comments or tweaking their profiles on a regular basis—some of them visiting repeatedly throughout the day. That makes the technical requirements for supporting MySpace much different than, say, for a news Web site, where most content is created by a relatively small team of editors and passively consumed by Web site visitors. In that case, the content management database can be optimized for read-only requests, since additions and updates to the database content are relatively rare. A news site might allow reader comments, but on MySpace user-contributed content is the primary content. As a result, it has a higher percentage of database interactions that are recording or updating information rather than just retrieving it.

Every profile page view on MySpace has to be created dynamically—that is, stitched together from database lookups. In fact, because each profile page includes links to those of the user’s friends, the Web site software has to pull together information from multiple tables in multiple databases on multiple servers. The database workload can be mitigated somewhat by caching data in memory, but this scheme has to account for constant changes to the underlying data.

The Web site architecture went through five major revisions—each coming after MySpace had reached certain user account milestones—and dozens of smaller tweaks, Benedetto says. “We didn’t just come up with it; we redesigned, and redesigned, and redesigned until we got where we are today,” he points out…

Ulster’s rotten (special) branch

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I’ve been reading the Police Ombudsman’s report into the collusion which existed between (i) loyalist paramilitary thugs and killers and (ii) the Royal Ulster Constabulary over a period of 12 years in the 1980s and 1990s. Even to those of us who always assumed that such collusion existed, it makes shocking reading. As the Guardian puts it:

It is hard to think of a more serious allegation against the police than that they colluded in the murder of citizens of the society that they are sworn to protect. Nevertheless, that is the deadly charge at the heart of the report by the Northern Ireland police ombudsman, Nuala O’Loan, into the protection of informants. The investigation started as an attempt to explain why Raymond McCord Jr was beaten to death in November 1997, a few months after his arrest in a drugs-running bust. It soon broadened into a wider probe of the relationship between the Royal Ulster Constabulary special branch and local paramilitary UVF police informers, some of whom were alleged to be involved in the McCord killing. These informers have been linked to an array of shocking crimes. Yet, throughout, special branch preferred to protect them rather than hunt them down, and with the full approval of senior supervisors, even going to the length of destroying much of the evidence.

There has been a lot of grave head-shaking in government circles today about Mrs O’Loan’s astonishing report. But this is invariably accompanied by exhortations to “move on” and “leave the past behind”.

All of which is understandable, but outrageous. At the very least, any ex-RUC officer connected in any way with the abuses chronicled by Mrs O’Loan and still serving in the (supposedly-reformed) Police Service of Northern Ireland ought to be forcibly retired. From tomorrow.

Now comes the bit which makes you want to pinch yourself. ‘Sir’ Ronnie Flanagan, the RUC Chief Constable on whose watch this stuff happened is now — wait for it! — Head of the Police Inspectorate of England and Wales. That is to say, he is the guy charged with investigating whether mainland police forces are maintaining standards of efficiency, integrity and honesty.

Truly, you could not make this stuff up.

Hello World!

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This is nice — a page maintained by the ACM which lists the code needed to print “Hello World” (the classic first output of the neophyte programmer) in 193 programming languages. I particularly like how Java does it:

class HelloWorld {
public static void main (String args[]) {
for (;;) {
System.out.print(“Hello World “);
}
}
}

Don’t you just love “public static void main”? Reminds one of George W. Bush.

Perl is fairly terse:

print “Hello, World!\n” while (1);

but not as elegant as Python:

print “Hello world!”

Thanks to Scott Rosenberg, who set me Googling for this, and whose lovely book I am currently devouring.

More… James Miller kindly points out that good ol’ BASIC is just as elegant:

PRINT “Hello world!”

Where HDTV may be too, er, sharp

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Well, well. A solemn piece in the New York Times reveals all:

The XXX industry has gotten too graphic, even for its own tastes.

Pornography has long helped drive the adoption of new technology, from the printing press to the videocassette. Now pornographic movie studios are staying ahead of the curve by releasing high-definition DVDs.

They have discovered that the technology is sometimes not so sexy. The high-definition format is accentuating imperfections in the actors — from a little extra cellulite on a leg to wrinkles around the eyes.

Hollywood is dealing with similar problems, but they are more pronounced for pornographers, who rely on close-ups and who, because of their quick adoption of the new format, are facing the issue more immediately than mainstream entertainment companies.

Producers are taking steps to hide the imperfections. Some shots are lit differently, while some actors simply are not shot at certain angles, or are getting cosmetic surgery, or seeking expert grooming.

“The biggest problem is razor burn,” said Stormy Daniels, an actress, writer and director.

Ms. Daniels is also a skeptic. “I’m not 100 percent sure why anyone would want to see their porn in HD,” she said.

The technology’s advocates counter that high definition, by making things clearer and crisper, lets viewers feel as close to the action as possible.

“It puts you in the room,” said the director known as Robby D., whose films include “Sexual Freak.”

Eh? Razor burn???

Doodling with a purpose

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Here’s a really good idea — Doodle: a site that makes it easier to schedule meetings involving several people.

How does it work?
1. Create a new poll with a title, description, your name, and possible dates and times.

2. You get a link to your new poll. Send this link to all participants.

3. The participants use the link to visit the poll and select suitable dates.

4. You use the same link to watch the poll’s progress and the result.

And it’s free!

Miss Potter

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Anthony Lane didn’t like it. Poor chap. I enjoyed it greatly, and laughed a lot during it. Lane’s review is good in parts, though. For example:

We begin with Miss Potter pitching Peter Rabbit to publishers, one of whom remarks, out of her hearing, “That book won’t sell ten copies.” (This is known as the ironical-historical mode, inviting the audience to smirk at the blindness of the past.) Nevertheless, the company, Frederick Warne, agrees to publish, if only to give Norman Warne (Ewan McGregor), the baby of the family, something to do with his time. Why, one must ask, did McGregor take this part? I can only imagine that he received the script one morning, after a late night, saw the words “Beatrix Potter,” assumed that he was being offered the role of his namesake, Mr. McGregor, fancied himself in a long white beard running past cabbages with a rake, mouthing Scotch oaths at departing vermin, called his agent to accept, and went back to bed. Not until later did he realize that he would be required to utter the line, “We shall give them a bunny book to conjure with.”

Only one man on earth can speak those words with a straight face, and that is Hugh Hefner. Needless to say, McGregor takes emergency precautions, appearing throughout in a mustache the size of a yew hedge, and thus defying us to work out whether his face is straight or not…

Jams tomorrow

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This morning’s Observer column.

Coincidentally, in another part of the forest, entrepreneurs Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, the guys who founded Kazaa and later Skype (which they sold to eBay in 2005 for $2.6bn) announced their particular variation on IPTV. The service is to be called Joost and combines aspects of file-sharing software and regular broadcast television. Like Skype, Joost requires users to download and install a free ‘client’ program which enables them to browse the internet for channels and clips they’re interested in.

The Joost website is deliciously opaque, riddled with PR-speak about how the new service is, apparently, ‘powered by a secure, efficient, piracy-proof internet platform that enables premium interactive video experiences while guaranteeing copyright protection for content owners and creators’.

In the ordinary course of events, one would be inclined to dismiss this as hype, were it not for the fact that Zennstrom and Friis have a track record of unleashing not one but two disruptive innovations on an unsuspecting world. So let’s suppose for a moment that Joost is for real. What then?

One implication is that if it spreads like Skype (putting on 150,000 new users a day), Joost could eventually strangle the net. Or, more realistically, it would provoke dramatic action from the world’s ISPs to fend off that outcome…