(2007-01-26) Rosenberg Myspace Scaling Challenges

Scott Rosenberg on David Carr's Base Line article about the Infrastructure Scalability challenges for MySpace and other hyper-growth web companies.

The most important news to me was that their page customizability was not intended. That feature was really "kind of a mistake," says Duc Chau, one of the social networking site's original developers. In other words, he neglected to write a routine that would strip Web coding tags from user postings - standard feature on most Web sites that allow user contributions. The Web site's managers belatedly debated whether to continue allowing users to post code "because it was making the page load slow, making some pages look ugly, and exposing security holes," recalls Jason Feffer, former MySpace vice president of operations. "Ultimately we said, users come first, and this is what they want. We decided to allow the users to do what they wanted to do, and we would deal with the headaches."