Simon Willison’s Weblog

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19 items tagged “myspace”

2010

What was programming use Myspace?

Originally ColdFusion, but then a small army of consultants from Microsoft helped rewrite it in .NET.

[... 27 words]

2009

FT.com: The rise and fall of MySpace (via) Lots of stuff about the internal politics at News Corporation. Of particular interest: MySpace have to take feature proposals to News Corp for approval. Meanwhile, Facebook are leading the industry in their use of A/B testing to figure out exactly what features their users will respond well to. # 5th December 2009, 5:09 pm

Facebook and MySpace security: backdoor wide open, millions of accounts exploitable (via) Amazingly, both services had wide open holes in their crossdomain.xml files. Facebook were serving allow-access-from-domain=“*” in the crossdomain.xml file on one of their subdomains (a subdomain that still had access to the user’s profile information) while MySpace were opting in farm.sproutbuilder.com, a service which allowed anyone to upload arbitrary SWF files. # 5th November 2009, 9:47 am

OpenID: Now more powerful and easier to use! The OpenID+OAuth hybrid protocol (where a user can sign in with OpenID and grant an application access to their OAuth protected resources such as a contact list at the same time) is now supported by Google, Yahoo! and MySpace—this feels like OpenID finally coming of age. # 25th September 2009, 9:08 pm

The First Ten Things the New CEO of MySpace Should Do. From the always thought provoking Jason Calacanis. # 23rd April 2009, 11:30 am

2008

MySpace To Join OpenID, Bringing Total Enabled Accounts to Over A Half Billion. Another 200 million OpenIDs—but the important difference between this and the Yahoo! and AOL announcements is that MySpace users know what their profile URL is. Whenever people have told me OpenID is flawed because people don’t understand URLs I’ve answered “sure they don’t, but they know their MySpace page”. # 21st July 2008, 7:42 pm

Google Trends for Websites: myspace.com,facebook.com. New fun tool from Google Trends. # 20th June 2008, 8:50 pm

An OpenSocial Foundation. “Today we are pleased to announce that Google is joining together with Yahoo! and MySpace in the creation of a non-profit foundation for the open and transparent governance of the OpenSocial specifications and intellectual property.” Good move; I’d personally love to see this happen with Google Gears. # 25th March 2008, 2:51 pm

2007

I’ve always said that setting up a web site for most folks is scary and intimidating—but myspace, with all your friends there, lends itself to a helping culture. Everyone shares how to do whatever with their circles of friends... they get by with a little help from their friends.

Phil Torrone # 20th April 2007, 4:37 am

MySpace Allegedly Kills Computer Security Website. No need for the allegedly; it’s been confirmed. MySpace got GoDaddy.com to redirect DNS for seclists.org after a list of phished user accounts posted to the full disclosure mailing list list was archived there. # 26th January 2007, 9:57 am

MySpace Blocking Widgets? Making your business dependent on revenue from MySpace is sharecropping of the worst possible kind. # 19th January 2007, 9:54 am

Inside MySpace.com. Case study of scaling against a network effect. Includes pretty honest coverage of the mistakes made along the way, although the article was put together second hand from conference presentations rather than from interviews. # 17th January 2007, 9:18 am

MySpace: Too Much of a Good Thing? CSS customization really was just the result of forgetting to strip HTML. They “eventually” decided to filter out JavaScript(!) # 17th January 2007, 9:09 am

ephemeral profiles (cuz losing passwords is common amongst teens). Lost your password? Create a new profile; you had too many friends you didn’t know anyway. # 7th January 2007, 10:37 pm

2006

Friends, friendsters, and top 8: Writing community into being on social network sites. I finally got around to reading this. Fascinating; lots to digest. # 24th December 2006, 7:32 pm

Real-World Passwords. Random passwords phished from MySpace are surprisingly decent. # 14th December 2006, 2:14 pm

Myspace.com Trojaned Navigation Menu. Replace the “Home” link with a link to a phishing page. # 8th December 2006, 4:41 pm

How the myspace SWF hack worked. If Flash is a vector for XSS, is this the end of Flash badges? # 17th July 2006, 6:04 pm