Gawker: valleywag, yahoo 360

MySpace's technical triumph

Owen Thomas — Tue, 06 May 2008 16:00:00 EDT

The conventional wisdom in Silicon Valley is that MySpace, based in Los Angeles, is a tech nightmare, blaring songs through a user's speakers while crashing all the time. Skilled engineers are in short supply down south, so the website must be falling over all the time, right? Not so. Pingdom, a website-monitoring service, has tracked how often some of the top social networks have gone offline. Twitter, based in Web-savvy San Francisco, has been down for 37 hours from January through April. MySpace has been up 99.96 percent of the time. That's 33 percent less downtime than Yahoo 360, and 60 percent less than Google's Orkut. Score one for the LA crowd. The chart:

Bebo needs cash to keep its servers running

Nicholas Carlson — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 12:09:00 EST

Now we know why Bebo's so eager for more cash. It needs more servers. According to Pingdom, Bebo has already been down for 12 hours and 28 minutes so far this year. Check out the full chart to see how 13 other social networks have fared so far.

Google, Yahoo start from scratch

Owen Thomas — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 15:24:25 EDT

If at first you don't succeed — and you can't manage to buy someone — try, try again. That's what Google and Yahoo, realizing the failure of their social-networking products, are doing. Google's Orkut is a nonstarter outside India and Brazil, and Yahoo 360 is, well, a nonstarter everywhere. Here's how the two giants of the Web are trying to fix their social inadequacies.Google's entrant is Socialstream, a Google-sponsored project at Carnegie Mellon University, which, instead of serving as a social network itself, attempts to unify multiple networks. That's a product that users, drowning in multiple logins and passwords, could badly use. And it plays to Google's strengths: Rather than trying to get users to contribute content to a new network, Socialstream just uses software to bring existing information on the Web together in one place, much like Google's Web search. (Screenshot by Google Operating System) Less is known about about Yahoo Mosh, a site that's live internally on Yahoo's network but blocked from outsiders. But I did find this intriguing trace: When you google "mosh.yahoo.com", you turn up a couple of results on YouTube. The inbound links from Yahoo Mosh to the YouTube videos suggest that Yahoo Mosh is a combination of profiles and bookmarks — a mashup, in other words, of Yahoo 360, Yahoo's failed MySpace clone, and Del.icio.us, Yahoo's popular bookmarks website. "A social network so user-friendly, even your mom knows it's redundant!" says Valleywag contributor Nick Douglas. If you want to know what Yahoo Mosh's internal beta testers are watching, here's a clip: