MySpace's success came in spite of their technology, not because of it. There's nothing technical at MySpace worthy of emulation. A real technology startup could have done much better.

Who would you suggest emulating?

Google, Amazon, LiveJournal, SixApart, Flickr, YouTube, Craigslist. Most any company who has had highly technical top brass. MySpace was created by suits, that's why it runs on Windows and cost many millions more than it should.

From an engineering perspective, I enjoyed the inside look at how Myspace scaled their infrastructure. Scaling is certainly a critical issue for these big sites; one of the reasons that Friendster waned in popularity was that they used algorithms and a back-end infrastructure that were painfully slow for their once-massive user base.

On the other hand, a site should be able to handle several hundred thousand users with a single beefy database server, remote static file hosting, and a few load-balance webservers. When you start 'scaling out' to a bigger array of cheap hardware, you introduce complications that make your site harder to maintain and improve. That change will need to happen at some point along the growth curve, but it seems to me that seed stage entrepreneurs need to be most concerned about making a product that people want to use.

A lot of you would-be entrepreneurs should give this a read. There are many things to consider in the crucial first steps.

This was a great read and the patterns of growth and strategies they used hold true even for much less extreme scaling.

great detailed read, Kinda of funny to think that mySpace pushed SQL server further than MS have done themselves.

I would have done it a lot different myself :p