| Notes |
The man who did not work for MySpace
Andrian Aoun did not work for Myspace. He’s careful to point that out. He worked for Fox Interactive Media, the company that owned Myspace. “Let’s not put all the blame on me,” he says.
At Fox, he spent an awful lot of time thinking about why Myspace was “getting creamed by Facebook.” In the end, he decided this had nothing to do with how ugly Myspace was. Myspace was getting creamed by Facebook, he says, because Facebook knew how to structure data.
If you added your company’s name to your profile, for instance, it wasn’t just empty text. It was link to a page, and this page, in turn, linked to anyone else who worked for that same company.
This meant that data could be easily reused on pages and services across the site – again and again and again. “Facebook gave your data some underlying representation,” Aoun says, “and it realized the power you can give to a computer interface if you have this sort of underlying data.”
So, after leaving Fox, he founded Wavii. The idea was to structure the Internet in much the same way that Facebook structured data about your online friends – a gargantuan task. |