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Comment by brown9-2 | Hacker News Reader

Once the free parking was pulled from MySpace, 50% of every team was laid off and all of the momentum was pulled from the company.

Can you explain what you mean by "free parking" here?

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Sorry, for being overly creative.

"free parking" is a spot on monopoly where the rules specifically state that once a user lands on the 'free parking' space no money is received. however, in almost every monopoly game i have played, players take fines/ taxes and put them in the middle of the board, and when a player lands on 'free parking' they get the funds.

It's an example of not following the rules as a point of culture.

The deal soured with Google because the terms were around pageviews and clicks. MySpace and Fox decided to target those terms to maximize revenue. The result was that MySpace added unneeded page flow for just about every user action. It destroyed UX and pissed off Google. Our team kept joking with management that we were going to create a MySpace-Lite as a side project from our REST APIs and to get rid of all of the crap.

  WE SHOULD HAVE DONE IT.  WE SHOULD HAVE CREATED MYSPACE-LITE

The Deal with Google was worth $300 million a year on total revenue of $750 million a year. MySpace Music was loosing the company mad money, it was and is a flawed model. Our team wanted to create an API where games and sites could access the music, and to create open playlists. We wanted to make the music open, and then work to license it. We were told that it was not possible.

Sidenote : Growing up I also played monopoly that way and various other house rules. After playing some Euro games I went back and read the monopoly rules and played a game by the rules. No free parking, no extra houses or hotels, forced auctions, etc. The game took 45 minutes and was way more fun. Made Monopoly actually enjoyable again, though not as good as most of the really good Euro games out today.

Even more OT: The electronic versions of Monopoly actually vastly improve the game. No more counting money, and strongly enforced rules make for a faster, more efficient and entertaining game.

There was a write-up by someone about how everybody hate Monopoly because it drags on, and few people fully understand that the reason it drags on is because of house rules like Free Parking, immunities and the like.

I hated playing the board game as a child, but the console Monopoly games can have some strategy applied to them that have immediate payoffs.

Putting the money in the middle and getting it when you land on free parking always made the game more fun as the pot got bigger you just tried to keep throwing the correct number to get the huge pot in the middle to hopefully help you get out of bankruptcy!

I never had a MySpace page, I found that the disjointed looks across peoples profiles and seemingly no direction as to what it was to be used for rather annoying and made me consider MySpace as a joke. Facebook won me over in that they had a consistent layout, and no goddamn music playing when I went to a users profile page, and I can't even begin to count the amount of friends I have that agree with me, but I can count the amount of friends on one hand who have a MySpace page.

I believe that he's referring to the deal where Google paid MySpace for ad impressions. When that fell through MySpace lost a lot of revenue. http://www.dailyfinance.com/story/media/myspace-in-trouble-o...

I guess it comes from Monopoly?

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