MySpace's effort to emulate the distinguishing status updates feature of Facebook went down quickly after introduction and remains down:

The function that you are currently trying to use is disabled and will be back shortly.We are making some minor changes to this section so please bear with us until we can get it back online.Please do NOT email me about this. Just wait it out. Jul 13, 2007 -Tom

While the typical MySpace user surely hasn't noticed the blip, social networking observers are keen to see whether Facebook has any enduring competitive advantages over MySpace.  The friend status feed has been a unique feature for the upstart network, and according to the FB corporate blog, a technological achievement.  How well MySpace makes the shadowing move will reveal the depth of their technical bench.  Are they a decent media company first but far second as a technologist to the leader as Yahoo is to Google, or is that characterization false?

MySpace has never made any deep innovations.  Their technical competitive strength in the war against Friendster was the ability to engineer scalability.  While Friendster choked on their open source platform, MySpace outran them with ColdFusion on steriods.  Friendster couldn't deliver pageviews or messages and had to cap the friend list at 500, while MySpace's scalability allowed it to foster a laissez fair environment that placed few bounds on the creativity of its users, who under this liberal regime made the system a runaway success.

In this round against Facebook, scaling the mundane -- delivering page views and messages -- is now a problem widely solvable.  The magic is in the innovations that require mathematics and computer science, problems that cannot be solved with simple algorithms and by eliminating bottlenecks or throwing more commodity machines into the webfarm.  Facebook makes much of the social graph, and I suspect the term is more than a mere metaphor.  The innovations on Facebook probably rely much on graph theory and other beyond engineering domains.

Anybody can put computer scientists or mathematicians on staff but is that enough against a technocracy running on all cylinders?  The technology gap between Yahoo and Google is probably two years or so -- and never narrowing -- and worth billions and billions in market cap.  How MySpace recovers from this stumble will indicate the size of their gap.

(Initial coverage of the MySpace stumble)