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> Google didn't notice the importance of social networking before Facebook did. Google Buzz? Wave? Orkut? Don't remember the exact timeline for all of those (m

> Google didn't notice the importance of social networking before Facebook did. Google Buzz? Wave? Orkut? Don't remember the exact timeline for all of those (maybe some were slightly after Facebook?) but I find it difficult to suggest they were late to the game. It was more like they didn't figure out how to play it well.

sliverstorm 11y ago
slightly? Wave was 6 years later, Buzz was 7.
- jessaustin 11y ago
  You left out the one that was founded the same year as FB.
scholia 11y ago
Google launched Orkut at almost exactly the same time as Facebook, and it was initially much more successful. (Google was a huge company, not a dorm-room start-up, and nost people couldn't join Facebook even if they wanted to.) Friendster and, later, MySpace were popular before Orkut and Facebook, so social networking was already a thing. Facebook was just much better than MySpace, Orkut and G+. And it still is.
- smitherfield 11y ago
  >[M]ost people couldn't join Facebook even if they wanted to. This was the brilliance of early Facebook. By initially limiting membership to only hip young influencers, and only gradually expanding to less hip/young/influential groups, they successfully created scarcity and huge word of mouth. It made the news every time a new group was allowed to join Facebook. People were coming banging at the gate to be let out of the "MySpace ghetto." People want what they can't have; Bernie Madoff created the most successful Ponzi scheme ever by making people have to come to him and beg to be allowed to invest. The other brilliant idea of early Facebook, unlike Friendster/MySpace/Orkut, was that it was a disguised dating app (remember pokes?), but one that eliminated the gender ratio issue by being disguised, and the creepy old guys problem by limiting its membership to young people and limiting most interactions to "friends." Later, only after it had built up a critical mass of a large and loyal userbase, it was able to become even bigger by gradually pivoting to becoming a more traditional social network/blogging platform. And Instagram now exists to fill the disguised-dating-app role in their product portfolio. Snapchat is pivoting much the same way, albeit more jarringly.[0] [0] http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-how-snapchat-built-a-business/ http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-how-snapchat-built-a-...
  - mseebach 11y ago
    > limiting membership to only hip young influencers That may have been an unintended consequence, but the genius move was to bootstrap the online social network with existing offline social networks (and getting the date integration - email addresses - for free!). Somewhat ironically, privacy (such as it follows strict exclusivity) was a central feature of early Facebook. No other social network did anything like it, they were all free-for-alls.
    - scholia 11y ago
      It actually wasn't limited to "hip young influencers". It started with people who had a Harvard email address (including staff). It expanded via Ivy League universities, then all US universities and colleges, then US high schools, before finally opening up to the public.
      - gmanley 11y ago
        It seems like you just listed off the segments of the population that tend to be considered the "hip young influencers". Did you not? College and high school students. My guess was the parent probably was speaking in generalities a bit, students were the vast majority of users.
        scholia 11y ago
        Well, there are nightclubs that you can only get into if you are a hip young influencer. Facebook didn't require anything like that, just an .edu email address. That let in a lot of very un-hip people, and a smattering of oldies. If you were running a nightclub, I think you'd appreciate the distinction between "let in hip young influencers" and "let in anyone with a student library card". ;-)
- cmrdporcupine 11y ago
  Google didn't launch Orkut. Orkut did. Google only acquired it later, from what I recall. And then they let it rot and failed to see what they had. Friendster was initially quite popular and not a bad product. But again, it was left to rot and it became slow, like unusably slow, and uncool. And then MySpace took its audience.
  - magicalist 11y ago
    > Google didn't launch Orkut. Orkut did. Google only acquired it later, from what I recall nope: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orkut_B%C3%BCy%C3%BCkk%C3%B6kten https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orkut_B%C3%BCy%C3%BCkk%C3%B6kt...
- frik 11y ago
  Facebook won, because Murdoch (Time Warner) bought MySpace and started to milk it, instead of investing more money. MySpace was written in the ill-fated Coldfusion language and web framework and porting MySpace to a newer dotNet based Coldfusion version paved their way to a slow unstable server platform, years long stagnation, very high Microsoft product license costs and so. MySpace stagnated, that's why Facebook had the chance to win. And MySpace had the chance early, because Friendster stagnated because they could scale their website to keep up with their growth.
- soylentcola 11y ago
  As someone who uses both Facebook and G+ occasionally, I find Facebook to be vastly inferior in terms of interface, functionality, and mobile applications. The main reason G+ or any other company will have trouble competing on features (which are easily added) is simply userbase and lack of interoperability. With something like webmail you can switch providers based on your preferences but nobody else needs to do anything. You can keep emailing the same people like you always have. But with Facebook-style communications networks, you have to use their service to communicate with people on it. And since Facebook was the first to really get everyone to join (not just the teens and twentysomethings who had Friendster and Myspace pages), it has that critical mass of users. So even if I think the G+ app runs better and looks nicer on my phone or the service does a better job of letting me specify who sees my posts, it won't make a bit of difference if I want to have a group chat or event planning page with 10 friends and Facebook is the only platform we all have in common. I don't own Google stock and I'm surely not going to start pestering friends and family to pull up stakes and move to G+ because I like it better. And that will be the case for a while I think...at least as long as the closed-network Facebook-style services are concerned. I don't see them being unseated until something new really takes off the way the current form of social networks replaced mass email chains for people sharing links, pictures and weekend plans with friends and family.
jarjoura 11y ago
I remember getting pulled into Facebook because classmates tagged me in photos. Then when I signed up, it was extremely useful because you could see and meet other people in classes for study groups, etc. It was also great at delivering status updates, well at least until people started saying "John Smith is." lol. The other powerful thing Facebook did that no other social network did was handle growth. Friendster and Orkut, they were painfully slow to use even in their early days.
holografix 11y ago
Very very true. Orkun was HUGE in Brazil. I had immigrated to Australia when it became popular and no one in Aus had heard of it, Facebook started surfacing a least 18 months later and for a time I had Brazilian friends on Orkut and everybody else on Facebook. What convinced most of my Brazilian friends to switch was the ability to tag people in photos and poke people. Yep, poking was really important.
thanatropism 11y ago
Orkut was hugely succesful in some places. Yuuuge.

sliverstorm 11y ago

slightly? Wave was 6 years later, Buzz was 7.

jessaustin 11y ago
You left out the one that was founded the same year as FB.

scholia 11y ago

Google launched Orkut at almost exactly the same time as Facebook, and it was initially much more successful. (Google was a huge company, not a dorm-room start-up, and nost people couldn't join Facebook even if they wanted to.) Friendster and, later, MySpace were popular before Orkut and Facebook, so social networking was already a thing. Facebook was just much better than MySpace, Orkut and G+. And it still is.

smitherfield 11y ago
>[M]ost people couldn't join Facebook even if they wanted to. This was the brilliance of early Facebook. By initially limiting membership to only hip young influencers, and only gradually expanding to less hip/young/influential groups, they successfully created scarcity and huge word of mouth. It made the news every time a new group was allowed to join Facebook. People were coming banging at the gate to be let out of the "MySpace ghetto." People want what they can't have; Bernie Madoff created the most successful Ponzi scheme ever by making people have to come to him and beg to be allowed to invest. The other brilliant idea of early Facebook, unlike Friendster/MySpace/Orkut, was that it was a disguised dating app (remember pokes?), but one that eliminated the gender ratio issue by being disguised, and the creepy old guys problem by limiting its membership to young people and limiting most interactions to "friends." Later, only after it had built up a critical mass of a large and loyal userbase, it was able to become even bigger by gradually pivoting to becoming a more traditional social network/blogging platform. And Instagram now exists to fill the disguised-dating-app role in their product portfolio. Snapchat is pivoting much the same way, albeit more jarringly.[0] [0] http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-how-snapchat-built-a-business/ http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-how-snapchat-built-a-...
- mseebach 11y ago
  > limiting membership to only hip young influencers That may have been an unintended consequence, but the genius move was to bootstrap the online social network with existing offline social networks (and getting the date integration - email addresses - for free!). Somewhat ironically, privacy (such as it follows strict exclusivity) was a central feature of early Facebook. No other social network did anything like it, they were all free-for-alls.
  - scholia 11y ago
    It actually wasn't limited to "hip young influencers". It started with people who had a Harvard email address (including staff). It expanded via Ivy League universities, then all US universities and colleges, then US high schools, before finally opening up to the public.
    - gmanley 11y ago
      It seems like you just listed off the segments of the population that tend to be considered the "hip young influencers". Did you not? College and high school students. My guess was the parent probably was speaking in generalities a bit, students were the vast majority of users.
      - scholia 11y ago
        Well, there are nightclubs that you can only get into if you are a hip young influencer. Facebook didn't require anything like that, just an .edu email address. That let in a lot of very un-hip people, and a smattering of oldies. If you were running a nightclub, I think you'd appreciate the distinction between "let in hip young influencers" and "let in anyone with a student library card". ;-)
cmrdporcupine 11y ago
Google didn't launch Orkut. Orkut did. Google only acquired it later, from what I recall. And then they let it rot and failed to see what they had. Friendster was initially quite popular and not a bad product. But again, it was left to rot and it became slow, like unusably slow, and uncool. And then MySpace took its audience.
- magicalist 11y ago
  > Google didn't launch Orkut. Orkut did. Google only acquired it later, from what I recall nope: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orkut_B%C3%BCy%C3%BCkk%C3%B6kten https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orkut_B%C3%BCy%C3%BCkk%C3%B6kt...
frik 11y ago
Facebook won, because Murdoch (Time Warner) bought MySpace and started to milk it, instead of investing more money. MySpace was written in the ill-fated Coldfusion language and web framework and porting MySpace to a newer dotNet based Coldfusion version paved their way to a slow unstable server platform, years long stagnation, very high Microsoft product license costs and so. MySpace stagnated, that's why Facebook had the chance to win. And MySpace had the chance early, because Friendster stagnated because they could scale their website to keep up with their growth.
soylentcola 11y ago
As someone who uses both Facebook and G+ occasionally, I find Facebook to be vastly inferior in terms of interface, functionality, and mobile applications. The main reason G+ or any other company will have trouble competing on features (which are easily added) is simply userbase and lack of interoperability. With something like webmail you can switch providers based on your preferences but nobody else needs to do anything. You can keep emailing the same people like you always have. But with Facebook-style communications networks, you have to use their service to communicate with people on it. And since Facebook was the first to really get everyone to join (not just the teens and twentysomethings who had Friendster and Myspace pages), it has that critical mass of users. So even if I think the G+ app runs better and looks nicer on my phone or the service does a better job of letting me specify who sees my posts, it won't make a bit of difference if I want to have a group chat or event planning page with 10 friends and Facebook is the only platform we all have in common. I don't own Google stock and I'm surely not going to start pestering friends and family to pull up stakes and move to G+ because I like it better. And that will be the case for a while I think...at least as long as the closed-network Facebook-style services are concerned. I don't see them being unseated until something new really takes off the way the current form of social networks replaced mass email chains for people sharing links, pictures and weekend plans with friends and family.

jarjoura 11y ago

I remember getting pulled into Facebook because classmates tagged me in photos. Then when I signed up, it was extremely useful because you could see and meet other people in classes for study groups, etc. It was also great at delivering status updates, well at least until people started saying "John Smith is." lol. The other powerful thing Facebook did that no other social network did was handle growth. Friendster and Orkut, they were painfully slow to use even in their early days.

holografix 11y ago

Very very true. Orkun was HUGE in Brazil. I had immigrated to Australia when it became popular and no one in Aus had heard of it, Facebook started surfacing a least 18 months later and for a time I had Brazilian friends on Orkut and everybody else on Facebook. What convinced most of my Brazilian friends to switch was the ability to tag people in photos and poke people. Yep, poking was really important.

thanatropism 11y ago

Orkut was hugely succesful in some places. Yuuuge.