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>[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 inf

>[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". ;-)

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". ;-)