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Their invite-only model for the first X months was also an early nail in the coffin. It's hard to enjoy a social network when none of your friends are able to j
by mtrpcic 9y ago
Their invite-only model for the first X months was also an early nail in the coffin. It's hard to enjoy a social network when none of your friends are able to join you.
- dredmorbius 9y agoI disagree completely. It was a good step, copied directly from the Facebook (and earlier: Usenet) playbook, and created a group that others wanted to get in to and join. That invite-only mode should have lasted far longer -- 3, 6, 18 months. Work out the kinks. Especially the kinks involved in scaling the system from its earlier 18 months or so of internal-only usage, where your criticisms were read by someone with hire/fire authority over you, to a limited but public context, where not everyone is friends, you can't fire the critics, and it's not just Job, but Life that matters. I've long noted that FB started as, literally, Harvard, and expanded gradually out over a set of selective universities over about a year and a half. The result was to create an in group with tremendous cachet, which Facebook capitalised on for years afterward. I'm glad to find others have realised this, including danah boyd who mentiones that specific point in several of her own research papers.