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Surely a new social network could use others' authentication providers (Facebook Connect, Google account, etc.) to get real names/numbers of users and their fri
by eppsilon 8y ago
Surely a new social network could use others' authentication providers (Facebook Connect, Google account, etc.) to get real names/numbers of users and their friends. Smartphone apps could use contacts from the phone itself. I don't think FB's social graph is as hard to replicate as its overall reach. Users think, "If everyone I know is already on FB or one of the other established networks, why use anything else? "
- oblio 8y agoYou're assuming getting users to give you that info is easy.
- WorldMaker 8y agoRight, Facebook themselves took roughly 10 years to build it, and they used a lot of psychological tricks to do it (first mover advantage, early FB was "exotic" and "invite only", late FB was an avalanche of FOMO and network effects, etc). Similarly, the history of the White Pages and the Yellow Pages is a fascinating read and took decades for those books to be accepted. (Nowhere near as fast as they declined in the internet age.)