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The real keys to Facebook's success: 1) Prior campus projects made him locally famous. 2) An upper-crust seed population. 3) Exclusivity during expansion.

The real keys to Facebook's success: 1) Prior campus projects made him locally famous. 2) An upper-crust seed population. 3) Exclusivity during expansion. 4) A clean interface which appealed to something other than the rebellious, "express myself" teen (i.e. not MySpace). 5) Timing. He hit the right audience at the right time. 6) Luck. I don't doubt that there is a lot of skill at Facebook these days to keep it riding high on the social wave, but if you want to talk about what made Facebook successful, it's mostly the above.

cabalamat 16y ago
> 3) Exclusivity during expansion. I'm not sure this helped. A social networking site is only as useful as the number of people on it. I expect Facebook would have grown faster without exclusivity. > 4) A clean interface Definitely. The worse thing about MySpace, and one reason I never considered getting a MySpace account, is that users can customise their page to make it hard or even impossible to read. If I made a site like MySpace, I'd allow users to customise their page, but I'd also give users an option to use their own customisations when viewing someone else's page. That way, people can read the damn thing!
- jcfrei 16y ago
  > 3) Exclusivity during expansion. I'm not sure this helped. A social networking site is only as useful as the number of people on it. I expect Facebook would have grown faster without exclusivity. I think exclusivity was key - and probably facebook's main difference from other networks (in it's early days). A social network isn't only about aggregating as many people as possible - this can also have a contradictory effect. What is much more important is the relevance of the community to you. Would you rather join a network with ~500 weak contacts or one with your 4 most important? The current popularity of facebook is also inherently causing a lot of people to stop sharing their personal lives on facebook. But lastly let's not forget, that many elder social networks simply screwed up - both friendster and myspace got big troubles to scale their systems (database integrity etc.) - whereas facebook has a culture strongly driven by engineers (however that's gonna turn out... but facebook definitely has got fantastic uptime). One last thing: build a social network that effectively and nicely solves the problem of the different social communities a person belongs too - and you might just as well build the next fb.
  - KMStraub 16y ago
    "The current popularity of facebook is also inherently causing a lot of people to stop sharing their personal lives on facebook." This is troubling to me. I feel like I'm looking at a bunch of ghosts when I view people's profiles now. Anyone else? Their photos and a bit of their bios are still up, but they've mostly moved on to other forms of tech to post anything dynamic because of the logical fear that they will no longer control what aspects of their personal lives will become public record. What, I wonder, is the company doing about this issue beyond just pr stuff like funding privacy-related nonprofits? If they don't address it in their core functionality, they've got a potential wasteland on their hands.
- jacobolus 16y ago
  > I'm not sure [exclusivity during expansion] helped As someone who was a Harvard student starting a few months after Facebook’s introduction, I think it was absolutely essential. 1. Many people are comfortable sharing much more information somewhere they know can only be accessed by people at their school than somewhere world-readable. The alternative to piggybacking on established trusted networks is to require users to build the whole network independently – a much more uphill struggle. 2. Features could be tailored to the campus: instead of generic questions, Facebook could ask which residence you lived in or which academic field you studied and provide a drop-down. Early on, there was a feature that let students see who shared their classes. These kinds of targeted features made the site relevant: for me personally, they were as or more useful than having everyone in the world on the network. 3. Facebook became a campus fad. Because everyone had joined, there was great pressure to join, and little reason not to. Something like 90% of incoming freshmen had joined facebook during the summer before the fall term started. Nearly everyone at the school was already on it. 4. The demographic (college students) are social, connected, meet lots of new people through forced interactions, prone to gossip, etc... basically the perfect demographic for a social network site. 5. Facebook was able to scale their developer effort and server resources in a very obvious way: each school went on a server (at least logically), and so to access someone at Stanford’s profile (e.g.) you’d go to stanford.thefacebook.com, and so on. By slowly expanding, Facebook not only was able to keep their user base in line with their infrastructural capabilities, but they also built up a great deal of envy and anticipation at each school which did not yet have Facebook access. When they finally did add each school, usage shot to nearly complete saturation very quickly.
deleted 16y ago
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cabalamat 16y ago

> 3) Exclusivity during expansion. I'm not sure this helped. A social networking site is only as useful as the number of people on it. I expect Facebook would have grown faster without exclusivity. > 4) A clean interface Definitely. The worse thing about MySpace, and one reason I never considered getting a MySpace account, is that users can customise their page to make it hard or even impossible to read. If I made a site like MySpace, I'd allow users to customise their page, but I'd also give users an option to use their own customisations when viewing someone else's page. That way, people can read the damn thing!

jcfrei 16y ago
> 3) Exclusivity during expansion. I'm not sure this helped. A social networking site is only as useful as the number of people on it. I expect Facebook would have grown faster without exclusivity. I think exclusivity was key - and probably facebook's main difference from other networks (in it's early days). A social network isn't only about aggregating as many people as possible - this can also have a contradictory effect. What is much more important is the relevance of the community to you. Would you rather join a network with ~500 weak contacts or one with your 4 most important? The current popularity of facebook is also inherently causing a lot of people to stop sharing their personal lives on facebook. But lastly let's not forget, that many elder social networks simply screwed up - both friendster and myspace got big troubles to scale their systems (database integrity etc.) - whereas facebook has a culture strongly driven by engineers (however that's gonna turn out... but facebook definitely has got fantastic uptime). One last thing: build a social network that effectively and nicely solves the problem of the different social communities a person belongs too - and you might just as well build the next fb.
- KMStraub 16y ago
  "The current popularity of facebook is also inherently causing a lot of people to stop sharing their personal lives on facebook." This is troubling to me. I feel like I'm looking at a bunch of ghosts when I view people's profiles now. Anyone else? Their photos and a bit of their bios are still up, but they've mostly moved on to other forms of tech to post anything dynamic because of the logical fear that they will no longer control what aspects of their personal lives will become public record. What, I wonder, is the company doing about this issue beyond just pr stuff like funding privacy-related nonprofits? If they don't address it in their core functionality, they've got a potential wasteland on their hands.
jacobolus 16y ago
> I'm not sure [exclusivity during expansion] helped As someone who was a Harvard student starting a few months after Facebook’s introduction, I think it was absolutely essential. 1. Many people are comfortable sharing much more information somewhere they know can only be accessed by people at their school than somewhere world-readable. The alternative to piggybacking on established trusted networks is to require users to build the whole network independently – a much more uphill struggle. 2. Features could be tailored to the campus: instead of generic questions, Facebook could ask which residence you lived in or which academic field you studied and provide a drop-down. Early on, there was a feature that let students see who shared their classes. These kinds of targeted features made the site relevant: for me personally, they were as or more useful than having everyone in the world on the network. 3. Facebook became a campus fad. Because everyone had joined, there was great pressure to join, and little reason not to. Something like 90% of incoming freshmen had joined facebook during the summer before the fall term started. Nearly everyone at the school was already on it. 4. The demographic (college students) are social, connected, meet lots of new people through forced interactions, prone to gossip, etc... basically the perfect demographic for a social network site. 5. Facebook was able to scale their developer effort and server resources in a very obvious way: each school went on a server (at least logically), and so to access someone at Stanford’s profile (e.g.) you’d go to stanford.thefacebook.com, and so on. By slowly expanding, Facebook not only was able to keep their user base in line with their infrastructural capabilities, but they also built up a great deal of envy and anticipation at each school which did not yet have Facebook access. When they finally did add each school, usage shot to nearly complete saturation very quickly.

deleted 16y ago

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