No other social network successfully kept a lid on who could join like FB did in the beginning. Anyone who started a social network at the time wanted as many

No other social network successfully kept a lid on who could join like FB did in the beginning. Anyone who started a social network at the time wanted as many people to sign up as possible but could care less who they were or where they were from. This resulted in lots of random people signing up but few connections that existed in the real world translating to the social network. Consider Myspace (or many others) where your "friends" were often people you did not know. Sometimes you didn't even know their names! Facebook did the exact opposite. They wanted to transfer the real world connections to the web. By getting almost everyone at Harvard on the service they were able make this happen. They repeated the success at many other schools. It was a long time before just anyone could join FB and at that point so many real world connections were already in place that when a person joined there were already people they knew on the site.