7 ms·

How I almost killed Facebook

157 points by neilc 18y ago

dimitry 18y ago
good read. different point of view.
aristus 18y ago
This is very off-topic, but in the last few years I've noticed more and more intelligent people misspelling words phonetically ("unphased" instead of "unfazed"). I can understand someone flubbing pronunciation (eg "macabre", "learned"), but what is causing this other phenomenon? Are people (Harvard professors!) not reading as much as they used to? Are they less concerned about editing? Is this the last great challenge for spellcheck?
- jerf 18y ago
  For better or worse, drift is inevitable. Words with unique or very unusual phonetics are all but doomed to regularization. Long-term irregularity is reserved for the most common words, in general. Things like that still make me twitch, but we're getting to the point that if you spell it "unfazed" you'll get a "correction" from your friendly local spelling-nazi-wannabe.
- kwamenum86 18y ago
  The most intelligent people in the world make mistakes...pretty sure spelling error is inconsequential for him.
  - aristus 18y ago
    Of course the mistake is not important. I'm just wondering about how it happens. If someone learns most of their words from books, you can tell because they will use a word correctly but say it oddly. I'm wondering what causes someone to use a word correctly but spell it phonetically. Are we speaking more and writing less? Hard to believe, no?
    - rudyfink 18y ago
      I don't know about other people, but I have always heard what I'm writing in my head before I type it out. Sometimes, especially if I'm a little distracted, this produces misspelled words that would be pronounced correctly or homonyms like "hear" instead of "here". On the chance that it might help, I think the funnel is something like: -ideas/shapes which are always moving around->selecting the appropriate/better/good enough one out of these by focusing on it more. this always feels kind of like a sorter appraising different things bubbling up and sinking on the surface of a pool. -this selected one at the fore gets structured to be said probably more precisely that feeling right before you actually say something. if this is going well, little is lost between the thought and what comes out of the structuring, but sometimes the thoughts are much worse from the process. -this structured thing gets more concrete as I touch type it and somehow grammar and punctuation get in there. -this gets a look over as it is coming out for errors. is it gibberish or not, is the grammar correct, do I like it. Depending on what I'm concerned with different amounts of effort are going into those different sections. I think the error gets put in pretty close to when it gets typed out.
      - aristus 18y ago
        That's very interesting... and a little creepy. It's like you are taking dictation from yourself.
        rudyfink 18y ago
        I suppose so. It's like that for everything though. If I want to draw a drawing, some part of me is picturing the drawing before it flows out, usually looking much worse than it did in my head. If I'm writing a program, some part of me is seeing the structure and how it works and fits together before it flows out. If I'm playing soccer, I see what I'd like to be doing before it flows out. I think it helps that the process almost always feels like a cooperative enterprise. Injury of some sort or another definitely will effect it. Something is always in my head out there a bit ahead (sometimes only very little) of whatever my body is doing. Maybe this is uncommon but I've never really gotten that impression from talking with people or other people's recitations of their experiences. I've never really talked with too many people about it though. "How do you feel your brain and body do things?" isn't exactly the kind of question one asks in the elevator, waiting in line, or on a plane.
- ciscoriordan 18y ago
  Possibly it's because you're seeing more writing done in-browser as opposed to in a word processor that has spell check?
  - batasrki 18y ago
    How would the spell check figure out that you meant unfazed instead of unphased? They're both properly spelled in the sense that they're not a mangled collection of letters.
- jrockway 18y ago
  In the past, people had editors edit their writing before making it public. Now, they let people like you do the editing for them, saving the expense of having a real editor. And oh yeah, writing comes together a lot faster now. You can have an idea in the morning and be on the front page of social news sites by the afternoon. When things happen that quickly, there is bound to be a brain-o (or typo) in your writing.
- batasrki 18y ago
  For that matter, there's been a surprising number of people that put "it's" where they meant "its". I've noticed that this is trending up lately, as well.
- 10ren 18y ago
  I don't recall seeing the word "unfazed" in print before (though google says it's ten times as common as "unphased"). Turns out "faze" is a word, since 1830: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/faze http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/faze The correct spelling was "feeze", but popular usage altered it...
unalone 18y ago
I've always been curious to know how much of Facebook was Zuckerberg and how much was other people. A lot of people are quick to slap him down, but quite a few accounts say that he's as brilliant as he's credited for.
- jmtame 18y ago
  i don't think he's good at coming up with ideas, but he has shown repeatedly that he will execute the hell out of a project.
  - neilc 18y ago
    i don't think he's good at coming up with ideas How would you know?
    - jmtame 18y ago
      i'm just observing. he didn't come up with the idea for facemash (his friend recommended that to him), and the winklevoss brothers asked him to help build the harvard connection (which is as the rumor goes, where zuck started building facebook).
- zandorg 18y ago
  He was offered a near $1-million offer from Microsoft, just for a job there, so his ability's not in dispute (unless $1-million is peanuts nowadays).
  - jmtame 18y ago
    wasn't that to acquire the app he built which suggests new music to listen to on your computer? and he rejected that and decided instead to go to harvard? i bet he was just trying to buy more time to build something bigger. from what i've heard, he was very much on a rapid fire mode with his projects. if one failed or didn't grow very quickly, he wouldn't wait long before moving on to another one.
mixmax 18y ago
"Of course, at that time I thought that social networking sites were a complete waste of time -- both for the users and those developing the sites -- so I earnestly tried to talk Mark out of squandering his precious Harvard education on such a frivolous endeavor. "You think you're going to compete against Friendster and Orkut?" was the general outline of my argument. There were already too many social networking sites out there, I claimed, and building yet another one was clearly a waste of time." Interestingly the argument against building a social network is still the same, and inevitably someone will come along, not listen to the advice and create the next facebook. These things seem to be cyclic in nature.
- liuliu 18y ago
  When Google startup, many people suggested that there are too many search engines out there and yet another search engine will not succeed. However, after Google, there is no major search engine emergence. For SNS, maybe there will be a next Facebook, but the chance is much rare than before. In Orkut/Friendster era, not so many people daily live on social network. For now, everyone online knows SNS and Facebook. That is the most obvious barrier for new comers, people's custom.
  - unalone 18y ago
    This. Everything is cyclical and doomed to fail until something better breaks that repeating pattern. It happened with Amazon before Web 2.0, when everybody thought it was doomed to fail. I'd bet it happens with Facebook. It deserved repeating, because I don't think some people get it: Friendster had a few users. Myspace had a lot. Facebook has every single college student and now it has every single high school student, and almost every person checks it at least once per day, and in the last 6 months it's been picking up in every demographic. Facebook is a part of life for those people, in a way that Twitter or Tumblr or Flickr or even a huge site like Youtube is not. It's not going down without a fight.
    - jfarmer 18y ago
      YouTube probably doesn't deserve to be lumped with Twitter, Tumblr, or Flickr, but you're right -- Facebook has been a part of my every day fabric for a few years now, and it's only growing. My parents, cousins, aunts, and uncles all use it, for goodness' sake. Sites I'm in contact with every day: Facebook, Google (search, mail, reader), YouTube, Twitter, and HN. As an aside, I honestly think Twitter will become very mainstream. I'm already seeing more pop-culture references every day, and have friends I never would have expected to see on it following me. It's certainly busted out of the Silicon Valley bubble, which honestly surprised me a lot. A year ago I thought of Twitter as the quintessential by-the-Valley-for-the-Valley startup.
dilanj 18y ago
How did the author 'almost kill facebook' if Zuckerberg was 'unphased' by his argument in this single conversation they had?
- deleted 18y ago
  [deleted]
- jsomers 18y ago
  I don't think he is being entirely serious in this post, which is sprinkled with self-deprecation masquerading as egotism.
  - cpr 18y ago
    It struck me as egotism masquerading as self-deprecation. It'd be like my talking about how I almost destroyed Microsoft because I used to tease Gates about he was wasting his time programming those silly microcomputers, when he was hacking late at night on his 8080 assembler/linker/simulator in the PDP-10 machine room at the old Harvard CRCT. (Which happens to be true. ;-)
    - gruseom 18y ago
      It struck me as egotism masquerading as self-deprecation. Damn, you beat me to it! I was going to say: Egotism masquerading as self-deprecation masquerading as egotism. Edit: That's a pretty great story about Gates, and it got me curious, so I googled some other places where you mentioned him. This one was my favorite, because it confirms a belief I have about companies' personalities reflecting their founders': http://caelumetterra.wordpress.com/2006/01/19/ceos-red-in-tooth-and-claw/#comment-1110 http://caelumetterra.wordpress.com/2006/01/19/ceos-red-in-to... It also makes a shrewd observation about Microsoft.
      - gruseom 18y ago
        Meant to add: sorry for web-stalking you... that tidbit was just too enticing to pass up!
thinkcomp 18y ago
I will always give The Harvard Crimson and the press at large more credit than Mark for spreading Facebook.
abrahamsen 18y ago
Matt Welsh could also claim some credit for making Linux popular. He wrote most of the user oriented documentation back when Linux was new, and founded the Linux Documentation Project.
- davidw 18y ago
  Oh... that Matt Welsh! Cool, yeah, I had the O'Reilly book with the cowboy on it.
snprbob86 18y ago
While this is interesting, it is just one bullet on my list of reasons not to grade based on class participation...
- herval 18y ago
  I'd add "not take business advice from teachers" to your list too...
fleaflicker 18y ago
fleaflicker has a "front office" feed displaying a league's recent activity. I launched it 4 months before facebook's friend feed. A cool idea but hardly original or patentable.
- jonknee 18y ago
  It's also the major reason I'm not on Facebook. It makes stalkers out of friends and just isn't something I'm interested in.
- neilc 18y ago
  It's almost surely patentable, I think. A generic activity feed is not novel, of course, but the context (using it for social activities, methods for selecting what appears in the feed) is significant.
vlad 18y ago
"I suggested to him that they really needed to find a way to get people to login to the site regularly. With most social networking sites, you sign up, add your few dozen friends, and maybe for one or two weeks get a kick out of messaging them as they join your friend list. But after that, there's little or no reason to keep returning to the site -- as a result your profile just stagnates. Well, wouldn't you know it -- a few months later Facebook came out with the News Feed feature which shows you what all of your friends are up on on an up-to-the-minute basis. Pure genius! Had I only thought to patent the idea..." Although Matt is obviously joking, the question is why did he even write this, if not to try to take some credit for the news feed? I've thought of at least half a dozen ideas identical to what YC had later funded, and the reality is that between the time I thought of it and the appearance of the same thing a few months later, the actual development of that began months earlier, and likely multiple groups formed and applied with a similar idea, and I did not develop or apply for funding for the idea. However, in his case, it doesn't sound like he even had a similar idea, but is just confusing giving somebody goodwill advice with having a piece of the credit in the creation of any features that are released in the next three months.
berlinbrown 18y ago
Yea right. Cry me a river.

157 points by neilc 18y ago

good read. different point of view.

This is very off-topic, but in the last few years I've noticed more and more intelligent people misspelling words phonetically ("unphased" instead of "unfazed"). I can understand someone flubbing pronunciation (eg "macabre", "learned"), but what is causing this other phenomenon? Are people (Harvard professors!) not reading as much as they used to? Are they less concerned about editing? Is this the last great challenge for spellcheck?

jerf 18y ago
For better or worse, drift is inevitable. Words with unique or very unusual phonetics are all but doomed to regularization. Long-term irregularity is reserved for the most common words, in general. Things like that still make me twitch, but we're getting to the point that if you spell it "unfazed" you'll get a "correction" from your friendly local spelling-nazi-wannabe.
kwamenum86 18y ago
The most intelligent people in the world make mistakes...pretty sure spelling error is inconsequential for him.
- aristus 18y ago
  Of course the mistake is not important. I'm just wondering about how it happens. If someone learns most of their words from books, you can tell because they will use a word correctly but say it oddly. I'm wondering what causes someone to use a word correctly but spell it phonetically. Are we speaking more and writing less? Hard to believe, no?
  - rudyfink 18y ago
    I don't know about other people, but I have always heard what I'm writing in my head before I type it out. Sometimes, especially if I'm a little distracted, this produces misspelled words that would be pronounced correctly or homonyms like "hear" instead of "here". On the chance that it might help, I think the funnel is something like: -ideas/shapes which are always moving around->selecting the appropriate/better/good enough one out of these by focusing on it more. this always feels kind of like a sorter appraising different things bubbling up and sinking on the surface of a pool. -this selected one at the fore gets structured to be said probably more precisely that feeling right before you actually say something. if this is going well, little is lost between the thought and what comes out of the structuring, but sometimes the thoughts are much worse from the process. -this structured thing gets more concrete as I touch type it and somehow grammar and punctuation get in there. -this gets a look over as it is coming out for errors. is it gibberish or not, is the grammar correct, do I like it. Depending on what I'm concerned with different amounts of effort are going into those different sections. I think the error gets put in pretty close to when it gets typed out.
    - aristus 18y ago
      That's very interesting... and a little creepy. It's like you are taking dictation from yourself.
      - rudyfink 18y ago
        I suppose so. It's like that for everything though. If I want to draw a drawing, some part of me is picturing the drawing before it flows out, usually looking much worse than it did in my head. If I'm writing a program, some part of me is seeing the structure and how it works and fits together before it flows out. If I'm playing soccer, I see what I'd like to be doing before it flows out. I think it helps that the process almost always feels like a cooperative enterprise. Injury of some sort or another definitely will effect it. Something is always in my head out there a bit ahead (sometimes only very little) of whatever my body is doing. Maybe this is uncommon but I've never really gotten that impression from talking with people or other people's recitations of their experiences. I've never really talked with too many people about it though. "How do you feel your brain and body do things?" isn't exactly the kind of question one asks in the elevator, waiting in line, or on a plane.
ciscoriordan 18y ago
Possibly it's because you're seeing more writing done in-browser as opposed to in a word processor that has spell check?
- batasrki 18y ago
  How would the spell check figure out that you meant unfazed instead of unphased? They're both properly spelled in the sense that they're not a mangled collection of letters.
jrockway 18y ago
In the past, people had editors edit their writing before making it public. Now, they let people like you do the editing for them, saving the expense of having a real editor. And oh yeah, writing comes together a lot faster now. You can have an idea in the morning and be on the front page of social news sites by the afternoon. When things happen that quickly, there is bound to be a brain-o (or typo) in your writing.
batasrki 18y ago
For that matter, there's been a surprising number of people that put "it's" where they meant "its". I've noticed that this is trending up lately, as well.
10ren 18y ago
I don't recall seeing the word "unfazed" in print before (though google says it's ten times as common as "unphased"). Turns out "faze" is a word, since 1830: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/faze http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/faze The correct spelling was "feeze", but popular usage altered it...

unalone 18y ago

I've always been curious to know how much of Facebook was Zuckerberg and how much was other people. A lot of people are quick to slap him down, but quite a few accounts say that he's as brilliant as he's credited for.

jmtame 18y ago
i don't think he's good at coming up with ideas, but he has shown repeatedly that he will execute the hell out of a project.
- neilc 18y ago
  i don't think he's good at coming up with ideas How would you know?
  - jmtame 18y ago
    i'm just observing. he didn't come up with the idea for facemash (his friend recommended that to him), and the winklevoss brothers asked him to help build the harvard connection (which is as the rumor goes, where zuck started building facebook).
zandorg 18y ago
He was offered a near $1-million offer from Microsoft, just for a job there, so his ability's not in dispute (unless $1-million is peanuts nowadays).
- jmtame 18y ago
  wasn't that to acquire the app he built which suggests new music to listen to on your computer? and he rejected that and decided instead to go to harvard? i bet he was just trying to buy more time to build something bigger. from what i've heard, he was very much on a rapid fire mode with his projects. if one failed or didn't grow very quickly, he wouldn't wait long before moving on to another one.

mixmax 18y ago

"Of course, at that time I thought that social networking sites were a complete waste of time -- both for the users and those developing the sites -- so I earnestly tried to talk Mark out of squandering his precious Harvard education on such a frivolous endeavor. "You think you're going to compete against Friendster and Orkut?" was the general outline of my argument. There were already too many social networking sites out there, I claimed, and building yet another one was clearly a waste of time." Interestingly the argument against building a social network is still the same, and inevitably someone will come along, not listen to the advice and create the next facebook. These things seem to be cyclic in nature.

liuliu 18y ago
When Google startup, many people suggested that there are too many search engines out there and yet another search engine will not succeed. However, after Google, there is no major search engine emergence. For SNS, maybe there will be a next Facebook, but the chance is much rare than before. In Orkut/Friendster era, not so many people daily live on social network. For now, everyone online knows SNS and Facebook. That is the most obvious barrier for new comers, people's custom.
- unalone 18y ago
  This. Everything is cyclical and doomed to fail until something better breaks that repeating pattern. It happened with Amazon before Web 2.0, when everybody thought it was doomed to fail. I'd bet it happens with Facebook. It deserved repeating, because I don't think some people get it: Friendster had a few users. Myspace had a lot. Facebook has every single college student and now it has every single high school student, and almost every person checks it at least once per day, and in the last 6 months it's been picking up in every demographic. Facebook is a part of life for those people, in a way that Twitter or Tumblr or Flickr or even a huge site like Youtube is not. It's not going down without a fight.
  - jfarmer 18y ago
    YouTube probably doesn't deserve to be lumped with Twitter, Tumblr, or Flickr, but you're right -- Facebook has been a part of my every day fabric for a few years now, and it's only growing. My parents, cousins, aunts, and uncles all use it, for goodness' sake. Sites I'm in contact with every day: Facebook, Google (search, mail, reader), YouTube, Twitter, and HN. As an aside, I honestly think Twitter will become very mainstream. I'm already seeing more pop-culture references every day, and have friends I never would have expected to see on it following me. It's certainly busted out of the Silicon Valley bubble, which honestly surprised me a lot. A year ago I thought of Twitter as the quintessential by-the-Valley-for-the-Valley startup.

dilanj 18y ago

How did the author 'almost kill facebook' if Zuckerberg was 'unphased' by his argument in this single conversation they had?

deleted 18y ago
[deleted]
jsomers 18y ago
I don't think he is being entirely serious in this post, which is sprinkled with self-deprecation masquerading as egotism.
- cpr 18y ago
  It struck me as egotism masquerading as self-deprecation. It'd be like my talking about how I almost destroyed Microsoft because I used to tease Gates about he was wasting his time programming those silly microcomputers, when he was hacking late at night on his 8080 assembler/linker/simulator in the PDP-10 machine room at the old Harvard CRCT. (Which happens to be true. ;-)
  - gruseom 18y ago
    It struck me as egotism masquerading as self-deprecation. Damn, you beat me to it! I was going to say: Egotism masquerading as self-deprecation masquerading as egotism. Edit: That's a pretty great story about Gates, and it got me curious, so I googled some other places where you mentioned him. This one was my favorite, because it confirms a belief I have about companies' personalities reflecting their founders': http://caelumetterra.wordpress.com/2006/01/19/ceos-red-in-tooth-and-claw/#comment-1110 http://caelumetterra.wordpress.com/2006/01/19/ceos-red-in-to... It also makes a shrewd observation about Microsoft.
    - gruseom 18y ago
      Meant to add: sorry for web-stalking you... that tidbit was just too enticing to pass up!

thinkcomp 18y ago

I will always give The Harvard Crimson and the press at large more credit than Mark for spreading Facebook.

abrahamsen 18y ago

Matt Welsh could also claim some credit for making Linux popular. He wrote most of the user oriented documentation back when Linux was new, and founded the Linux Documentation Project.

davidw 18y ago
Oh... that Matt Welsh! Cool, yeah, I had the O'Reilly book with the cowboy on it.

snprbob86 18y ago

While this is interesting, it is just one bullet on my list of reasons not to grade based on class participation...

herval 18y ago
I'd add "not take business advice from teachers" to your list too...

fleaflicker 18y ago

fleaflicker has a "front office" feed displaying a league's recent activity. I launched it 4 months before facebook's friend feed. A cool idea but hardly original or patentable.

jonknee 18y ago
It's also the major reason I'm not on Facebook. It makes stalkers out of friends and just isn't something I'm interested in.
neilc 18y ago
It's almost surely patentable, I think. A generic activity feed is not novel, of course, but the context (using it for social activities, methods for selecting what appears in the feed) is significant.

vlad 18y ago

"I suggested to him that they really needed to find a way to get people to login to the site regularly. With most social networking sites, you sign up, add your few dozen friends, and maybe for one or two weeks get a kick out of messaging them as they join your friend list. But after that, there's little or no reason to keep returning to the site -- as a result your profile just stagnates. Well, wouldn't you know it -- a few months later Facebook came out with the News Feed feature which shows you what all of your friends are up on on an up-to-the-minute basis. Pure genius! Had I only thought to patent the idea..." Although Matt is obviously joking, the question is why did he even write this, if not to try to take some credit for the news feed? I've thought of at least half a dozen ideas identical to what YC had later funded, and the reality is that between the time I thought of it and the appearance of the same thing a few months later, the actual development of that began months earlier, and likely multiple groups formed and applied with a similar idea, and I did not develop or apply for funding for the idea. However, in his case, it doesn't sound like he even had a similar idea, but is just confusing giving somebody goodwill advice with having a piece of the credit in the creation of any features that are released in the next three months.

berlinbrown 18y ago

Yea right. Cry me a river.