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For those that were around during its initial release, it would be great if you could share your thoughts on why/how FB became so popular. Exclusivity? Seeding/

by smaili 13y ago

For those that were around during its initial release, it would be great if you could share your thoughts on why/how FB became so popular. Exclusivity? Seeding/inviting the site to social/popular people (like in The Social Network)? Simple UI? No ads? Another reason? Or just a little bit of everything? Very interested!

JeremyMorgan 13y ago
For me, it was definitely the exclusivity and the timing. MySpace was big, and it was cool for communicating and reconnecting but it still felt like a "kids place" to some extent. Many of my buddies from college were signed up to this and recommended it to me. I signed up and started being more active on it. It wasn't so much that it was only exclusive to people attending college, but just that it was not overrun by spazzy kids and animated gifs (at the time).
RandallBrown 13y ago
Facebook used to just be a profile system. You put up information about yourself and hoped other people would look at it. People could write on your wall (timeline now) and you could write on theirs. People at your university and your friends could see your profile. Nobody else could. I remember spending hours looking at other peoples profiles. They're a computer science major? I'm a computer science major. What kind of music do they like? WOW this is interesting. They also had this really fascinating "How you're connected" feature which would give you a list of friends that connected you to that person. You could pick almost any random person at the school (I went to a school with almost 40,000 students) and you would almost always be connected to them through your friends. MySpace, while offering many similar features, was annoying to use. Oh great, white text on a yellow background and emo music blasting on page load. It got to a point where I wouldn't ever click my friend's MySpace pages because I just knew it was going to be terrible. The exclusivity of it to college students was cool too. My friends at schools that didn't have facebook yet would be jealous of all the cool connections and groups we made on facebook that they couldn't do. Then, when it rolled out to their campus, they would do the same.

by smaili 13y ago

JeremyMorgan 13y ago

For me, it was definitely the exclusivity and the timing. MySpace was big, and it was cool for communicating and reconnecting but it still felt like a "kids place" to some extent. Many of my buddies from college were signed up to this and recommended it to me. I signed up and started being more active on it. It wasn't so much that it was only exclusive to people attending college, but just that it was not overrun by spazzy kids and animated gifs (at the time).

RandallBrown 13y ago

Facebook used to just be a profile system. You put up information about yourself and hoped other people would look at it. People could write on your wall (timeline now) and you could write on theirs. People at your university and your friends could see your profile. Nobody else could. I remember spending hours looking at other peoples profiles. They're a computer science major? I'm a computer science major. What kind of music do they like? WOW this is interesting. They also had this really fascinating "How you're connected" feature which would give you a list of friends that connected you to that person. You could pick almost any random person at the school (I went to a school with almost 40,000 students) and you would almost always be connected to them through your friends. MySpace, while offering many similar features, was annoying to use. Oh great, white text on a yellow background and emo music blasting on page load. It got to a point where I wouldn't ever click my friend's MySpace pages because I just knew it was going to be terrible. The exclusivity of it to college students was cool too. My friends at schools that didn't have facebook yet would be jealous of all the cool connections and groups we made on facebook that they couldn't do. Then, when it rolled out to their campus, they would do the same.