If the network effect alone was enough, we'd have never left Geocities, or Angelfire, or Hotmail, or ICQ, or MySpace... the network effect explains growth curve

If the network effect alone was enough, we'd have never left Geocities, or Angelfire, or Hotmail, or ICQ, or MySpace... the network effect explains growth curves, little more. The rest of your points were part of my point. "Real Names" vs "usernames" is a temporary inefficiency in the early services. It's a typical programmer's solution causing normal person frustration. No-one's making that mistake again. No-one's going to roll out, say, an email service without a profile page for each account or a White Pages feature. No-one's leaving out simple photo/file sharing, tweeting or blogging as an integrated service. And everyone who isn't FaceBook has a huge incentive to support the first federated protocol that enables all that. (So they stand some chance at capturing internet traffic again) Say, Google's Wave. Does anyone think it won't roll out with support for a profile page, some sort of White Pages feature, simple blogging, twitter-esque status updates, etc? It's already got email/chat integration and simple photo sharing this early. Why in the world would they be testing photo sharing if they weren't looking to do much more than 'Email 2.0'?