How Amazon bought and killed PlanetAll, an early Facebook precursor | Hacker News Reader

How Amazon bought and killed PlanetAll, an early Facebook precursor

qz.com

106 pointsastdb42 comments

Do you know how many "early" social networking platforms there were? Friendster and Orkut were just two of dozens. Not sure why the one Amazon bought would be better off than the one Google bought.

The question should be why is Facebook the one to make it big.

The question should be why is Facebook the one to make it big.

Among many other things, IMO, they connected with the right type of investors at the right time.

*connected with the right type of users at the right time

Love him or hate him Zuck was also a big reason behind Facebook's success.

Sean Parker is a huge reason too. Then Sheryl Sanberg during their crazy growth and maturity period. Many others are very important too, but I think these three have been the most important to FB's success.

The college-only thing was huge.

This one predates Orkut and Friendster by 4-6 years, so it was somewhat unique in already having some traction. Well, and perhaps too early.

Agree strongly with your last sentence though. MySpace in particular missed the boat.

MySpace pretty much paved the way for Facebook. It was the experimental and kooky product that really got the ball rolling on social media, but was too weird to dominate. Then Facebook came in and, among other things, cut out all the crazy customization and provided a clean and consistent interface that had a much better chance of being used daily by a wide range of people.

Another thing Facebook did was start small and slowly roll out to more users. This is kind of antithetical to the ethos of "launch to the public ASAP, get those users!" By starting with a limited and already connected group of people (Harvard students), they were able to realize network effects with less users, and it very quickly integrated itself into their real social lives in a way MySpace hadn't. Being sort of "exclusive" also fueled initial interest among a set of valuable users that would become evangelists.

The customization thing was somehow thought to be really important. That was part of "Web 2.0". Customization is part of what killed Tribe, which "upgraded" and implemented customization badly. You could slide everything around. The user had to get panes and widgets to not overlap, then be careful never to slide anything again.

This is a classic programmer design error. Faced with an aesthetic decision, there's a tendency to punt and make it user-programmable.

I'd say rather than an error per se it's the classic tradeoff between the open "blank canvas" approach and the structured "walled garden" approach. One promotes user creativity and expression at the expense of cohesion, the other creates a consistent experience at the expense of freedom.

Initially when people come from myspace they were using it similar to myspace. Facebook was all about profile widgets, although they still fit a more consistent layout.

I think college only was a good way to start.

This is pretty early on. Late 90s. Years before Friendster and Orkut.

It's not about the ideas, it's all about the execution.

"Let's make a website that connects users" is not that new idea. It's hard to do it so it scales and you don't go bankrupt in the meantime.

>It's not about the ideas, it's all about the execution.

And a little bit of right-time, right-place and just good old fashioned luck.

From everything I heard about Friendster, the idea was great but their technical architecture couldn't scale. Amazon wouldn't have had that issue.

Most of what I know about Friendster comes from listening to the Startup podcast.

https://gimletmedia.com/episode/friendster-part-1-season-5-e...

This one. Others couldn't scale or the investors weren't willing to invest in it to scale.

Orkut was for ages invite only. And thus became a ghetto consisting of Brazilian and Indian users. Expanding within some limited circles.

Facebook faced scaling problems in the early days too. But they believed in it and invested heavily to solve it.

ghetto?!!! May be not the most appropriate description.

There was a huge harassment culture on Orkut. It was a place where was normal to get insulted. Exactly the opposite of FB, which might be extreme on the other side, full of fake compliments.

One of the things that FB got right was exactly this one. Am not sure how they did it, maybe because they started from highly educated places in the US and that set the tone for everyone who joined later.

The problem with Friendster is that one feature wouldn't scale, and it's not obvious that Amazon would have been able to scale it either. Some problems don't scale in linear.

The founder of Friendster believed that the "degrees of bacon" chain was a critical feature. That chain is incredibly expensive to calculate for very large graphs, and produced multi-second page loads. In retrospect, the obvious answer is "drop that feature"; Facebook does fine without it. But Friendster product management thought it was the secret sauce... and maybe it was a reasonable thing to think back in 2002? Dunno, but it sank the company.

Most of what I know about Friendster comes from their #3 and #6 employees (friends).

The Startup podcast did mention that as one of their biggest issues. I didn't know that technically that was their biggest issue.

How did those early employees make out financially? If it's personal, no problem, no need to answer. Always interesting to know how early employees end up doing from a specific startup or overall.

Financially, they ended up with nothing but their paychecks.

Doesn't LinkedIn currently compute a similar n-degree of separation metric, or am I conflating two different features?

Like Google, Facebook was just way better than the other options. As a user you knew that after about 5 minutes of using it.

Unlike the other networks Facebook didn't spam either. It was invite only whilst the other networks would send you weird spammy messages and just felt (and looked) dirty.

I think people using their real names on FB really helped. It made it much easier to find people and connect.

I remember using the social network site Bolt.com back in the mid-late 90s. People have said it was "ahead of its time" by about 10 years, which is about how long it lasted. I enjoyed using it

I fell out of enjoying the use of Facebook.

Honestly, I'd say it's unlimited photo upload that was the big one for facebook.

Other things were late monetization and a focus on usability over other metrics such as clicks (closely related to monetization - the short story of MySpace death is they had to squeeze as many clicks out of each user as possible, killing usability.)

It was games. Farmville and Mafia Wars and the like did more to get people hooked onto the platform more than anything else.

Ten years ago, when FB was gaining steam, everyone in my workplace was talking about Mafia Wars. Whatever other actions propelled FB, games were certainly a component.

I doubt you can boil it down to any one specific factor. Initial exclusivity (to universities, where FB is particularly useful), unlimited photo sharing, games, etc. are all going to drive adoption by different (overlapping to some extent) groups of people.

I don't know how many users signed up only for games, but in my circles it was a minority that used it mostly for gaming, though it really was a big part if it.

Does anyone know why they gave up on it?

As a very, very early user of Facebook, one of the big appeals was the exclusivity of it (way before games). You couldn't sign up unless Facebook was available for your university and you had a university email address. This legitimized it more than say, MySpace, where just anybody could sign up. They started with the "right" demographic, I believe (college kids). Because once FB became a thing at colleges (and to the exclusion of everyone else), it created demand from teenagers and high school kids as the cool thing college kids did. It created demand from college-aged people that weren't going to university because that's where their friends were. Then eventually, it started creating demand in what we then considered weird places, e.g. parents and grandparents, and businesses, who started showing up because that's where their kids were going. I always hear companies talk about teenagers as the most important target demographic, but I think Facebook (perhaps inadvertently?) discovered the "best" demographic, since it automatically attracted people outside of that. I dunno, just some thoughts.

It probably didn't hurt to seed the userbase at Harvard et al. either.

I sat down a considered that for a bit, and i think it was a few things that Facebook did right.

First of all the focus on sharing/timeline, and how we subscribe to those we befriend. Earlier networks seems to have more of a focus on "profile" creation and curation.

Then there was the inclusion of casual gaming. Farmville and whatsnot.

In addition to that they seemed to have been quick to translate their base timeline experience into mobile apps.

And then they introduced an IM system that was mobile friendly just as the big name ones like MSN messenger and AIM struggled, because they were desktop first and expected an always on connection between client and server.

And presto changeo you have a service where people share images, play games with each other over great distance, and stay in touch even while one or both only have a phone handy.

Honestly these days it seems Facebook is more popular via phone than web.

First of all the focus on sharing/timeline, and how we subscribe to those we befriend. Earlier networks seems to have more of a focus on "profile" creation and curation.

Early versions of Facebook were like this too. I remember the outrage in my friend groups when Facebook added the "News Feed" feature. That was around fall of 2006, I think.

I joined Facebook in the summer of 2006 (I'm sure many posters here preceded me -- I would love to know more about Facebook's features and "culture" before then). It used to be the things you could do on Facebook were pretty much limited to:

* Update your profile. including university-centric things like your course enrollment (which you could use to connect with classmates). Facebook also presented statistics like the "top 10 most popular books" at your university, based on user profile data.

* Update your "status". This was always directly preceded by "$YOURNAME is" in the status update UI, which is why if you read old Facebook statuses they're in the third person and lack a subject, like "is SO GLAD finals are over!!" instead of what you might see today: "SO GLAD finals are over!!" or "I'm SO GLAD finals are over!!"

* Upload photos to albums, and post comments on them

* Visit your friend's profile to read their status (I don't remember if past statuses were available; I think not), post on their wall, view their profile, poke them or browse their photos.

* Create groups and invite your friends to join them. Groups had walls and profiles, too.

There was no aggregated feed of your friends' status updates. There was no feed of your friends' activities. Really, there were barely any activities to begin with: comments on posts and even the vaunted "Like" button were implemented well after I joined ("Likes" on comments came well after each of those). Skimming Wikipedia, it actually looks like "Like" didn't come until 2009, even though it feels like it's been around forever.

Exactly, Facebook took hold on campuses before the news feed, before games, before most of the present-day experience. I joined in Fall 05 and it was very much like a college-centric MySpace. Most of the activity happened on your profile and people saying silly things on your Wall (and the pokes haha, it seems so quaint now). You listed your interests, hobbies, bands you liked. There were no Pages, but I think you could see who else in your friends or network listed those bands, later they converted these lists to Likes on Pages.

Photos may have always been there but it was before the smartphone era so it wasn't anything like now, it was more meme posting and random shots of someone passed out drunk. I don't think there were albums at first.

Groups were really popular right away, lots of joke groups but also study and other interest groups where people would post information and organize events. Whereas MySpace and other networks were fun places to hang out, stuff was actually "happening" on Facebook, it became the place of record.

Damn. Groups were a part of FB in 2005. I now remember knowing this but had completely forgotten I'd read that fact before. I'm surprised you're the first comment to mention groups being there early on.

What does your last paragraph mean? Facebook already has more mobile users than web, no? And their mobile revenue is what is giving them most of their valuation.

Or do you mean from the get go FB is something people are used to just from phones? If so my apologies. That does make some sense and could be true. Probably is for a lot of growing nations and economies like Africa and Asia.

Our the elephant in the room, MySpace.

I thought the site made an error with FB's market cap being $435B in the article. Didn't realize FB is up close to 15% since June and closing in on $500B now.

Interesting that this site had a lot of basic common social networking features so early on. The 90s.

I came into it assuming something like LiveJournal or Xanga.

"If [PlanetAll] were the inventors of Facebook, they'd have invented Facebook."

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