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A related question: does anyone know how reddit/digg/facebook/myspace gained their initial traction? Facebook couldn't have been very useful with all of 5 people on it. How did they gain their initial group of users?

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I was one of the first couple hundred people on Facebook (and one of the first 30 people at MIT on it). Zuckerberg started it at Harvard. It spread like wildfire at Harvard because it was highly useful and then he opened it up to MIT. And then Yale. And then UPenn. And so on and so forth.

I think the takeaway there is to try niching to a manageable segment of the user population at first.

“I was one of the first couple hundred people on Facebook (and one of the first 30 people at MIT on it).”

I hate to rain on your parade (and this is admittedly extremely nit-picky), but those two statements are incompatible, unless you had email addresses from both institutions. Something like ten thousand students from Harvard, Columbia, Stanford, and Yale had joined the site before MIT was added.

Hmm. If you're right, I feel like a bit of a doofus. That's not as I remember it, but I don't have evidence to back up my point except my (probably flawed) memory. I will, however, stand by the weaker statement of being one of the first few from MIT.

And don't worry, that's not much of a parade to rain on. ;)

OTTOMH:

reddit: PG and Joel Spolsky talked about it. facebook: Zuck acquired the main harvard email list and spammed everyone. myspace: The parent company spammed all its users. digg: ?

I think spamming is almost inevitable. The plentyoffish guy spammed myspace (i think) and made lots of female sockpuppets.

IIRC, Kevin Rose promoted digg during his TechTV gig.

I think Facebook started as a hot-or-not clone. Zuck went around to the college residences to scrape the pictures from the residence's face books.

For posterity - digg on TechTv: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1_YoG7lqI4

From what I remember, Digg first became popular when Paris Hilton's phone got hacked. They were one of the first sites to break the news with the leaked phone numbers.

So she will actually go down in history for some noteworthy event :-)

I predict here today that Paris Hilton's fame will outlast Digg by many, many years.

True. We were chugging along, growing about 20% a month, 4 months in, when that story appeared on digg and then got indexed by yahoo (we were no.1 and no.3 for the search "paris hilton phone"). Traffic doubled instantly. That should underline the importance of SEO. Get your friends to link to your site.

Yeah, I tried to do some reading about plentyoffish and couldn't find anything about myspace spamming. Though I don't doubt he had a ton of fake accounts at the start, and probably did some deal of spam.

Facebook gained its initial user base by recruiting a huge percentage of the Harvard student body:

“Today, two weeks after its inception, thefacebook.com has blossomed from about 650 members early last week to a network of over 4,300 student, alumni and faculty subscribers as of yesterday.”

http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=357543

“‘I have no idea why it’s so popular,’ said thefacebook.com creator Mark E. Zuckerberg ’06. ‘I was pretty surprised.’”

According to interviews the Reddits have given, they (& friends & fellow YC founders) basically submitted everything themselves for the first 2-3 months. Any time they ran across something interesting on the net, they threw it on Reddit.

I remember checking it out the day it launched and leaving because it wasn't very interesting. I came back in October (about 3-4 months later) and it had some minimal traction. IMHO, the critical factor was that they added comments and people had started commenting on links.

Facebook was pretty well-established when I joined (fall 04, about 8 months after it started). People were using it as an address book - meet someone at a party, you instantly had all their contact info once you knew their name. And since there were pictures and it was organized by college, you could often pick out who they were from first names alone. There weren't many social features back then; IIRC, it just had Poke and the Wall.

I have a plan to start a game of some sort, get a local computer store to sponsor it with a new PC as the prize. Maybe sell local advertising on the site as much to spread awearness as anything.

If it goes well then find a bigger sponsor and do another game, slightly less local next time around....

Myspace gained their initial traction with pseudo-spam.

I'd suggest not following by their example.

Myspace was a well known spam outfit with a history of spamming for a living and a very large database of emails.

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