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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.

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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).”

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. ;)

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