Wayne Ting, nearly a billionaire. Or how Facebook won | Hacker News Reader

Wayne Ting, nearly a billionaire. Or how Facebook won

bbc.co.uk

80 pointsmarckremers29 comments

Every new feature Facebook introduced has already been done by someone else. When it started, it was a simple clean website, and that ease of use attracted the initial users. Then Facebook was opened for apps, and there was a flood of zombie/vampire apps, and widgets to customize your page with. Like most geeks, I got sick of those years earlier, having visited enough PHPnuke-based portals and linkspam-based games.

But for many people Facebook was an introduction to the things you could do online. It was a structured, gradual, hand-holding introduction, which is what I think made it work.

The final sentence in your characterization of Facebook is uncannily similar to what AOL was in its glory days.

Also one should recognize that Facebook never let the site degrade to the point that bad features caused people to leave. Appspam was a huge problem, for maybe a month-- then they started incremental steps to limit it, until now when there is so little of it on my Newsfeed I forget there are apps. There is a threshold for people leaving and Facebook always skirts it, never enough to cause a mass exodus however.

until now when there is so little of it on my Newsfeed I forget there are apps

Recently I thought of trying out a few facebook games, just to see how things have progressed.

I literally could not figure out how to find the games. I have no "games" icon on the left toolbar as I deleted it a while back, and there is seemingly no way to navigate to a list of popular games from anywhere on the site.

I thought that was strange.

Quite so. Facebook has made a bonanza on new internet users. My personal belief is that most of these people will figure out that Facebook is not the internet and spread out to other services, decreasing Facebook's importance, and they will not be replaced by other new users in the similar quantities.

And yes, the past three years have shown derivative introduction after derivative introduction. Facebook is basically in it's MS-1998 stage: if you can't buy the competition, copy them thoroughly and use your superior market power to smother them. This will end up just like MS, in a dying, boring irrelevant company that has a popular product, but absolutely no clue about where to go next and a serious inability to catch on to true trends.

Agree. Mixi was definitely there before Facebook on a lot of things. I loved Mixi for being "MySpace done right" long before I'd heard of Facebook.

If I had a dollar for everybody out there who claims that they were "nearly a billionaire" I'd be a fucking billionaire.

Pretty simple: This article has nothing to do with what happened, only conjecture with hindsight. How many phone calls, or little decisions guided facebook through its early months? Many. Trying to pin down a reason why one site won out over another is just crazy. Things are not 3 variable functions, they are much more complex.

I'd say the important thing to take away is the network effect: once you start winning in a race to become the dominant network in a winner-take-all market, you tend to go on winning as long as you don't screw up too badly.

Like this write-up by Wesabi's cofounder as to why they lost to mint much beter: http://blog.precipice.org/why-wesabe-lost-to-mint

Nice catch. And reminded me of Netflix's chief product officer summing up all his split testings as "simple trumps complete": http://www.quora.com/What-types-of-things-does-Netflix-A-B-t...

I think we're seeing a pattern here.

From the Social Network: If you guys were the inventors of Facebook, you'd have invented Facebook.

I'd like to see a comparison of the competing interfaces. It's not about the functionality -- as Facebook has shown by attaining the large majority of its users after the Notes functionality was included, the ability to blog doesn't keep users away. If you present yourself as a blogging site, however, and no one wants to blog, then you're in for it.

I think it'd be interesting to see if there really was something better about the Facebook interface or if this whole thing should be blamed on network effects. People used Facebook when it was new for the same reason they use it now: the people they know also use it.

I was a freshman at Columbia at the time. CUcommunity's interface was MySpace-esque. The first version of Facebook was very spartan. No photos other than your profile pic, no wall, no messages. Basically nothing other than your info page. The upshot was that you used all of Facebook's features and a (small) subset of CUcommunity's.

Facebook was several months ahead on spreading to other schools, and that was huge. Probably the decisive factor. By the time CUcommunity spread (rechristened as CampusNetwork), I think Wayne is right that it was simply way too late. By the beginning of summer 2004, Facebook's position on college campuses was pretty obviously unassailable.

Edit: found some screenshots of CUcommunity/CampusNetwork: http://www.wikicu.com/CampusNetwork

Facebook didn't win because of better features. They went for the most valuable and influential users first. I think their initial user base, exclusivity and gradual expansion were their greatest assets.

Moral of the story: Do one thing and do it better than everyone.

His guess at why Facebook won could easily be wrong.

Yeah, I suspect that the "users weren't sophisticated enough" is bullshit.

I just wonder who the first hundred or so users of Facebook were, must be amazing to hop onto a site (and a story) like that so early, and to have seen it expand the way it did.

Just look for the users with the first 100 Facebook UIDs... e.g. Mark Zuckerberg has UID=4.

My user ID on the houseSYSTEM Facebook was 1; Mark's was 1,234. On Mark's Facebook mine was/is 82, and his was/is 4. I've commented on the experience of being involved and "amazing" is one of many adjectives one could use. It's striking how few people want to hear what I have to say, anyhow.

Are you really working on FaceCash? It sounds like a parody.

Yes, and it's not. Did you look at the site?

Yes I did and it looks great! Are you seeing good adoption? Who are your early users? Any plans of coming to the UK?

(Sorry I realise my earlier comment sounds silly.)

Your comment struck me as prescient. I founded a "flash in the pan" social startup game that eventually went nowhere. But despite the end results, it was quite an interesting ride and there are some fascinating stories to tell. Unfortunately, only a couple people I know have cared to hear them. Most of my 300 or so Facebook friends don't even know what a startup is, let alone why they should want to hear stories about one.

Obviously my experience is probably not nearly as interesting as yours, but I understand your sentiment. The vast majority of people simply don't seem relate to much that falls beyond their own preconceived worldviews. Anything beyond that horizon is foreign to them to the point of being meaningless.

I think it's more that when faced with a) a site where the stuff you want is surrounded by other things to wade through, and b) a site that contains only things you want, people prefer the latter.

If not wrong, it's really simplistic (probably for the sake of this news piece). I just finished listening to the Facebook Effect by David Kirkpatrick. It is a really good account of Facebook's history. It shows just how uncertain things were in the beginning. There were loads of little decisions along the way which made Facebook what it is.

Zuckerberg, no doubt, turned out to be a visionary. But even he wasn't sure Facebook would last long, so he was hedging his bets with Wirehog.

Before Facebook, he was already experimenting with random hacks. When he saw Facebook absolutely exploded as soon as he put it out, he doubled down on it. Wouldn't any hacker do that?

I think Facebook's success lies in Zuck's ability to rally top people around him and to keep them focused on one vision, even when he's not clear what that vision is. Just "something big" seems to work until you figure out what it is.

This news story probably doesn't do justice to Ting's story, but did he really give up without even a hard fight? Who said becoming a billionaire was easy?

Edit: The coolest thing about listening to the book for me was that I found an old school friend of mine was a key early hire at Facebook. I hadn't spoken to her in years, but it was so cool to connect with her again. Of course, via Facebook.

A few details in execution and a better name perhaps.

Facebook bought close to $40 million of Friendster's patents.

Does Zuck really have over $1 billion in liquid assets?

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