Facebook returns to its roots with Campus, a college student-only social network

I was in college when Facebook first came out as thefacebook.com. It didn’t have a news feed, just profiles. You could share basic photos. It’s source code once showed up instead of an HTML response. At the time it was a novelty and one of a bunch of social networks. It was hard to tell what its value proposition was, but people were signing up for it soon as they heard about it.

The problem with a college student focused network is that students graduate. And college kids don’t have nearly as much money as college grads 20 years after they graduate (unless the student loan apocalypse takes everyone down). I can’t imagine this network would last very long as a college student only thing. There just is too much incentive to grow beyond the relatively small group that is college students.

Also, fuck Facebook for enabling and stoking the hate and FUD in this country. If you work for FB, please look for other employment. I am sure you have options. At this point I personally view working for them on the same level as working for cigarette companies: it is literally harmful to public health.

The next Facebook can NOT be invented at a company like Facebook.

This may be a bit controversial so please, hear out the reasoning. From public accounts in the press as well as comments and discussions over on anonymous employee forums, it's fairly evident that the culture at _insert_large_Bay_Area_Firm_here_ has devolved into one of negativity with an unhealthy dose of politics mixed in.

We see "Product managers" numbering in the thousands, the vast majority of whom are likely better classified into an "Operations" role than anything resembling innovative work that pushes the boundaries. The definition of risk taking has reduced severely into one where, even small-ish code decisions go through layers of executive review.

A lot of what is publicly known of the early days of theFacebook.com indicate much higher risk taking appetites in a firm staffed with engineers that had a more "Fuck it" attitude. Without going into any information not in the public domain, it is clear from publicly available news reports on internal deliberations and chatter, that this culture has, sadly, died.

That's not to say they won't be profitable or successful at what they're doing . . .quite the opposite. They have a business model that allows this wasteful approach and have the luxury of being a retirement home.

The Student only social network in the OP however . . .doesn't look like a serious attempt at launching something new and exciting and will likely be dead in one or two performance evaluation cycles when the people working on it move on and hand it over to someone else.

Facebook isn't returning to its roots. This is just another re-branded social media site meant to capture the attention of another generation of college students for advertising purposes.