I think a lot of people would point at Facebook and PHP and say "yr doin' it wrong!"

I think Zuck got very lucky with that one, php happened to be available when he was first "playing around" with social websites, and available hosting was just getting fast enough cpu for it to become practical to run larger and larger systems with it. These days they've pretty much painted themselves into a corner with it, and their HipHop work is a probably very carefully chosen alternative to a ground-up rewrite in scalable-serverside-tenchiques-de-jour…

But no-one can argue that they're not the 800lb gorilla of the social network vertical today. There might well be other people out-competing Facebook in the "fine dining" markets, but Facebook certainly have the "fast food" social network space sewn up pretty tight. (And when the value is the size and connectedness of the social graph, that's the bit I'd want to own first too)

Agreed. Like I always tell my men and women when we're trying to build something:

"It's not going to be the first one. It sure as hell can't be the best one. But I promise you, it will be another one."

People are missing that the options aren't "Doing it {first|best}.", they're "Doing it{ first.| best.|.}"