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Comment by edu | Hacker News Reader

Indeed they were.

Also, it’s interesting to note that in both cases they where two very lean companies (Instagram had 13 employees and WhatsApp had 55) with pretty a pretty large and engaged user base (30 million for Insta and 450 million for WhatsApp)

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Yeah, and he threw a huge bunch of cash to acquire them. pretty easy to acquire. Harder to build. He got lucky with facebook because myspace sucked. Good timing.

I always hear reverence around Myspace. Is it really rose-tinted nostalgia? It seemed like a cool core product.

MySpace gave users a lot of freedom. That was great in certain scenarios but at it got bigger it meant there was just more noise and the general atmosphere was very messy for lack of a better word. Facebook was very clean by comparison and it felt natural to connect to people who couldn't handle MySpace, people in your family or at work etc. Then eventually it got big enough through that that it just became the place to connect with your cool friends too because "everyone" was there.

So yeah, it's kinda mixed. The core product was cool but it wasn't as suitable for as a replacement for the phone book in the way Facebook was.

Yes and then Facebook did everything they could to subvert granular privacy controls (Myspace was decent, it had a wall but that was about it) which is of paramount importance for people with real safety issues

FB would have been invented. It's just another layer of authentication anyway. Myspace was an interesting experiment for its time

...Comparisons of Tom to Zuck are rife I'm aware but somehow Myspace isn't known for "they trust me, dumb fucks"

...but most of all, Samy is my hero!

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