How I almost killed Facebook | Hacker News Reader

How I almost killed Facebook

matt-welsh.blogspot.com

157 pointsneilc55 comments

"Of course, at that time I thought that social networking sites were a complete waste of time -- both for the users and those developing the sites -- so I earnestly tried to talk Mark out of squandering his precious Harvard education on such a frivolous endeavor. "You think you're going to compete against Friendster and Orkut?" was the general outline of my argument. There were already too many social networking sites out there, I claimed, and building yet another one was clearly a waste of time."

Interestingly the argument against building a social network is still the same, and inevitably someone will come along, not listen to the advice and create the next facebook. These things seem to be cyclic in nature.

When Google startup, many people suggested that there are too many search engines out there and yet another search engine will not succeed. However, after Google, there is no major search engine emergence. For SNS, maybe there will be a next Facebook, but the chance is much rare than before. In Orkut/Friendster era, not so many people daily live on social network. For now, everyone online knows SNS and Facebook. That is the most obvious barrier for new comers, people's custom.

This.

Everything is cyclical and doomed to fail until something better breaks that repeating pattern. It happened with Amazon before Web 2.0, when everybody thought it was doomed to fail. I'd bet it happens with Facebook.

It deserved repeating, because I don't think some people get it: Friendster had a few users. Myspace had a lot. Facebook has every single college student and now it has every single high school student, and almost every person checks it at least once per day, and in the last 6 months it's been picking up in every demographic. Facebook is a part of life for those people, in a way that Twitter or Tumblr or Flickr or even a huge site like Youtube is not. It's not going down without a fight.

YouTube probably doesn't deserve to be lumped with Twitter, Tumblr, or Flickr, but you're right -- Facebook has been a part of my every day fabric for a few years now, and it's only growing.

My parents, cousins, aunts, and uncles all use it, for goodness' sake.

Sites I'm in contact with every day: Facebook, Google (search, mail, reader), YouTube, Twitter, and HN.

As an aside, I honestly think Twitter will become very mainstream. I'm already seeing more pop-culture references every day, and have friends I never would have expected to see on it following me. It's certainly busted out of the Silicon Valley bubble, which honestly surprised me a lot. A year ago I thought of Twitter as the quintessential by-the-Valley-for-the-Valley startup.

> As an aside, I honestly think Twitter will become very mainstream.

I'm rooting for Twitter to succeed independently (e.g. not acquired by Google or Facebook).

I think I started suspecting Twitter was reaching out to the mainstream (or at least the younger generation) when I would click on random public timeline and/or summize search result rows and find people who had 40-50 followers, talking about what was going on in their life (e.g. normal, average people not social media cultists)

The power of Twitter is that is like a cocktail party laced with real-time search capabilities.

That's exactly what makes me wonder whether it will succeed in mainstream despite the advent of Facebook statuses and antisocialites like myself.

Well, of course: Facebook started by serving a specific niche (campus social life) that was very large, but that no social networking site specifically focused on. By doing so, it built critical mass quickly.

Lots of new social networking sites are starting these days focusing on specific niches, and they're very useful within those niches. And then there's ning and its ilk, which are "meta-niche" social network sites.

There are also still a number of very large unserved niches that create openings for new Facebook-like social network sites. (I'm actually kicking around the idea of going for one of those that I happen to be very familiar with)

I buy into the argument that social networks aren't stable entities. Because the main element is friending somebody, it is incredibly awkward to unfriend somebody, or denying a friend request.

So a boss asks to be your facebook friend, and all of a sudden, you have to be super careful about privacy settings, other friends, talking trash, etc. Now it's become linkedin.

But hey, check out this new social network. Hop on a new network that's growing, and keep up with your friends, who you can convince to also join.

Repeat.

Matt Welsh could also claim some credit for making Linux popular. He wrote most of the user oriented documentation back when Linux was new, and founded the Linux Documentation Project.

Oh... that Matt Welsh! Cool, yeah, I had the O'Reilly book with the cowboy on it.

I've always been curious to know how much of Facebook was Zuckerberg and how much was other people. A lot of people are quick to slap him down, but quite a few accounts say that he's as brilliant as he's credited for.

i don't think he's good at coming up with ideas, but he has shown repeatedly that he will execute the hell out of a project.

i don't think he's good at coming up with ideas

How would you know?

i'm just observing. he didn't come up with the idea for facemash (his friend recommended that to him), and the winklevoss brothers asked him to help build the harvard connection (which is as the rumor goes, where zuck started building facebook).

He was offered a near $1-million offer from Microsoft, just for a job there, so his ability's not in dispute (unless $1-million is peanuts nowadays).

wasn't that to acquire the app he built which suggests new music to listen to on your computer? and he rejected that and decided instead to go to harvard?

i bet he was just trying to buy more time to build something bigger. from what i've heard, he was very much on a rapid fire mode with his projects. if one failed or didn't grow very quickly, he wouldn't wait long before moving on to another one.

That music player is impressive. I didn't know he'd made anything before Facebook.

Does it matter if he came up with it? I think brilliance isn't always in coming up with the idea. Often it is the ability to see one idea of many, the one that appears ordinary to everyone else, and zero in on it.

It does to me.

I'm guessing that the people downvoting you aren't aware of the part you played regarding Facebook's being made.

I'm going to agree with kolya3 in part, however. Ideas are good, but execution matters a lot more. Part of that's because execution means deciding exactly how to implement things, and that's where Facebook really signs. Everything works beautifully on a level I don't think any other site has reached. It's perfectly compact.

That's why I have the interest in Zuckerberg that I do. I'd like to know how much of Facebook's design philosophy is his, and how much is somebody else's. If it's his, then to be honest I'd forgive him for a lot of other shortcomings.

I down voted it because ideas are a dime a dozen, and social networks had already come to be prior to Fb.

I google ThinkComputer and very little substance comes up. I google the book, and very little substance comes up. I honestly don't think you had much beef on the bones to execute or market, and that's why I believe Mark passed on working with you and others. After all, how many founders of Facebook were there? I don't think his intentions were to short you if he thought you brought significant value to the equation.

Certainly I wasn't there so maybe I'm making an ass out of myself with said comment, but it's how I see it from a 3rd party persecutive. And with that said, I think it's time for you to move on with your life and show the world that you're not a prototypical wantraprenuer.

This is very off-topic, but in the last few years I've noticed more and more intelligent people misspelling words phonetically ("unphased" instead of "unfazed").

I can understand someone flubbing pronunciation (eg "macabre", "learned"), but what is causing this other phenomenon? Are people (Harvard professors!) not reading as much as they used to? Are they less concerned about editing? Is this the last great challenge for spellcheck?

For better or worse, drift is inevitable. Words with unique or very unusual phonetics are all but doomed to regularization. Long-term irregularity is reserved for the most common words, in general.

Things like that still make me twitch, but we're getting to the point that if you spell it "unfazed" you'll get a "correction" from your friendly local spelling-nazi-wannabe.

The most intelligent people in the world make mistakes...pretty sure spelling error is inconsequential for him.

Of course the mistake is not important. I'm just wondering about how it happens. If someone learns most of their words from books, you can tell because they will use a word correctly but say it oddly. I'm wondering what causes someone to use a word correctly but spell it phonetically. Are we speaking more and writing less? Hard to believe, no?

I don't know about other people, but I have always heard what I'm writing in my head before I type it out. Sometimes, especially if I'm a little distracted, this produces misspelled words that would be pronounced correctly or homonyms like "hear" instead of "here".

On the chance that it might help, I think the funnel is something like:

-ideas/shapes which are always moving around->selecting the appropriate/better/good enough one out of these by focusing on it more. this always feels kind of like a sorter appraising different things bubbling up and sinking on the surface of a pool.

-this selected one at the fore gets structured to be said probably more precisely that feeling right before you actually say something. if this is going well, little is lost between the thought and what comes out of the structuring, but sometimes the thoughts are much worse from the process.

-this structured thing gets more concrete as I touch type it and somehow grammar and punctuation get in there.

-this gets a look over as it is coming out for errors. is it gibberish or not, is the grammar correct, do I like it.

Depending on what I'm concerned with different amounts of effort are going into those different sections. I think the error gets put in pretty close to when it gets typed out.

That's very interesting... and a little creepy. It's like you are taking dictation from yourself.

I suppose so. It's like that for everything though. If I want to draw a drawing, some part of me is picturing the drawing before it flows out, usually looking much worse than it did in my head. If I'm writing a program, some part of me is seeing the structure and how it works and fits together before it flows out. If I'm playing soccer, I see what I'd like to be doing before it flows out.

I think it helps that the process almost always feels like a cooperative enterprise. Injury of some sort or another definitely will effect it. Something is always in my head out there a bit ahead (sometimes only very little) of whatever my body is doing.

Maybe this is uncommon but I've never really gotten that impression from talking with people or other people's recitations of their experiences. I've never really talked with too many people about it though. "How do you feel your brain and body do things?" isn't exactly the kind of question one asks in the elevator, waiting in line, or on a plane.

A computer science university professor is the type of person most likely to learn a word like "unfazed" from the people around him, and not from literature. As such, he will write it as he heard it.

A factory worker is more likely to learn the word from books, and so will probably write it correctly.

You held factory workers to a very high standard, and I commend you for it. However, I believe even a factory worker is likely to learn new words through hearing them, either from his bosses, or from television. The amount of reading they do is bound to be small, and of common language (think US Today, not the "fancy" New Yorker or NYT).

As an interesting side-note, I cannot recall the American equivalent of British tabloids. Are there any ?

Don't underestimate the amount of reading done by factory workers. An average page turner fiction will use words like unfazed, and the person reading it will know what this word means, but will never use it in actual speech.

American tabloids? NY Post? I don't know, I'm not American.

There are many American tabloids. The National Enquirer is a staple at every checkout counter, along with others like The Globe, the Star, and Weekly World News.

Those are not the equivalent of British tabloids, they're just called by the same name.

As an aside, someone once pointed out to me that the National Enquirer is distinct from the other trashy tabloids. They never have the wacky "aliens stole my lunch" stories. They're focused on the gossip/celebrity domain and do a good job of it, as measured by: (1) they almost never lose a lawsuit, and thus (2) they rarely get sued. This person argued that the difference between the NE and "serious" papers was not one of accuracy or quality (making allowances for the lowbrow material) but rather in their willingness to pay for stories and photos.

I've tested this theory many times since while standing in queues at supermarkets, and I must say it checks out.

Technically both "unphased" and "unfazed" are phonetic spellings. The latter still actually looks incorrect to me.

Not very hard to believe. Nobel prize winners spell words wrong. Mensa members spell words wrong. Harvard professors spell words wrong...

Possibly it's because you're seeing more writing done in-browser as opposed to in a word processor that has spell check?

How would the spell check figure out that you meant unfazed instead of unphased? They're both properly spelled in the sense that they're not a mangled collection of letters.

In the past, people had editors edit their writing before making it public. Now, they let people like you do the editing for them, saving the expense of having a real editor.

And oh yeah, writing comes together a lot faster now. You can have an idea in the morning and be on the front page of social news sites by the afternoon. When things happen that quickly, there is bound to be a brain-o (or typo) in your writing.

For that matter, there's been a surprising number of people that put "it's" where they meant "its". I've noticed that this is trending up lately, as well.

I don't recall seeing the word "unfazed" in print before (though google says it's ten times as common as "unphased").

Turns out "faze" is a word, since 1830: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/faze

The correct spelling was "feeze", but popular usage altered it...

How did the author 'almost kill facebook' if Zuckerberg was 'unphased' by his argument in this single conversation they had?

I don't think he is being entirely serious in this post, which is sprinkled with self-deprecation masquerading as egotism.

It struck me as egotism masquerading as self-deprecation.

It'd be like my talking about how I almost destroyed Microsoft because I used to tease Gates about he was wasting his time programming those silly microcomputers, when he was hacking late at night on his 8080 assembler/linker/simulator in the PDP-10 machine room at the old Harvard CRCT. (Which happens to be true. ;-)

It struck me as egotism masquerading as self-deprecation.

Damn, you beat me to it! I was going to say: Egotism masquerading as self-deprecation masquerading as egotism.

Edit: That's a pretty great story about Gates, and it got me curious, so I googled some other places where you mentioned him. This one was my favorite, because it confirms a belief I have about companies' personalities reflecting their founders':

http://caelumetterra.wordpress.com/2006/01/19/ceos-red-in-to...

It also makes a shrewd observation about Microsoft.

Meant to add: sorry for web-stalking you... that tidbit was just too enticing to pass up!

Oh, not at all. It's all public record.

You found me off in some odd corners of the net, I see (Catholic agrarianism, in this case).

He must keep thinking he is relevant, you know... It's pretty much like "you know I'm responsible for the credit mark crisis because once upon a time I bought a house"

"I suggested to him that they really needed to find a way to get people to login to the site regularly. With most social networking sites, you sign up, add your few dozen friends, and maybe for one or two weeks get a kick out of messaging them as they join your friend list. But after that, there's little or no reason to keep returning to the site -- as a result your profile just stagnates. Well, wouldn't you know it -- a few months later Facebook came out with the News Feed feature which shows you what all of your friends are up on on an up-to-the-minute basis. Pure genius! Had I only thought to patent the idea..."

Although Matt is obviously joking, the question is why did he even write this, if not to try to take some credit for the news feed? I've thought of at least half a dozen ideas identical to what YC had later funded, and the reality is that between the time I thought of it and the appearance of the same thing a few months later, the actual development of that began months earlier, and likely multiple groups formed and applied with a similar idea, and I did not develop or apply for funding for the idea. However, in his case, it doesn't sound like he even had a similar idea, but is just confusing giving somebody goodwill advice with having a piece of the credit in the creation of any features that are released in the next three months.

fleaflicker has a "front office" feed displaying a league's recent activity. I launched it 4 months before facebook's friend feed. A cool idea but hardly original or patentable.

It's also the major reason I'm not on Facebook. It makes stalkers out of friends and just isn't something I'm interested in.

It's almost surely patentable, I think. A generic activity feed is not novel, of course, but the context (using it for social activities, methods for selecting what appears in the feed) is significant.

While this is interesting, it is just one bullet on my list of reasons not to grade based on class participation...

I'd add "not take business advice from teachers" to your list too...

I will always give The Harvard Crimson and the press at large more credit than Mark for spreading Facebook.

Yea right.

Cry me a river.

good read. different point of view.

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