Did Mark Zuckerberg's Inspiration for Facebook Come Before Harvard? | Hacker News Reader

Did Mark Zuckerberg's Inspiration for Facebook Come Before Harvard?

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Seriously, I still can't understand what 'inspiration' has to do with Facebook's success at all. There were dozens of already popular social networks when it arrived - apart from timing/market positioning (read: luck), what's the big deal?

Please enlighten me...

Nope you've got it spot on.

Facebook is like Google: it rocks and is extremely popular, but at its roots it doesn't really have much of a story to tell — it's not that revolutionary, if Facebook didn't become popular, another social network would.

Exactly; the point is not that Zuckerberg came up with something no one else had. The point is that he did it better. Just as Google didn't invent search; they just really focused on it and did it better.

The thing that really really shot facebook through the roof was its photo tagging interface. Being able to tag a friend and have your photo show up on their profile-- that was the killer app.

It was popular from the start. You cannot correlate any release of a feature to this subjective shooting through the roof to which you are referring. Or, if you can, I would be interested in seeing the data.

I would be interested in the data - but anecdotally - the news feed (see copies from myspace, friendfeed, etc) and photo tagging were both brilliant pieces of product design.. The give you a reason to come back - often.

The reason Facebook became so popular, initially, was its exclusivity. I remember being on campus when it first became big -- and at first it was an Ivy League social network created out of Harvard, and it created a sense of exclusivity among its members that sites like Friendster never had. A lot of people I knew were disgusted when it was released to the "state schools", because it diluted the value of their membership. The state schoolers then became upset when it was released to high schoolers, and so on.

Can its popularity really be attributed to that? I'm guessing that when it was reserved for Ivy League students, it has <50,000 users. When did they break a million?

I'd also be very interested to see the actual metrics of growth, with milestone marks for new features. I'm going to guess that FB isn't too keen in releasing this data, though.

Didn't he steal the idea from someone else anyway?

Social anthropologist my arse. Mark's inspiration was Ryze, Friendster and Myspace (the initial feature lists are near identical). The brilliant insight was making each network 'private' by email domain and maintaining that ability to remain mostly walled off when they opened up the network to outsiders. The author seems to be confusing the origin of the name with the origin of the feature set.

Regardless of the fact that the general idea of a social network was nothing new, the article hinges heavily on the fact that there was something called "the facebook" at Exeter. But I'm pretty sure the reason he called it the facebook was because the same thing at Harvard (a directory of students with photos that eventually went online) is called the undergraduate facebook, and he wanted students to immediately realize that his facebook was this, but more.

It's a clean Friendster and MySpace that is now copying Twitter. I would not call that innovative!

It's strength is everyone, including your mom is on Facebook. From grade school, to high school, to family & friends, etc .... MySpace never provided that!

I sometimes think and feel like the fact that everyone is on there is a weakness of the site. Turning down friend requests from work acquaintances and family members is a bad move socially, but accepting those requests has forced me to censor a lot of my posting to the site in the last year.

I think that’s assuring the quality (not that it is very high). People start to realize that you shouldn’t do/say something on the web that shouldn’t be public.

If every public forum was with real names we wouldn’t read so much rubbish.

Facebook was incredibly popular, and had a lot of buzz even when you could only register if you had an email at a college they'd added by hand. So Facebook isn't popular just because everyone's on there. Of course, that helps. One could argue that its strength in that time was having everyone at your college on Facebook.

I know it isn't what you meant, but I'll take the opportunity here to say this anyway. "Everyone" is not on Facebook (nor MySpace, Friendster, nor any of the other social networks). I know there are a great number of folks who have zero interest in those sites. And I'm not referring to technology-challenged people either. I'm talking about people who know computers, live and breathe the stuff.

I personally am not interested in having a page on any of those sites. I just don't see it as a valuable use of my time (which is a very precious commodity in my life). If I wanted to share something with the world (or a limited group of friends/family), I'd put it up on a blog or a personal web site. The social sites wouldn't add anything to the content that I care about.

Perhaps I'm weird (and I've been accused of that before :-D), but the whole concept just has zero appeal to me.

Oh come on, enough already. Who wasn't thinking about Facebook before Facebook came out?

In middle school I built a system based on hacked message boards and content management systems for students to share notes and study online (mostly the night before tests).

Before it got 'big', I was working on it during lunch when a media specialist saw the web page and logo and asked what it was. I thought I was screwed.

But I was at a small private school and next thing I knew, the head of the middle school was telling my entire grade about it. Then it grew. I learned a ton in middle school, I had my best study skills ever because I was preparing content for the web, interacting about the content, and managing the site. At one point I had a science teacher logging on before tests and helping students. Eventually I won first place at a state technology fair.

But the site was always confined to my middle school.

The following summer I wrote pages upon pages of planning, figuring out how we could convince schools to buy licensing, how we (2 friends and I) would monetize it, grow it. But we all went to different high schools and my public high school instantly gave me signals it would not be tolerated.

I could get into a big long debate about my views on the "honor code" but my point about this story is that I am sure there were lots of localized "Facebook"s around. What Mark did well in my view is that he took it beyond his local, beyond Harvard, and he did so exceptionally well. At least better than I, a high school freshman did.

every geek in school built some kind of forum and cms mix for students. However, few of them really get big and go out of their own school. That is nothing revolutionary, all about execution...

Thanks for the good story!

the tone is unfair - he was the one who got his act together and got it done. one could make a similar argument/"investigation" about any creation.

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