Hacker News Reader

Comment by herval | Hacker News Reader

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...

View on HN

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?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com