amazing, 300 million people can see something I can't. Am I the only person working in the tech field not to have facebook?
Congratulations indeed, what an amazing scaling success story. Every statistic I read about them is staggering.
Congratulations indeed, what an amazing scaling success story. Every statistic I read about them is staggering.
Yeah...that knife cuts both ways, doesn't it?
1. Ivy League beginnings. It was easy to scrape together an audience due to the Ivy league exclusivity at the beginning. This solved the chicken and egg problem in a field dominated by MySpace, LJ, Friendster, Xanga, et al.
2. Harvard background: its easier to raise funding just because of the name.
3. MySpace's utter lack of progress especially by the time it was bought out by Murdoch.
At that point in time, Facebook's networking features were equivalent to Myspace and Friendster, and still is today for the most part aside from some fancy bells and whistles.
The only way you could break into the market was to find a niche, and the Ivy league exclusivity at the beginning was that niche. Facebook was not a pioneer in this field as evidenced by sites such as ConnectU and Orkut.
While this was indeed an "incredible" thing, the question is, did this help make Facebook what it is today, or even attract a sizable audience?
The answer is most resoundingly no. Facebook was already very popular by the time most of these unique things were made, and in the case of Facebook apps, it even put off some users who were annoyed by its spammy nature.
The pattern is simple, a new site shows up that let's you exchange info with people you have not talked to in a while. So you sign up and chat for a while, but you don't really care about those people so after a while going to the site becomes an annoying time sink and so you drop it. For a site that just has your core friends. But then you don't talk to people for a while and...
The only long term niche is to become the psudo holiday site, where people occupationally show up to chat with their extended social graph, but you don't really spend much time there. So, lot's of people, few page views.
PS: The people that "love" social sites and want to keep up with all their friends will jump ship as soon as something else becomes popular with most of their friends.
What makes Facebook different, in short, is that while other services offer a place to talk, Facebook is built as a utility in a way other sites aren't. It's the new big communication medium. The people that use it are using it as a replacement to email and IM. That's a huge deal, because it suggests Facebook has the potential to last as long as email has.
Your suggestion that people abandon things all the time is countered by AIM, which has been the prominent IM service for a decade.
If facebook is how office drinks get organised, you need ot be in on that. (size doesn't matter so much for that though)
Awesome achievement.
Doing so requires other startups! twitpic twitvid bit.ly etc etc
Startups, to add features to twitter that should already be there :/ madness I tell you.
(Yes, I know, plain text emails to hotmail/gmail recipients would probably be just as bad as plain text private messaging on facebook. Protecting privacy is so bothersome that my efforts are pretty token. But I do try... because I don't comprehend the ramifications of releasing so much information.)
Facebook is not for communicate with a people in next block. It for links between countries and cultures (excuse me for this pathos =).