

Social networking and the Geocities fallacy - far33d
http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/10/social-networki.html

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nanijoe
Facebooks is like Geocities..and Ning is like Yahoo Groups. If you take a look
at the feature differences between Geocities and Facebook, you'll realize that
(horrors), there are few real ones. The way geocities worked was that people
would create a home page, say something about themselves and upload their
pictures to that page (ie they had a profile). Their friends could leave
comments on a guestbook (now fondly referred to as a 'wall') , and people
often had links to their friends' geocities pages thereby plotting a Social
Graph.

There were no mobile updates which is ok, considering most people did not have
mobile phones.

Alas, there were no REST, PHP or Javascript APIs...oh wait, the users did not
care then, and still don't care that facebook has them.

Geocities did have sophisticated multimedia capabilities for the time it
existed.

A 1980 honda is as much a car as a 2007 Ferarri.

Facebook, myspace, hi5, orkut, friendster, dogster etc are all improved
versions of geocities..and Ning is yahoo groups in disguiuse

~~~
rms
Well said. They're all important steps in the evolution of information
exchange. Facebook is a lot better than Geocities as long as you don't want to
design a web page, but Geocities was clearly an enormous first step towards
internet sociality.

