
Wayne Ting, nearly a billionaire. Or how Facebook won - marckremers
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/rorycellanjones/2010/12/wayne_ting_nearly_a_billionair.html
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nzmsv
Every new feature Facebook introduced has already been done by someone else.
When it started, it was a simple clean website, and that ease of use attracted
the initial users. Then Facebook was opened for apps, and there was a flood of
zombie/vampire apps, and widgets to customize your page with. Like most geeks,
I got sick of those years earlier, having visited enough PHPnuke-based portals
and linkspam-based games.

But for many people Facebook was an introduction to the things you could do
online. It was a structured, gradual, hand-holding introduction, which is what
I think made it work.

~~~
tiles
Also one should recognize that Facebook never let the site degrade to the
point that bad features caused people to leave. Appspam was a huge problem,
for maybe a month-- then they started incremental steps to limit it, until now
when there is so little of it on my Newsfeed I forget there _are_ apps. There
is a threshold for people leaving and Facebook always skirts it, never enough
to cause a mass exodus however.

~~~
fookyong
_until now when there is so little of it on my Newsfeed I forget there are
apps_

Recently I thought of trying out a few facebook games, just to see how things
have progressed.

I literally could not figure out how to find the games. I have no "games" icon
on the left toolbar as I deleted it a while back, and there is seemingly no
way to navigate to a list of popular games from anywhere on the site.

I thought that was strange.

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hugh3
If I had a dollar for everybody out there who claims that they were "nearly a
billionaire" I'd be a fucking billionaire.

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3pt14159
Pretty simple: This article has nothing to do with what happened, only
conjecture with hindsight. How many phone calls, or little decisions guided
facebook through its early months? Many. Trying to pin down a reason why one
site won out over another is just crazy. Things are not 3 variable functions,
they are much more complex.

~~~
RyanMcGreal
I'd say the important thing to take away is the network effect: once you start
winning in a race to become the dominant network in a winner-take-all market,
you tend to go on winning as long as you don't screw up too badly.

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jayzee
Like this write-up by Wesabi's cofounder as to why they lost to mint much
beter: <http://blog.precipice.org/why-wesabe-lost-to-mint>

~~~
barmstrong
Nice catch. And reminded me of Netflix's chief product officer summing up all
his split testings as "simple trumps complete": [http://www.quora.com/What-
types-of-things-does-Netflix-A-B-t...](http://www.quora.com/What-types-of-
things-does-Netflix-A-B-test-aside-from-member-sign-up)

I think we're seeing a pattern here.

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bhoung
From the Social Network: If you guys were the inventors of Facebook, you'd
have invented Facebook.

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cookiecaper
I'd like to see a comparison of the competing interfaces. It's not about the
functionality -- as Facebook has shown by attaining the large majority of its
users after the Notes functionality was included, the ability to blog doesn't
keep users away. If you present yourself as a blogging site, however, and no
one wants to blog, then you're in for it.

I think it'd be interesting to see if there really was something better about
the Facebook interface or if this whole thing should be blamed on network
effects. People used Facebook when it was new for the same reason they use it
now: the people they know also use it.

~~~
karzeem
I was a freshman at Columbia at the time. CUcommunity's interface was MySpace-
esque. The first version of Facebook was very spartan. No photos other than
your profile pic, no wall, no messages. Basically nothing other than your info
page. The upshot was that you used all of Facebook's features and a (small)
subset of CUcommunity's.

Facebook was several months ahead on spreading to other schools, and that was
huge. Probably the decisive factor. By the time CUcommunity spread
(rechristened as CampusNetwork), I think Wayne is right that it was simply way
too late. By the beginning of summer 2004, Facebook's position on college
campuses was pretty obviously unassailable.

Edit: found some screenshots of CUcommunity/CampusNetwork:
<http://www.wikicu.com/CampusNetwork>

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wilhelm
Facebook didn't win because of better features. They went for the most
valuable and influential users first. I think their initial user base,
exclusivity and gradual expansion were their greatest assets.

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Swizec
Moral of the story: Do one thing and do it better than everyone.

~~~
staunch
His guess at why Facebook won could easily be wrong.

~~~
joshu
Yeah, I suspect that the "users weren't sophisticated enough" is bullshit.

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marckremers
I just wonder who the first hundred or so users of Facebook were, must be
amazing to hop onto a site (and a story) like that so early, and to have seen
it expand the way it did.

~~~
thinkcomp
My user ID on the houseSYSTEM Facebook was 1; Mark's was 1,234. On Mark's
Facebook mine was/is 82, and his was/is 4. I've commented on the experience of
being involved and "amazing" is one of many adjectives one could use. It's
striking how few people want to hear what I have to say, anyhow.

~~~
revorad
Are you really working on FaceCash? It sounds like a parody.

~~~
thinkcomp
Yes, and it's not. Did you look at the site?

~~~
revorad
Yes I did and it looks great! Are you seeing good adoption? Who are your early
users? Any plans of coming to the UK?

(Sorry I realise my earlier comment sounds silly.)

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puredemo
A few details in execution and a better name perhaps.

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chopsueyar
Facebook bought close to $40 million of Friendster's patents.

Does Zuck really have over $1 billion in liquid assets?

