
Why did Columbia's Campus Network lose out to Harvard's Facebook? - aarghh
http://www.slate.com/id/2269131/
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dgant
I was one of the original users of the site. The article, while good, omits
what I think are two of the most important causes.

When CUCommunity was relaunched a CampusNetwork, there was a long period --
several weeks, perhaps months -- when the site was down. Completely. When it
came back online as CampusNetwork, a lot of the user base never came back.
People who had previously made regular visits to CUCommunity were now using
Facebook instead.

The second, and possibly more fatal problem, was that the site community's
attention became focused around trolls. Abusive attention-seeking users were
often the first people one encountered on the site, and most of the discussion
on the site revolved around them.

Facebook's salvation from the latter fate came from the lack of universally
accessible communication features: a feature they have yet to implement,
perhaps for that very reason.

~~~
funthree
Implementing a new UI might have had something to do with that downtime. That
and looking back the UI seems a bit over done compared to facebook

CUCommunity tutorial :
<http://mengto.com/project/campusnetwork.com/tutorial.swf>

<http://mengto.com/project/campusnetwork.com/splash.htm>
<http://mengto.com/project/campusnetwork.com/696.jpg>

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newchimedes
Definitely an interesting case study and the first time I had heard about
CampusNetwork. I didn't understand what Goldberg motivation for taking down
his high school social network was...

From the article: "In the meantime, Goldberg had launched a social network for
high schools called Friendex. But he says he killed the project after a month
at the request of Zuckerberg and the Facebook team. "They made me feel really
bad for having launched it," he says. "So I took it down." Facebook soon
expanded to high schools."

How did Facebook make him feel bad? Why would he feel bad either? Seems like
FB at the time wasn't in high school so it would make sense to try to make a
play there...more importantly considering how facebook started...they should
be the last people to make people feel bad to starting a competing service...

