
How I almost killed Facebook - neilc
http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2009/02/how-i-almost-killed-facebook.html
======
mixmax
_"Of course, at that time I thought that social networking sites were a
complete waste of time -- both for the users and those developing the sites --
so I earnestly tried to talk Mark out of squandering his precious Harvard
education on such a frivolous endeavor. "You think you're going to compete
against Friendster and Orkut?" was the general outline of my argument. There
were already too many social networking sites out there, I claimed, and
building yet another one was clearly a waste of time."_

Interestingly the argument against building a social network is still the
same, and inevitably someone will come along, not listen to the advice and
create the next facebook. These things seem to be cyclic in nature.

~~~
liuliu
When Google startup, many people suggested that there are too many search
engines out there and yet another search engine will not succeed. However,
after Google, there is no major search engine emergence. For SNS, maybe there
will be a next Facebook, but the chance is much rare than before. In
Orkut/Friendster era, not so many people daily live on social network. For
now, everyone online knows SNS and Facebook. That is the most obvious barrier
for new comers, people's custom.

~~~
unalone
This.

Everything is cyclical and doomed to fail until something better breaks that
repeating pattern. It happened with Amazon before Web 2.0, when everybody
thought it was doomed to fail. I'd bet it happens with Facebook.

It deserved repeating, because I don't think some people get it: Friendster
had a few users. Myspace had a lot. Facebook has every single college student
and now it has every single high school student, and almost every person
checks it at least once per day, and in the last 6 months it's been picking up
in every demographic. Facebook is a part of life for those people, in a way
that Twitter or Tumblr or Flickr or even a huge site like Youtube is not. It's
not going down without a fight.

~~~
jfarmer
YouTube probably doesn't deserve to be lumped with Twitter, Tumblr, or Flickr,
but you're right -- Facebook has been a part of my every day fabric for a few
years now, and it's only growing.

My parents, cousins, aunts, and uncles all use it, for goodness' sake.

Sites I'm in contact with every day: Facebook, Google (search, mail, reader),
YouTube, Twitter, and HN.

As an aside, I honestly think Twitter will become very mainstream. I'm already
seeing more pop-culture references every day, and have friends I never would
have expected to see on it following me. It's certainly busted out of the
Silicon Valley bubble, which honestly surprised me a lot. A year ago I thought
of Twitter as the quintessential by-the-Valley-for-the-Valley startup.

~~~
wallflower
> As an aside, I honestly think Twitter will become very mainstream.

I'm rooting for Twitter to succeed independently (e.g. not acquired by Google
or Facebook).

I think I started suspecting Twitter was reaching out to the mainstream (or at
least the younger generation) when I would click on random public timeline
and/or summize search result rows and find people who had 40-50 followers,
talking about what was going on in their life (e.g. normal, average people not
social media cultists)

The power of Twitter is that is like a cocktail party laced with real-time
search capabilities.

~~~
unalone
That's exactly what makes me wonder whether it will succeed in mainstream
despite the advent of Facebook statuses and antisocialites like myself.

------
abrahamsen
Matt Welsh could also claim some credit for making Linux popular. He wrote
most of the user oriented documentation back when Linux was new, and founded
the Linux Documentation Project.

~~~
davidw
Oh... _that_ Matt Welsh! Cool, yeah, I had the O'Reilly book with the cowboy
on it.

------
unalone
I've always been curious to know how much of Facebook was Zuckerberg and how
much was other people. A lot of people are quick to slap him down, but quite a
few accounts say that he's as brilliant as he's credited for.

~~~
zandorg
He was offered a near $1-million offer from Microsoft, just for a job there,
so his ability's not in dispute (unless $1-million is peanuts nowadays).

~~~
jmtame
wasn't that to acquire the app he built which suggests new music to listen to
on your computer? and he rejected that and decided instead to go to harvard?

i bet he was just trying to buy more time to build something bigger. from what
i've heard, he was very much on a rapid fire mode with his projects. if one
failed or didn't grow very quickly, he wouldn't wait long before moving on to
another one.

~~~
unalone
That music player is impressive. I didn't know he'd made anything before
Facebook.

------
aristus
This is very off-topic, but in the last few years I've noticed more and more
intelligent people misspelling words phonetically ("unphased" instead of
"unfazed").

I can understand someone flubbing pronunciation (eg "macabre", "learned"), but
what is causing this other phenomenon? Are people (Harvard professors!) not
reading as much as they used to? Are they less concerned about editing? Is
this the last great challenge for spellcheck?

~~~
kwamenum86
The most intelligent people in the world make mistakes...pretty sure spelling
error is inconsequential for him.

~~~
aristus
Of course the mistake is not important. I'm just wondering about how it
happens. If someone learns most of their words from books, you can tell
because they will use a word correctly but say it oddly. I'm wondering what
causes someone to use a word correctly but spell it phonetically. Are we
speaking more and writing less? Hard to believe, no?

~~~
rudyfink
I don't know about other people, but I have always heard what I'm writing in
my head before I type it out. Sometimes, especially if I'm a little
distracted, this produces misspelled words that would be pronounced correctly
or homonyms like "hear" instead of "here".

On the chance that it might help, I think the funnel is something like:

-ideas/shapes which are always moving around->selecting the appropriate/better/good enough one out of these by focusing on it more. this always feels kind of like a sorter appraising different things bubbling up and sinking on the surface of a pool.

-this selected one at the fore gets structured to be said probably more precisely that feeling right before you actually say something. if this is going well, little is lost between the thought and what comes out of the structuring, but sometimes the thoughts are much worse from the process.

-this structured thing gets more concrete as I touch type it and somehow grammar and punctuation get in there.

-this gets a look over as it is coming out for errors. is it gibberish or not, is the grammar correct, do I like it.

Depending on what I'm concerned with different amounts of effort are going
into those different sections. I think the error gets put in pretty close to
when it gets typed out.

~~~
aristus
That's very interesting... and a little creepy. It's like you are taking
dictation from yourself.

~~~
rudyfink
I suppose so. It's like that for everything though. If I want to draw a
drawing, some part of me is picturing the drawing before it flows out, usually
looking much worse than it did in my head. If I'm writing a program, some part
of me is seeing the structure and how it works and fits together before it
flows out. If I'm playing soccer, I see what I'd like to be doing before it
flows out.

I think it helps that the process almost always feels like a cooperative
enterprise. Injury of some sort or another definitely will effect it.
Something is always in my head out there a bit ahead (sometimes only very
little) of whatever my body is doing.

Maybe this is uncommon but I've never really gotten that impression from
talking with people or other people's recitations of their experiences. I've
never really talked with too many people about it though. "How do you feel
your brain and body do things?" isn't exactly the kind of question one asks in
the elevator, waiting in line, or on a plane.

------
dilanj
How did the author 'almost kill facebook' if Zuckerberg was 'unphased' by his
argument in this single conversation they had?

~~~
jsomers
I don't think he is being entirely serious in this post, which is sprinkled
with self-deprecation masquerading as egotism.

~~~
cpr
It struck me as egotism masquerading as self-deprecation.

It'd be like my talking about how I almost destroyed Microsoft because I used
to tease Gates about he was wasting his time programming those silly
microcomputers, when he was hacking late at night on his 8080
assembler/linker/simulator in the PDP-10 machine room at the old Harvard CRCT.
(Which happens to be true. ;-)

~~~
gruseom
_It struck me as egotism masquerading as self-deprecation._

Damn, you beat me to it! I was going to say: Egotism masquerading as self-
deprecation masquerading as egotism.

Edit: That's a pretty great story about Gates, and it got me curious, so I
googled some other places where you mentioned him. This one was my favorite,
because it confirms a belief I have about companies' personalities reflecting
their founders':

[http://caelumetterra.wordpress.com/2006/01/19/ceos-red-in-
to...](http://caelumetterra.wordpress.com/2006/01/19/ceos-red-in-tooth-and-
claw/#comment-1110)

It also makes a shrewd observation about Microsoft.

~~~
gruseom
Meant to add: sorry for web-stalking you... that tidbit was just too enticing
to pass up!

~~~
cpr
Oh, not at all. It's all public record.

You found me off in some odd corners of the net, I see (Catholic agrarianism,
in this case).

------
vlad
_"I suggested to him that they really needed to find a way to get people to
login to the site regularly. With most social networking sites, you sign up,
add your few dozen friends, and maybe for one or two weeks get a kick out of
messaging them as they join your friend list. But after that, there's little
or no reason to keep returning to the site -- as a result your profile just
stagnates. Well, wouldn't you know it -- a few months later Facebook came out
with the News Feed feature which shows you what all of your friends are up on
on an up-to-the-minute basis. Pure genius! Had I only thought to patent the
idea..."_

Although Matt is obviously joking, the question is why did he even write this,
if not to try to take some credit for the news feed? I've thought of at least
half a dozen ideas identical to what YC had later funded, and the reality is
that between the time I thought of it and the appearance of the same thing a
few months later, the actual development of that began months earlier, and
likely multiple groups formed and applied with a similar idea, and I did not
develop or apply for funding for the idea. However, in his case, it doesn't
sound like he even had a similar idea, but is just confusing giving somebody
goodwill advice with having a piece of the credit in the creation of any
features that are released in the next three months.

------
fleaflicker
fleaflicker has a "front office" feed displaying a league's recent activity. I
launched it 4 months before facebook's friend feed. A cool idea but hardly
original or patentable.

~~~
neilc
It's almost surely patentable, I think. A generic activity feed is not novel,
of course, but the context (using it for social activities, methods for
selecting what appears in the feed) is significant.

------
snprbob86
While this is interesting, it is just one bullet on my list of reasons not to
grade based on class participation...

~~~
herval
I'd add "not take business advice from teachers" to your list too...

------
thinkcomp
I will always give The Harvard Crimson and the press at large more credit than
Mark for spreading Facebook.

------
berlinbrown
Yea right.

Cry me a river.

------
dimitry
good read. different point of view.

