

Mark Zuckerberg on the Three Keys to Facebook’s Success [video] - g0atbutt
http://thestartupfoundry.com/2011/02/05/mark-zuckerberg-on-the-three-keys-to-facebooks-success/

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jonpaul
I didn't think the video was all that informative. I was hoping it was three
keys to the initial success of Facebook. Not, three keys that keeps Facebook
successful which are:

1) Culture

2) Developer's platform.

3) Leverage with hiring. e.g. Mentioning the impact that engineers will have.

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pedalpete
agreed,though the leverage is an interesting way to look at hiring. If that is
one of the key things that Zuckerberg points at when talking about the success
of Facebook, I have to wonder if when he sits down with a potential new hire,
he asks him self 'does this person have the capabilities and initiative to
lead 1 million people'.

~~~
spitfire
I've seen it mentioned somewhere that facebook has been having a problem
finding self-directed developers. They want the good ones to be mini-ceo's,
and they're having problems finding that. Instead they're getting lots of
hotshot coders who flounder around.

I think they'll have a difficult time finding those mini-ceo's without
changing the culture quite a bit. This is what happens when you hire straight
out of school.

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YooLi
Why is luck not listed?

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Joakal
He already 'won' the social media lottery, now he's talking about investing
his 'prize' to ensure it returns a good investment.

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georgieporgie
The real keys to Facebook's success:

1) Prior campus projects made him locally famous.

2) An upper-crust seed population.

3) Exclusivity during expansion.

4) A clean interface which appealed to something other than the rebellious,
"express myself" teen (i.e. not MySpace).

5) Timing. He hit the right audience at the right time.

6) Luck.

I don't doubt that there is a lot of skill at Facebook these days to keep it
riding high on the social wave, but if you want to talk about what _made_
Facebook successful, it's mostly the above.

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cabalamat
> _3) Exclusivity during expansion._

I'm not sure this helped. A social networking site is only as useful as the
number of people on it. I expect Facebook would have grown faster without
exclusivity.

> _4) A clean interface_

Definitely.

The worse thing about MySpace, and one reason I never considered getting a
MySpace account, is that users can customise their page to make it hard or
even impossible to read.

If I made a site like MySpace, I'd allow users to customise their page, but
I'd also give users an option to use their own customisations when viewing
someone else's page. That way, people can read the damn thing!

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jcfrei
_> 3) Exclusivity during expansion._

 _I'm not sure this helped. A social networking site is only as useful as the
number of people on it. I expect Facebook would have grown faster without
exclusivity._

I think exclusivity was key - and probably facebook's main difference from
other networks (in it's early days). A social network isn't only about
aggregating as many people as possible - this can also have a contradictory
effect. What is much more important is the relevance of the community to you.
Would you rather join a network with ~500 weak contacts or one with your 4
most important? The current popularity of facebook is also inherently causing
a lot of people to stop sharing their personal lives on facebook.

But lastly let's not forget, that many elder social networks simply screwed up
- both friendster and myspace got big troubles to scale their systems
(database integrity etc.) - whereas facebook has a culture strongly driven by
engineers (however that's gonna turn out... but facebook definitely has got
fantastic uptime).

One last thing: build a social network that effectively and nicely solves the
problem of the different social communities a person belongs too - and you
might just as well build the next fb.

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KMStraub
"The current popularity of facebook is also inherently causing a lot of people
to stop sharing their personal lives on facebook."

This is troubling to me. I feel like I'm looking at a bunch of ghosts when I
view people's profiles now. Anyone else? Their photos and a bit of their bios
are still up, but they've mostly moved on to other forms of tech to post
anything dynamic because of the logical fear that they will no longer control
what aspects of their personal lives will become public record. What, I
wonder, is the company doing about this issue beyond just pr stuff like
funding privacy-related nonprofits? If they don't address it in their core
functionality, they've got a potential wasteland on their hands.

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TimothyBurgess
I watched it twice because I didn't really pick up on 3 separate ideas. I
guess they conflate into one and that's why it works. Plus, it's a bit naive
of The Business Insider to think success in innovation can be attributed to
only 3 main ideas. But correct me if I'm wrong, these are the 3 key points I
picked up:

1) Don't be afraid to try new things (be bold).

2) Execute quickly while keeping future quickness of execution in mind.

3) If/when keys 1 & 2 work out and "explode" your userbase, giving you massive
leverage... use it.

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jonpaul
I gathered it was Culture, Developer Platform, and Leverage/Impact

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mikeyp
Facebook succeeded because MySpace failed.

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g0atbutt
I disagree. Both Facebook and MySpace tried to solve the problem of connecting
people digitally, but that's where their likeness ends. They tried to solve
that problem in fundamentally different ways.

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spitfire
Both were(are) homepages that list your likes/dislikes/memberships and have a
stream of comments. It was friendster et al that tried to do the real hard CS
graph theory stuff. Facebook /still/ doesn't do those things - though they
talk about "the graph" constantly.

Just try searching for everyone within X miles in your network.

