

Facebook’s Earliest Rival, Why It Failed.  - sinzone
http://www.sociableblog.com/2010/10/12/facebook-earliest-rival-why-it-failed/#more-6158

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nostrademons
Amherst College had a web-based social network called "planWorld" (after VAX
.plans, which it replaced) starting around 1999. I know Grinnell had something
similar. I have to imagine that other colleges did too.

Amherst also had the DailyJolt, a web forum founded around 1999, and that one
actually expanded to several other campuses.

I suspect that FaceBook became dominant because it had a.) the right features
b.) at the right time c.) expanding to the right places d.) in the right
order.

Sites like Friendster died because they missed critical features, namely the
ability to stay up for a reasonable amount of time under load. Friendster was
also good for making friends (or at least recording them), but didn't provide
very much for you to do with them.

Sites like planWorld - and LiveJournal, for that matter, which was far better
and more dominant than FaceBook in 2004 - failed because they were too early.
They couldn't get a critical mass of people to explode in popularity, because
social networking was still a niche activity, popular among geeks and nerds
but not among the general public.

Sites like Campus Network (or planWorld, again) failed because they failed to
expand. As the article says, Campus Network was way more popular among
Columbia students, and FaceBook had to struggle to make inroads at Columbia.
And among Amherst students who attended between 1996 and 2005, planWorld still
tends to be more popular than FaceBook.

Sites like MySpace failed because they tried to expand in the wrong order.
MySpace captured the 20-something music scene, and then the high school
market. But college kids don't do what high school kids are doing, high school
kids do what college kids are doing. And (at least in technology) kids don't
do what their parents are doing, parents do what their kids do. FaceBook had
perfect positioning to take over the rest of the market, because high school
kids do what college kids do, and college kids eventually graduate and become
20-somethings, and then parents do what their kids are doing. MySpace had no
room to expand once FaceBook captured the college market, because they lost
the high schoolers to FaceBook, and then they had no beachhead to grab the
parents.

It kinda reminds me of what Google told us during orientation: Google
succeeded because they had the right idea, at the right time, with the right
technology and the right people, in the right place. And without any of those
elements, they would've failed miserably. I suspect a lot of startups are in
the same boat.

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carbocation
The original article that this is taken verbatim from is at
<http://www.slate.com/id/2269131/>

