I work with a Harvard guy who has ID in the low 300s on Facebook and also had an account on the early ConnectU.
His exact quote: "ConnectU was nothing like Facebook. It was a total joke."
"Spamming" or not, Facebook executed better.
Also even if another team had the Pagerank idea, they still could've royally blew it. You think Yahoo hasn't studied the algorithm and come up with their own version by now? If it was just the idea then Yahoo would have a search engine competitive to Google by now. (it's getting there but still has a long way to go)
His exact quote: "ConnectU was nothing like Facebook. It was a total joke."
"Spamming" or not, Facebook executed better.
Also even if another team had the Pagerank idea, they still could've royally blew it. You think Yahoo hasn't studied the algorithm and come up with their own version by now? If it was just the idea then Yahoo would have a search engine competitive to Google by now. (it's getting there but still has a long way to go)