But for many people Facebook was an introduction to the things you could do online. It was a structured, gradual, hand-holding introduction, which is what I think made it work.
Recently I thought of trying out a few facebook games, just to see how things have progressed.
I literally could not figure out how to find the games. I have no "games" icon on the left toolbar as I deleted it a while back, and there is seemingly no way to navigate to a list of popular games from anywhere on the site.
I thought that was strange.
And yes, the past three years have shown derivative introduction after derivative introduction. Facebook is basically in it's MS-1998 stage: if you can't buy the competition, copy them thoroughly and use your superior market power to smother them. This will end up just like MS, in a dying, boring irrelevant company that has a popular product, but absolutely no clue about where to go next and a serious inability to catch on to true trends.
Zuckerberg, no doubt, turned out to be a visionary. But even he wasn't sure Facebook would last long, so he was hedging his bets with Wirehog.
Before Facebook, he was already experimenting with random hacks. When he saw Facebook absolutely exploded as soon as he put it out, he doubled down on it. Wouldn't any hacker do that?
I think Facebook's success lies in Zuck's ability to rally top people around him and to keep them focused on one vision, even when he's not clear what that vision is. Just "something big" seems to work until you figure out what it is.
This news story probably doesn't do justice to Ting's story, but did he really give up without even a hard fight? Who said becoming a billionaire was easy?
Edit: The coolest thing about listening to the book for me was that I found an old school friend of mine was a key early hire at Facebook. I hadn't spoken to her in years, but it was so cool to connect with her again. Of course, via Facebook.
I think we're seeing a pattern here.
I think it'd be interesting to see if there really was something better about the Facebook interface or if this whole thing should be blamed on network effects. People used Facebook when it was new for the same reason they use it now: the people they know also use it.
Facebook was several months ahead on spreading to other schools, and that was huge. Probably the decisive factor. By the time CUcommunity spread (rechristened as CampusNetwork), I think Wayne is right that it was simply way too late. By the beginning of summer 2004, Facebook's position on college campuses was pretty obviously unassailable.
Edit: found some screenshots of CUcommunity/CampusNetwork: http://www.wikicu.com/CampusNetwork
Does Zuck really have over $1 billion in liquid assets?
