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0 pointsjomamaxx9y ago0 comments

Friendster was a clumsy product.

MySpace was limited in features, and a fugly interface.

Neither had talented people.

Zuck started at Harvard. That was his core user base. The Ivy League. Basically marquis 'customers' in social.

Think of how massively that affected recruiting and attention? The network effect of Ivy League x 1000. It would have been trivial for him to get investment.

But in the end - forget culture - the basic features were just better, and for every great feature, there are 'smart things' happening internally that are good. Zuck deserves credit for that.

I used to work a little bit with MySpace. Their culture was 'LA Cool Kid' i.e. 'The Standard' hang-out types.

They reminded me of a Record Label - totally hip - totally useless. I feel sorry for any Engineer that had to work at MySpace.

If you knew the culture at Lycos, Excite etc. - and compare it to Google, it's a little bit of a similar story.

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doomlaser9y ago

Yes, Facebook had better strategy. They embraced new tech to streamline the pain factor of navigating the website, whereas MySpace tried to optimize for discrete page views to serve more ads. MySpace would serve an entire interstitial page load with nothing but ads to get to different parts of its interface, whereas Facebook would embrace ways to jump to your friends' profiles or read your messages quickly, often without reloading the page.

It reminds me of how Google won the search engine war by delivering a more streamlined, less exploitative product.

And then of course there were a couple innovations that neither MySpace or Friendster had: photos with tags of your friends, and the concept of the News feed. It's hard to imagine a social network without those features, but they didn't exist before Facebook introduced them.

Smirnoff9y ago

I believe Facebook didn't invent newsfeed. They acquired a company (Friend Feed) that did just that and was quickly becoming popular.

tim3339y ago

Facebook's newsfeed was launched in 2006 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Facebook_features#News...

Friendfeed was launched October 2, 2007 and acquired 2009 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FriendFeed

perseusprime119y ago

Agreed. I think the larger point I was trying to make is there is always a bit of luck somewhere somehow that contributes to overall success. In the case of Facebook, it came in the form of lousy products such as Friendster and Myspace.

Animats9y ago

MySpace had a record label - "Myspace Records". Founded in 2006, ended somewhere around 2012.

jomamaxxOP9y ago

MySpace had a record label - but they also got their start in music.

MySpace started out as a way for bands in LA to post gigs.

So their initial user-base/NDA was musicians, LA culture.

Facebook was a little more academic/ivy league.

It's hard to change one's genes :)

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