Please tell me more about all these historical "too big to fail" "forums" where across the globe, all of my non-technical friends and their entire families, including grandma, were signed up and active.
So basically you are asking "tell me about those online places where I couldn't find those people who had no internet access at the time."
Internet penetration increases through time and with that more non-knowledgeable people get on board and go to the lowest common denominator, lower branches. See AOL, eternal september.
The point being that those site such as facebook and those who came before have no proper value. Value and content comes from the users, who can shift it around quite faster than expected.
-edit-
sorry, allow me to correct myself here, facebook has value in that it succeeded in linking real names with online profiles. Something that was unthinkable and contrary to common sense and netiquette.
-/edit-
Follow the trail of 13 years old and you'll know which site is gonna succeed in the near future.
CompuServe. AOL. Both dominated social media so much that anyone new had practically no choice but sign up because everyone they knew who was on any social media was on there.
Wasn't long ago here on HN we were bantering about Facebook disappearing because everyone was leaving in droves.
There's always a Facebook-shaped niche. It used to a CompuServe-shaped niche. Then it turned into an AOL-shaped niche.
But it's the same niche, for more-or-less the same user profile.
And it'a a very vulnerable niche. FB may seem unstoppable at the moment, but it really isn't.
The number of ways it could be replaced is non-trivial.
Zuckerberg knows this, hence internet.org, which is really just a way to promote lock-in in the developing world. But that's a lot less useful than it seems if FB loses traction in the developed world.
Internet penetration increases through time and with that more non-knowledgeable people get on board and go to the lowest common denominator, lower branches. See AOL, eternal september.
The point being that those site such as facebook and those who came before have no proper value. Value and content comes from the users, who can shift it around quite faster than expected. -edit- sorry, allow me to correct myself here, facebook has value in that it succeeded in linking real names with online profiles. Something that was unthinkable and contrary to common sense and netiquette. -/edit-
Follow the trail of 13 years old and you'll know which site is gonna succeed in the near future.