[mentos]

Imagine facebook is a spherical magnet with ten thousand small lead balls clung to it. If you're trying to create a better magnet it can't just be the same as facebook's. Putting the same magnet near facebook's will only collect a small handful of peripheral users. If you want to capture the critical mass you have to energize a magnet with an attractive force so great that it will begin to vibrate users close to the facebook core and attract them through the empty space between to you.

[zepolen]

I found a better analogy to be a fire.

Think of products/startups as fires, they start small, can't use large logs straight away, need constant attention, you could use a lot of petrol (financing) to get it started faster, but it could also just fizzle out immediately if the large logs don't catch fire as well.

Once they get going, you don't have to watch it so closely, you can just add a log here and there, maybe remove some ash.

The goal of the fire is to get people to gather around it. The warmth in this case matters a lot, but also the people gathering around the fire.

In fact some people might pick another fire because it has people who are interested in the same things as them.

Sometimes a fire gathers TOO many people, and it gets crowded. The maker of the fire didn't make sure it grew large enought to provide warmth to many people - and so people on the outside get cold and go to another fire.

Most of the time though, if someone is by a fire that provides enough warmth for him and he likes the people around it, there is little compelling reason to go to another one.

[obelisk_]

I am generally not a fan of analogies but I think yours is a good one.

[soylentcola]

Pretty good analogy but magnetic fields don't discriminate whereas one enduring reason for Facebook's success is that a large portion of that critical mass is particularly adverse to change.

I guess if you wanted to get ridiculous with the analogy, you could make the "balls" of different materials, some of which are very strongly attracted to the magnet and others which take a lot less force to pull away.

[drdeca]

... why lead though? I don't think lead generally sticks to magnets?

I mean unless you meant lead for some particular reason, that doesn't really matter and this comment just becomes useless nitpicking (and by becomes I mean always was), but I'm trying to justify making this comment to myself, and I come up with the justification that I really don't understand why you picked lead.

Is it because of the density?

[gherkin0]

My guess is he just wasn't thinking about that, so he made an error.

[zeveb]

> Imagine facebook is a spherical magnet with ten thousand small lead balls clung to it.

It'd be pretty impressive to get lead to exhibit magnetism…