[meisterbrendan]

You're mostly right. There is a lot more sophistication now, but most of the advances facebook has made are in two areas:

-Mobile. Making messaging a central strength of the platform. Figuring this out is a big piece of why the stock is doing so well. -Conversations. Facebook has become the default place for people to discuss (or, more accurately, shout about) media/news. I mean both news from external sources and personal life events.

Everything else is reorganizations of existing features in new ways, like the shift from the wall to the timeline. It was a new feature that better fit an existing goal, not an expansion in the scope of the service.

[rconti]

They effectively destroyed Facebook when they got rid of all of the college class info -- all of the curated content that had to be done on a school-by-school basis. When they got rid of groups (before later re-adding them). The newsfeed.

There was a time somewhere in 2006-2007 where Facebook was an utter shell of its former self, looked weird, and wasn't particularly useful.

And the amazing thing was, they were right. They did what they needed to do to pivot from what it was (a college information source) into a global social network superpower. It sort of reminds me of the Steve Jobs quote where if you don't cannibalize your own products, someone else will.