| 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. |
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.