[brightball]

I hear things like this about Zuckerberg all the time and he did one singular thing that made Facebook take off more than all of the other social networks that were out there at the time (Classmates, High School Alumni, My Space, etc).

He made it exclusive. You had to have a .edu address to sign up so the people ON the network were initially only your peer group. You couldn't get in without that .edu address and therefore you WANTED to get in if you couldn't.

This created a steady user base that didn't have to be EVERYBODY (as long as people at your school were on you didn't care) and a natural spam filter as there were controls on access to those email addresses. Once those people graduated from college they got to stay on the site.

Zuckerberg succeeded specifically because of the exclusivity that Facebook grew from during a time where every other service was just a spam mine.

[encoderer]

You don't give him enough credit. From an engineering pov alone, Friendster, myspace and twitter were often down or terribly slow.

Also, the foresight to launch a platform.

Launching news feed despite howling criticism.

Taking the company public with little investor surplus, taking heat on CNBC for a year until the market caught up to what they were doing.

Not putting ads on the site in numbers that turned off users but Having enough to run profitably from an early era

Great hiring.

Edit: Also, I think most people misunderstand the primary benefit of school-by-school rollout. By the time people without .edu addresses wanted into Facebook it was already successful. Their growth plan was premised that if you can get 50% of the people in a network to use something, the other 50% (or close to it) will pile on. You can't do that everywhere all at once across the country, let alone the world. The cliche goes... How do you eat a whale? Bite by bite.

[amyjess]

Let's add: clean, simple theme and layout that doesn't allow users to customize how other people see their page.

MySpace was a trainwreck. The default layout was horrendous, and each user had their own themes, many of which were unreadable (I remember having to select text just to read it).

[noobermin]

Not that they didn't want it, Myspace glits moved onto tumblr, although it is "cleaner" there I suppose.

[amyjess]

From looking at the culture on Tumblr, it feels like there was a large-scale migration from LiveJournal more than anything else.

[skewart]

You're absolutely right. Though I'd argue the real value in that exclusivity was not only exclusivity itself making people want to join (though I'm sure that was part of it), but also in enabling a culture of honesty about names, interests, and life. That honesty was only possible at the time through exclusivity. When FB started there was a long-standing cliche about social interaction on the internet: everyone lied about or exaggerated who they were. Facebook encouraged people to use their real name and share real information. Of course that honesty made it all the more fascinating to look at - you got to see who people really were. The honesty was only possible because it was a small network of more or less peers with a high level of trust.

[amyjess]

> He made it exclusive. You had to have a .edu address to sign up so the people ON the network were initially only your peer group. You couldn't get in without that .edu address and therefore you WANTED to get in if you couldn't.

Don't forget that each college's network was segregated from each other's.

You couldn't view the full profiles of people at other schools unless you were friends with them, but by default, you could view the full profiles of everyone else at your school (you could set your profile to friends-only, but most people didn't back then). I know that I didn't care that everyone else on my network could see my home address and my phone number on my profile, because I knew that they were all classmates (or professors, but very few of them were on Facebook). After I graduated and networks became less prominent, I locked down my profile to friends-only.

Groups were restricted to single schools (and Pages didn't exist): this kept group sizes small and made them feel cozier. Pretty much every school had a group for most fandoms, and it was a big deal if you were able to be the person who got to create your school's group for your favorite subject. There were a number of groups that were basically memes; I forgot what they all were, but no real discussion happened in the group, and their only value was to be listed on your profile. They were classified as "Facebook Classics", and what would happen was that the meme would take off at one school, then the members' friends at other schools would notice them on their profiles and create versions at their schools, and so on. Again, there was some prestige in being the first person to spread the meme to your school.

And there were some college-specific things on your profile, too. There were fields for your class schedule, and you had a separate "mailbox" field for colleges that had dorms.

[hvidgaard]

Tell me again how exclusivity helped Google+ take off.

What he did right, was providing something that no other service did.

[collyw]

Funny that, because I was signed up to two or three other services at the time that seemed to be doing the same thing when Facebook appeared on my radar. Facebook seemed to gain a larger share of my friends which had a snowballing effect.

[brightball]

How was Google+ exclusive?

[jandrese]

When it first started out you needed an invitation. Gmail had the same thing. Google does this fairly often to prevent still developing services from being crushed by an onslaught of signups.

G+ never gained traction because it was always the nerdier also-ran to Facebook. Everyone was already on Facebook and G+ didn't really offer anything compelling to make people want to switch. It had (has?) somewhat better segregation of your friends but keeping track of all of that is too much hassle for most people and doesn't really buy them much. Trying to decide if only your family would appreciate this witty cartoon or if you can also include your work colleagues is not something people want to do on every post.

[brightball]

That's not really exclusive though, that's just a beta program.

Facebook's exclusivity initially showed no plans for letting everyone else in. It was basically, if you do not have this type of email account, you can NEVER join.

[elmar]

it confirms the strategy to make happy a small group of users and them try to scale.