[nostrademons]

You have to come at them obliquely. If you set out to build a better social networking site for everybody you'll fail, because they have more resources and more expertise.

Instead, try to figure out a niche that they're failing at - either an activity or a population of users - and that can be expanded into a full social networking site as it grows. Twitter's attempting to do this with status messages, Zynga with casual games. There've got to be a bunch of other sub-activities that people do on FaceBook that aren't well supported...tie into one of those, then gradually expand your usage base until you're better than FaceBook at everything.

[cheald]

> for everbody

This is key. It's arguable that Facebook is successful because it was exclusive to a smaller niche (college students) when it was starting out.

[Gibbon]

IMHO Facebook make a colossal mistake when they opened up the service to the entire world.

Now that they've let the genie out of the bottle, there's no going back. With 500 million users, every feature they add is a monstrous engineering challenge and every change they make is an impossible political challenge, guaranteed to piss off a major portion of it's users.

How do you market to 500 million people? How do you govern a sytem with that many users in any meaningful way.. you can't. There's nothing you can offer that many people except for lowest common denominator stuff like advertising.

The biggest challenge in business is finding a market you can clearly define, that can be reached easily. Had Facebook stayed "closed" and only available to college students, that's exactly what they would have had.

Imagine the possibilities.. Facebook would have been a right of passage for freshman students.. you go to college, you get a facebook account. College students and their families are some of the richest people on the planet.. just imagine what you could have offered them?

If a college social network is the primary product.. what are the related products, information, services and media? Dating, food, moving, insurance, travel (spring break!), textbooks, banking, car rentals, housing, used goods, career counseling, job searching, recruiting, training, social events, clubs.. the list is endless.

But with a market of everyone.. which products do you offer? When you picture "everyone" do you have an image of a person in your head? Of course not.. but "college student".. ahh you know immediately what to offer them.

Imagine how many companies would beg to offer their services and products on a college-only facebook network?

That's how you compete.. find a specific niche you can clearly define and build deep relationships with your customers.

[coryl]

Ermm, you can still easily target college students because they add their colleges to their Facebook network. Users tag their interests, music they listen to, books they read.

From a business stand point, I really can't see how you could say facebook made a colossal mistake by opening to the world. It made them rich and one of the most powerful websites on the Internet.

[keefe]

they also provided a better product than the alternatives at the time. Now that facebook is out there, you can't release a facebook clone and not get laughed at. You have to innovate.

[cheald]

Absolutely, but my point is that Facebook didn't start out to be a MySpace killer. It was started as a niche product that grew into a MySpace killer.

[keefe]

is that how it went, or did they build a superior product that they first launched to a niche?

[nostrademons]

They're related concepts, but I'd say that they won by building a superior product for a niche.

I first got on FaceBook in the fall of 04, when they were still "elite colleges only", and first checked out MySpace around that time too (I did end up creating a MySpace profile, but abandoned it after like half a dozen visits). MySpace was better as a general social-networking site. It had all sorts of features that FaceBook didn't - you could put pictures and videos and music on your profile, it had messaging (FaceBook only had the Wall when it launched, which was everyone-to-everyone messaging and lost the thread of conversation), and it had all these features for bands and other local entertainment.

FaceBook was better at one, specific use case: you meet someone at a party, you want to remember their contact details so you can hang out with them again, you track them down on FaceBook. And it was a lot better than MySpace at this: your profiles were private to within the school so they wouldn't be exposed to the whole Internet, and you could easily search within schools, and you could find their contact info & interests at a glance without having to wade through all the crud people put on their profiles. And that one use case turned out to be very useful for very many college students.

[keefe]

That's an interesting perspective about the use case - I signed up at about the same time, never use the account and deleted it a few years later. I was more the steady girlfriend type than the party type in college, so perhaps that use case passed me by.