[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.