[skewart]

100% agree. Facebook's restricted access was a huge driver of their early success.

> People wanted to join before they were able to join.

I'd argue the more important factor was that because the early audience was so limited people felt comfortable sharing a lot more personal content than they would on the open internet - even just simple things like their real name and photo. That created much more interesting content for other people to look at, driving engagement. In the early days, when there were maybe two or three dozen schools on FB, it felt like a like a pretty small high-trust community. All of your friends from high school were on it, and their college friends, who maybe you met once or twice, but that was it - no parents, no employers, no randos. It was a very different vibe than most other social networks. I also don't think anyone thought it would be around very long. It felt like a new social network popped up as the cool new thing every few months.

I'm sure there was some aspect of pent up demand due to exclusivity, but I think the community and openness created by that exclusivity was a much bigger drover of its success.

[beerandt]

Don't forget that during the initial college high growth period they were completely separate networks per school. This was huge as far as building trust between users. Even if the per-school limitation was actually a tech limitation on Facebook's part.