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In fairness facebook has many competitors and it's possible to create a clone for a small sum. That doesn't include the scaling components which are world class. But a profile some photos and videos has been done successfully by vk for example.

How to you get everyone to signup? This is how facebook did it. Start in top universities and only allow people from there to sign up. Repeat at other universities. Open it up to all .edus. Get press coverage about this site many are talking about but only college kids can use. Open it up to everyone but setup cities regions where content is shared. Introduce a tool that reads your hotmail and emails everyone to join. Add games. Groups. Kill games. Promote flame bait. Replace content with ads.

The facebook rollout was magical and hard to replicate. Having people within the same colleges on a public/private network created communities. Places where parents/relatives/past school mates wouldn't see that content. Lost some magic with cities but it still created communities. Killing games started the decline. Everyone you know from your grandparents to your little sister joining killed the original feel. Politics killed conversations.

Facebook had many paths to choose and they ended up here. If you started a similiar journey you could make different choices and end up somewhere else.