[iMiiTH]

It was pretty much all because of this.

It took far too long to get an invitation, and you had to be 18 or older to use it. Facebook exploded first by being used by kids still in Elementary and High School. They initially cut out an absolutely major demographic, and people lost interest after a couple days.

[saurik]

What is so silly is that they already had existing experience of the "invitation only" feature destroying a launch: Wave; I had a ton of friends at the time who were really excited about Wave, but they could almost never use it because there was at least one person they might want to involve in the discussion who didn't yet have access. It just seems like such a beginner-level misunderstanding of the value of networked products: even video games, which are classically purchased per user, have been moving in a direction where "if you own this game and your friends don't they will still be able to play it with you". I wish I understood the reason Google keeps doing this: it isn't like I really imagine that Google (of all companies) absolutely needs these invitation buffers to help them scale the system out (maybe for Wave, but not for G+), to the point where they have existential risk that the whole project will fail. (Am I simply misremembering how the G+ invite process worked, due to the way Wave worked? Were you guarantee access if you could get invited by a friend?)

[dredmorbius]

Facebook exploded first by being used by kids still in Elementary and High School.

Last I checked, Havard University, Stanford University, and the Ivy League are neither elementary nor high school institutions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook#History

[j2kun]

I remember when facebook was not accessible to anyone without a university email address. So I think it was college students, not high school students, that blew it up.