> the big innovation that your profile had to be your real life identity early on.
This came after facebook was wildly successful, so not early on. I also have never met a single person who was attracted by it, or was confused as to who their friends were before it existed. That being said, tying real names to online identity allowed facebook to buy data from brokers to fill out the sliced up audiences they sell to advertisers, so maybe it was important to their profitability.
What made FB successful was that it was a platform that other developers could program for, so it filled up with games and quizzes. Farmville,
"Which Harry Potter Friends Spice Girl Are You?" etc. was all the edge that it took to kill myspace, a site which seemed to stop any sort of development about 10 minutes after launch.
But, as you say, even myspace made it very easy to write on the web. You could scribble on other people's "walls", put whatever you wanted on your own page, and every profile came with a blog.
Against what you say, however, is the timeline where you could just post random crap and all of your friends would see it and comment on it; the dopamine stream. There's no easier way to write than to spit out a random sentence or upload a random picture, and broadcast that instantly to hundreds of people.
> What made FB successful was that it was a platform that other developers could program for, so it filled up with games and quizzes. Farmville, "Which Harry Potter Friends Spice Girl Are You?" etc. was all the edge that it took to kill myspace, a site which seemed to stop any sort of development about 10 minutes after launch.
Even before that, it was a combination of exclusivity and social groups. When people found out there was a social network they weren't allowed into (when it required a *.edu email address to sign up for), they were curious and wanted in. For the people who could get in, Facebook had network pages tied to your email's domain so you had an immediate social group of people going to the same college/university as you, which was used for all sorts of things like planning events, coordination, sharing campus information, I believe it even had a full-on calendar for students to put things on.
The loss of the network pages was when I first started losing interest in Facebook.
> This came after facebook was wildly successful, so not early on.
Not true. The original version of the site required you to be a student at Harvard, then a student at select universities, etc. Eventually it opened to the general public, but the norms for Facebook had been set. You entered your real name, real city and state, real college, etc.
You also misread what I said this allowed you to do.
Official requirement came later, but people were de facto using their true identities in large numbers, which allowed to find old friends and family easily.
You know, the fact that it invites you to consider it a "yearbook" of sorts.
This came after facebook was wildly successful, so not early on. I also have never met a single person who was attracted by it, or was confused as to who their friends were before it existed. That being said, tying real names to online identity allowed facebook to buy data from brokers to fill out the sliced up audiences they sell to advertisers, so maybe it was important to their profitability.
What made FB successful was that it was a platform that other developers could program for, so it filled up with games and quizzes. Farmville, "Which Harry Potter Friends Spice Girl Are You?" etc. was all the edge that it took to kill myspace, a site which seemed to stop any sort of development about 10 minutes after launch.
But, as you say, even myspace made it very easy to write on the web. You could scribble on other people's "walls", put whatever you wanted on your own page, and every profile came with a blog.
Against what you say, however, is the timeline where you could just post random crap and all of your friends would see it and comment on it; the dopamine stream. There's no easier way to write than to spit out a random sentence or upload a random picture, and broadcast that instantly to hundreds of people.