Comments on: Facebook Goes for Bigger Pond

By: Rob

Rob — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 20:24:26 +0000

I think that Brian is exactly right. Facebook has been forced into it’s current position because investors are looking for a big payday. I think this will open the door to competitors. Speaking of competition – I just read a great review written by Pete Cahsmore today over at Mashable.com on a new facebook competitor that titled “Uspot.com – An Excellent Facebook Alternative”… You can Check out Mashable.com more on this.. http://mashable.com/2006/09/12/uspot-excellent-facebook-alternative/

By: Salman

Salman — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 19:27:44 +0000

Soon they can boast of new user registrations like myspace, forgettting for the moment that a good chunk of those could be spam/ bot accounts hehe.

By: Roy

Roy — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 18:58:13 +0000

I guess now we know you went to Dartmouth.

By: pwb

pwb — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 18:28:11 +0000

Very risky. It’s quite possible that a big part of Facebook’s appeal was/is its exclusivity.

By: Karel

Karel — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 07:47:55 +0000

Zuck’s first (and second and third) company priority is Growth, because along with stickiness (how often and how much an average user is on the site, a metric where facebook rules), growth decides which social network will be relevant.

Facebook can’t grow fast enough since it has saturated it’s eligible, core demographic. This plan has been in the works for over a year, with the questions revolving around how to track fraud and group people meaningfully. The uninformed will holler again about privacy, but they should go complain instead to myspace, which as noted in my book, opens up all user information to just about everyone. Facebook will likely not change how college networks work. It may allow unvalidated friends to accept invitations, but would almost certainly track the referral/registration history, to be able to prune away bad branches of the invitation tree.

As a closed network, Facebook has gained success by modeling real life networks, towards which multiply.com is also narrowing its focus. Real life networks have a large geographic component, and they naturally include friends outside of school or work associations. However, I also have many people here in my geography who are not my friends, and who I don’t want to share in my information. As the book describes in detail, people closeness categories or some other meaningful way of sorting my “real friends” away from everyone in artificially bloated networks is increasingly necessary. I do not know that Facebook has a planned solution for this problem.

By: Jake

Jake — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 05:57:57 +0000

Brian, You hit the nail on its head. I couldn’t have said it better. Jake

By: Brian McConnell

Brian McConnell — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 03:42:37 +0000

Growth for growth's sake.

If Facebook had not taken on institutional funding at such a high valuation, they would not be burdened with such high growth expectations and could be content to dominate the college market for many years.

Bill Gates once said something every entrepreneur should memorize, that every business has a natural size.

Maybe they'll get this right, but they run a big risk of becoming a case study in how high expectations can cause an otherwise great company to make bad decisions by focusing on growth over focus.

By: aTypical Joe: A gay New Yorker living in the rural south.

aTypical Joe: A gay New Yorker living in the rural south. — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 03:19:37 +0000

Open enrollment @ Facebook…

Forbes: They'll let anyone in to Facebook these days. Once the exclusive online stomping grounds of college students, social networking site Facebook.com is throwing open the doors to rest of the world. The site is slated to announce in coming…