It's not like facebook required one in the beginning either. You could signup with joe s and many of these profiles still exist.
The secret was the rollout (the school network connected to your edu email), and other tricks like getting you to give your login/password so hotmail contacts could be downloaded.
The journey to the top has a lot of little wins. Real names were a step added much later and connected with their ad network strategy.
I understand but my comment wasn't trying to explain Facebook competitive market value by reducing it to only to real names. To beat Friendster, beat Google+, and get to its successful IPO, one can point to many things ... e.g. the addictive NewsFeed rollout in September 2006... and free unlimited disk space for photos, photo tagging of friends, etc.
My comment to gp's quote was how Facebook as a social network works very differently from USENET/Geocities/vBulletin/AOL_AIM. One can't point to those older communications alternatives and say they work "just as well". On those platforms, there's a fundamental difference that prevents people from even finding each other.
When they opened the floodgates it was a chance for normal people to associate with fancy harvard people and show how they were too cool for MySpace now.
You would be hard pressed to duplicate that kind of buzz anymore.
Finding people you know on Facebook is only one aspect of their success and it's probably the most heavily network dependant one. The other thing that drove adoption was the relative simplicity of publishing content. Your Facebook profile was/is essentially a dumbed down webpage where you can post text, links and photos. You also get free hosting, free "email" in the form of messaging, and a bag of other features that you would normally have to set up yourself and pay for. They did a good enough job of providing all of the killer features of the internet for free to average, non-technical users.
Because it's hard to get people to enter that information. In contrast, Harvard students in 2004 were highly motivated and that started everything off.
From 2005 to 2008, the killer feature of Facebook was entering your real information when signing up and then Facebook showing all the real people in life that were connected to you. E.g... old high school friends finding each other again. Likewise, signing up for Facebook means you also wanted to "be found" by others. It was the first mainstream service to successfully accomplish this. Myspace didn't do it. Friendster tried but their webpage performance was too slow.
>The other thing that drove adoption was the relative simplicity of publishing content.
Most Facebook users do not "publish content". Most just follow their friends or read links passed on by friends (or the algorithm). [EDIT for clarity: I mean "publish content" the way that gp I replied to cited "blogs/personal websites"]
By publish content I mean post links, photos, comments, rants, etc. Do people no longer do that on Facebook?
If you're listing those as Facebook alternatives, you misunderstand the key ingredient that made Facebook get adopted by billions of non-technical mainstream users: the real name identities.
The other communications platforms of dial-up BBSs, USENET, Geocities, personal Wordpress, vBulletin/phpBB forums, AOL AIM ... do not have strong real-name identities for non-tech people to find each other. Anonymous/pseudonymous online handles and cryptic login names have too much friction of discovery and are not scalable to a billion users. (Previous comment about the real Rolodex acting as database primary key: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15294086)
Facebook (possibly accidentally) bootstrapped the psychology of users creating logins with their real name in 2004 because Harvard students want to find each other on the service. In turn, as other schools were added on, other students were motivated to use their real names to interact with friends in other schools. The social graph of real names becomes so viable that old high school alumni that were "lost" can now find each other again and grandparents can easily now keep track of grandchildren's baby photos. The fake names of USENET and other forums prevent that from happening.
Emails don't work for social network growth because you can't derive an email address from a real name you know. Someone has to tell you the exact spelling of their email address. With Facebook, you can just find them by their real name (or their real phone number) and send a "friend request".
>All these options worked for expressing one's self online
The secret sauce to Facebook's dominance is its accumulation of real identities and not because it gives Facebook users a way to "express themselves". E.g. A lot of grandparents following grandchildren photos don't post anything.
Consider direction of cause & effect:
- easier evolution of platform: a bunch of users login with real names to follow/poke each other --> easy to build on that network into groups for discussion, shared calendar events, share news articles, etc
- harder to grow platform: start with discussion forum software with fake names --> impossible to build a giant sticky social network graph from that base
Facebook & Linkedin built on real names. WhatsApp growth built on real phone numbers.
Platforms built on real identities will naturally centralize because nobody has come up with a viable decentralized alternative for a universal identity database. Ideas like web-of-trust, blockchain, keybase.io, etc don't accomplish the same thing as Facebook's real_id database.
[To downvoters, if you have a better explanation of how Facebook got mass adoption by non-tech people in ways that didn't happen with USENET and vBulletin web discussion forums, please reply with your thoughts.]