Friendster, Hi5, Xing, Linkedin, Myspace, Orkut, Bebo, VK

Those were all facebook's competitors and offered mostly the same features. Facebook succeeded because everyone's friends were there. Facebook was not "integrated", it didnt even have a newsfeed when it started

You could add asianavenue who had millions of users. Except friendster and VK I think I toyed with all the others and none felt like Facebook. MySpace was just a blog + ad-hoc musician, LinkedIn was too narrow.

Things that were different:

- stronger crossover into real life (it wasnt a net persona, LinkedIn was real but it was for jobs, you dont live in it)

- sharing personal Prefs

- games with other members

Maybe I missed these on other websites.

PS: I'm not pro FB, but to my best memory it was clearly different from other websites. Hence my original message.

all of them had those, to different degrees. Bebo even had a copy of the facebook platform for games. Arguably myspace, bebo , orkut etc had more customization and the feeling of subcultures. Facebook was a flat big mass. Their success relied on sucking up every possible contact list faster than the rest.

I don't agree with the contact list sucking. If it was bad people would have left pure and simple. Myspace and others were huge mess, just larger blogs, it wasn't different.