Do you really think Zuckerberg would have agreed to that? I doubt it. Facebook was still relatively small when Yahoo offered to buy them for $1 billion but Zuckerberg didn't give it much thought at all.

But, honestly, in the mid-2000's, would you have wanted to be bought by Yahoo?

Honestly, 1 billion $ for a 2 year old startup, i wouldnt have thought twice.

Its easy to say Zuckerberg did the right thing in hindsight of course.

Well, there's no guarantee that Google would have known what to do with it if they had ;)

At worst they could have killed it instead of having to fight it. At best, it could have become what it is today or at least something similar.

Meh, that never works. Remember Yahoo also offered $1B for Google in 2002 or so.

Google had a social network that launched in 2004 as well, at almost the exact same time as Facebook -- Orkut.

It sometimes works, it's just that you never hear about it when it does because you forget all about the small company and it's just seen as a big company's hot new product.

Recall that Google bought Android and YouTube when they were small, Google bought Where2 (Google Maps) when it was small, Google bought Writely (Google Docs) when it was small, Yahoo bought Flickr when it was small, Google bought MetaWeb (those knowledge cards on the right of the search result page) and ITA (flight search) when they were medium-sized, Twitter bought Summize (Twitter Search) when it was small, and Conde Nast bought Reddit when it was small.

The key seems to be to either let the acquired company continue to do its thing without interference or to fold it into a high-priority project within the acquirer, though.

holy crap, Orkut still exists. just logged in, saw that I got some badges inlcuding the 'early user' one for having an account that's older than 5 years.

my oh my, what a waste. anyone outside of brazil using this? why is LP keeping this around and not shutting this down after migrating all users to g+? focus, focus, focus?

A social network they didn't let anyone into; seriously don't understand how you expect to develop a social network/platform with a limited beta test.