There's no speed limit. (The lessons that changed my life.)

Re:There's no speed limit. (The lessons that changed my life.) by codexon on Wednesday December 02, 2009 @03:43PM (#972886)

But can you honestly say that something like Facebook would have gained the critical mass it had without essentially starting out as an Ivy league "Myspace" in an era dominated by Myspace and Friendster?

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Re:There's no speed limit. (The lessons that changed my life.) by SapphireSun on Wednesday December 02, 2009 @06:00PM (#973226)

I don't see how that is relevant. You need to identify a target seed market at first. In Facebook's case, academia at Harvard was a good choice. I don't see a good reason why any of them had to go to Harvard to do that.

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Re:There's no speed limit. (The lessons that changed my life.) by codexon on Thursday December 03, 2009 @12:00AM (#973759)

I don't see a good reason why any of them had to go to Harvard to do that.

I truly doubt Zuckerberg would have been able to convince people from Harvard to use Facebook back in it's inception without being from Harvard himself. Harvard is a seed market because it's Harvard. Podunk state college is not a seed market because people back then would rather have used one of the better existing solutions such as Friendster back then.

The only reason that I and many others joined back then was because of it's exclusivity. We would have used Friendster, Livejournal, or maybe even joined Myspace for the sake of a superior product.I am quite confident that Facebook would have died in it's infancy had it been created in some state college.

The whole exclusivity in the beginning was the sole reason that it was able to make it this far.

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Re:There's no speed limit. (The lessons that changed my life.) by SapphireSun on Thursday December 03, 2009 @03:59AM (#973996)

Well what if they launched somewhere else that was exclusive? Nothing pops to the top of my head I'll admit, but I haven't thought about it very long. There seem to be three key ingredients for the initial launch: exclusive, young/technically savy, and prestigious. LinkedIn is doing fine working with business professionals, although they have the benefit of people already understanding what a social networking site is.

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