Hacker News Reader

That worked so well for AOL when they were the "internet".

Except that facebook has a population already greater than "America". And AOL cost money to use - facebook is free.

It doesn't stop you using other services/sites/etc -- you just don't need or want to.

"facebook has a population"

Every time I hear this meme repeated, I get the (depressing) image of roughly 400,000,000 stub accounts that were created to check out FB, and promptly abandoned to gather dust.

The numbers they release are "monthly active users", ie people who logged in within the last 30 days, not stub accounts.

I don't think so. Facebook only had 132M unique visitors in March, compared to 400M users they are believed to have. To say that 400M were active last 30 days, Facebook need to workaround the pigeonhole principle.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like AOL's strategy was very content-heavy - they tried to provide all the news, movies, etc. their users would need in order to keep to on AOL properties as much as possible. Users are much more tied into Facebook via their friends and private info.

AOL also did a lot with 'buddy lists' and offline friendships. They didn't have social networking figured out, but they definitely tried to own communication and relationships as well as content.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com