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Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

I was actually working on a site for 1000 students at one college in 2004 (Amherst had its own social network for students, 3 years before Facebook, and it still exists). It sounded and was pretty cool, but the thing is - nobody working on it thought that it could possibly be a business. It was just this student-run club that we'd have some fun with while avoiding our homework and then forget about once we got jobs.

Zuckerburg's genius was in realizing that Facebook wasn't just a hobby, it could actually be a huge business.

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A friend I was working with in 2004 also ran a social network for North Carolina State University. The difference was (and is) that it was just an online bullentin board system.

Zuck's genius is his execution ability and making a prime product combined withthe exclusivity of elite Universities. He was also on CNBC in 2004 so that combination of skill and Harvard created a grand opportunity.

Surely people thought easy social networks would be a big business -- MySpace and AOL proved that. Of course, no one could had reasonably predicted it'd be as big as it is.

Don't forget another big differentiator of FB from a bunch of others at the same time was having a few (accidental? intentional?) very dark psychological patterns.

At the time, real names were not commonly used online. That coupled with very real 'stalkability' of how FB was used at universities made it much stickier than others. Embedding a "relationship" function into the same software as your "class schedule" was bizarre - but apparently very effective social manipulation. Having in-class life so closely linked with social-life as well as daily preferences and even vacation pictures really embedded itself into a social nerve in a way any network designed with a more singular goal in mind really would not have.

Very interesting point, I do recall in 2005-2007 most friends not using any names for Bebo/Myspace

I still remember with complete clarity the shock when Facebook posted my "real name" publicly. No website had done that before. I was glad to have used a fake surname.

There are people today who think my fake Facebook surname is actually my real surname. I'm considering changing my real surname to match my fake Facebook name.

> Zuck's genius is his execution ability and making a prime product combined withthe exclusivity of elite Universities.

For what it's worth, the Winkelvoss twins came up with exactly this business plan. Maybe his genius was to steal it.

He'd tell you he didn't realize that until very late: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/facebooks-mark-zuckerber...

Zuckerburg's genius was realizing he could be famous off a better implementation of someone else's idea. He eventually started making money on it, too. This is a recurring pattern in technology.

Whose idea did he copy? TheFacebook was nothing like Friendster or MySpace, it came from a completely different angle. Also, why do you assume he wanted to be famous, or had some realization about how to be successful?

The truth is, he executed the shit out of a scalable idea, and he had the vision to see it through many orders of magnitude growth. The idea that there was some master plan is just silly, his success, like most big companies was iterating over time and making a series of successful bets.

Let's start with Winklevoss Twins and early employees that might have given him an idea or two.

> TheFacebook was nothing like Friendster or MySpace, it came from a completely different angle.

In the early days it was more MySpace-like, and the parts that weren't were very much like LiveJournal. The UI was much better though.

This is clear case of survival bias. We had social networks way before facebook, I remember using one in 2002 and it took many years until a mass user exodus to facebook.

Without hindsight, nothing about facebook was novel. It had less to do with Zuckerberg's intellectual capacity and more to do with luck, capital and network effects.

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