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Comment by fbn79 | Hacker News Reader

Facebook innovation was not to connect with friends (many other sites / services was doing it). Facebook innovation was the news feed: all friends news in a single time ordered infinite scrollable page. The value of facebook is how good it is to keep the newsfeed interesting.

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Honestly, outside of the tech innovation, FB's biggest "in" was its exclusivity. - First, you HAD to have a Harvard .edu address. For a lot of the general public, Harvard is top of mind when people think 'elite' institution

- Next, they expanded it, but only to other US schools with .edu domains. That's when I joined, around 2005.

- Finally, they opened it up to the general public everywhere, and by that time they were almost a household name globally.

adding to that, i believe:

fb is one of the first social implementation of b.j. fogg's behavior model + and engineered addiction, and the subsequent commoditization of likes and shares

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> fb is one of the first social implementation of b.j. fogg's behavior model + and engineered addiction, and the subsequent commoditization of likes and shares

Yes, the method of rollout was helpful in its adoption. The name recognition of the first institutions (first Harvard, then other Ivies and other selective schools) was helpful in hyping it. I don't think it was a household name in 2006 but the rate of adoption did help it garner attention from the press.

Not rushing into generating revenue helped. Handling scaling up well, compared to its social media competitors, helped.

We had a local social network that did that even before MySpace was a trend. Even phpbb had some skins that did made it more news feed like.

That was not exactly a Facebook thing really.

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