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Comment by trevize1138 | Hacker News Reader

Sounds like they were trying to emulate the early days of FB some people pine for where you had to have a .edu email address to sign up. I know a few friend were hopeful that Google+ meant they would no longer see posts from their racist uncle or gullible aunt. Start out with that same kind of exclusivity and hopefully it builds this exclusive mystique so when you open it up to everybody you get a flood. Perhaps the big difference they didn't factor in is FB did this when relatively few people were on social media so they couldn't help but grow whereas Google+ needed to recognize they were trying to enter an already saturated market.

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Facebook had what turned out to be an accidentally brilliant way of bootstrapping networks and trust.

Fundamental problem: social networks with no-one on them are not fun and not sticky.

Fundamental problem 2: if anyone can read what you're writing, it's not a social network, it's a blog. So you can't just let anyone see what people are writing.

The way FB handled that in the early days was that by default, people in the same university network could see your status etc. I don't remember exactly what they could and couldn't do but the point is that they created a semi-privileged circle of people with some access based on a pre-made group that people would be familiar with - fellow students at the same university.

That gave people a network from day 1 in what felt like a controlled way. Also, as noted, they started with a desirable closed group that people wanted to belong to.

Facebook started out as a social network where you could get what we today regard as PII (e.g phone numbers of the opposite gender and such) for Harvard students, and its engagement numbers were really good (based on Zuck’s previous experience with the Harvard-only FaceMash).

They would later expand to other Ivy league schools — aka networks — one by one, rather than simultaneously, as a way to slow their growth.

I imagine an unintended side effect of this growth strategy was the sense of FOMO that it engendered among university students that had heard about but couldn’t join the exclusive/elusive Facebook, unlike the other social networks like Friendster, Hi5 etc.

For each network on their expansion list, Zuck & team would furiously scrape the student directory to seed the new network with plausible student info.

Crucially, they had a strategy that worked for that time. Same strategy applied today would simply fail.

In the early days, you could only friend people at your school because that's who was colocated on your MySQL shard. Fully general addressing of sharded objects was added quite a bit later, about when they opened to non-.edu addresses.

> Sounds like they were trying to emulate the early days of FB some people pine for where you had to have a .edu email address to sign up.

It wasn't just that. At the beginning, you had to be at an Ivy League. And that was the problem, G+ was invite only among a bunch of nerds, whereas FB was invite only among people who network for a living.

I don't think the nerd/Ivy distinction you're making is significant. Most students at Ivy League schools are nerds, at least by the standards of broader society (you need good grades to get in). Few of them "network for a living."

If anything, the real distinction is that a network for college students is appealing to teenagers, who are the perfect audience for social media. A network for adults doesn't draw in this crowd.

Problem is even though Facebook was restricted to a very small set of people, each of them could interact with most/all of the people they wanted to (other college students). Same was not true for Google+, people didn't have enough invites to give to all of their friends.

It's an exclusivity play, to pump up demand. People like things that make them feel exclusive, so for launch someone at Google tried to increase demand by making G+ more exclusive with invite-only.

Unfortunately this increased the barrier to entry at launch too, which for social networks whose value is tied to users generating media is a cardinal sin.

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