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Comment by nikolay | Hacker News Reader

It was an expensive service. Not sure who in their right mind would have used it. Not to mention, it was not linked to Facebook and that was the biggest missed opportunity.

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Not linking it to public FB was a decision because most people don't want their work and personal lives mixed.

I didn't say that, but connecting with coworkers with their accounts would have been nice. It's a social network, after all!

Nothing stops you

Searching for them how? By name? I'm talking about an unambiguous interface. Also, job verification by being a member of a workplace, etc.

In the past, TheFacebook had similar features about colleges, work, then they got rid of those - not sure why. And then they launched a separate product, which was doomed since launched.

Yes, that’s exactly how you do it. That’s the exact process I everyone uses to find someone on facebook. Since you supposedly are in regular contact with these people, you can even ask them, “Is this you?” if for some reason you can’t identify their profile.

This is literally how everyone finds anyone on Facebook and every other social network.

False! Possibly 90% of people find their friends via the mobile app, which scans their phone contacts and suggests people they might know. Names are not unique, plus there are lots of fake profiles and impersonations - so far, after I've reported hundreds if not thousands, Facebook has never taken down a single phony account I've reported! Many click farms create fake profiles using the same names and existing photos! We used to be able to search by phone number and email, but that option is no longer available. Most of my friends have several profiles because people forget their passwords or get locked out by Facebook's ridiculous policies, so they create new profiles (I have two backup profiles myself as I manage several nonprofit Facebook pages, and when I get punished personally by Facebook, they also punish the community pages I manage). Many of my more active friends have at least one backup Facebook profile in case Facebook puts them in the like/comment jail for some time. The ridiculous thing is having a small nonprofit, which has been verified by Facebook, which has just one admin, and that nonprofit, which is not a personal entity, gets punished by being unable to live stream, for example, while this entity has no violations! But that's how Facebook inflates the number of its users, I guess.

To their credit, they seem to have used it extensively internally.

For free.

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