I'm not sure this helped. A social networking site is only as useful as the number of people on it. I expect Facebook would have grown faster without exclusivity.
I think exclusivity was key - and probably facebook's main difference from other networks (in it's early days). A social network isn't only about aggregating as many people as possible - this can also have a contradictory effect. What is much more important is the relevance of the community to you. Would you rather join a network with ~500 weak contacts or one with your 4 most important? The current popularity of facebook is also inherently causing a lot of people to stop sharing their personal lives on facebook.
But lastly let's not forget, that many elder social networks simply screwed up - both friendster and myspace got big troubles to scale their systems (database integrity etc.) - whereas facebook has a culture strongly driven by engineers (however that's gonna turn out... but facebook definitely has got fantastic uptime).
One last thing: build a social network that effectively and nicely solves the problem of the different social communities a person belongs too - and you might just as well build the next fb.
"The current popularity of facebook is also inherently causing a lot of people to stop sharing their personal lives on facebook."
This is troubling to me. I feel like I'm looking at a bunch of ghosts when I view people's profiles now. Anyone else? Their photos and a bit of their bios are still up, but they've mostly moved on to other forms of tech to post anything dynamic because of the logical fear that they will no longer control what aspects of their personal lives will become public record. What, I wonder, is the company doing about this issue beyond just pr stuff like funding privacy-related nonprofits? If they don't address it in their core functionality, they've got a potential wasteland on their hands.
I'm not sure this helped. A social networking site is only as useful as the number of people on it. I expect Facebook would have grown faster without exclusivity.
I think exclusivity was key - and probably facebook's main difference from other networks (in it's early days). A social network isn't only about aggregating as many people as possible - this can also have a contradictory effect. What is much more important is the relevance of the community to you. Would you rather join a network with ~500 weak contacts or one with your 4 most important? The current popularity of facebook is also inherently causing a lot of people to stop sharing their personal lives on facebook.
But lastly let's not forget, that many elder social networks simply screwed up - both friendster and myspace got big troubles to scale their systems (database integrity etc.) - whereas facebook has a culture strongly driven by engineers (however that's gonna turn out... but facebook definitely has got fantastic uptime).
One last thing: build a social network that effectively and nicely solves the problem of the different social communities a person belongs too - and you might just as well build the next fb.