How I almost killed Facebook

http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2009/02/how-i-almost-killed-facebook.html

by neilc • 17 years ago

157 55 17 years ago

matt-welsh.blogspot.com

dimitry• 17 years ago

good read. different point of view.

aristus3• 17 years ago

This is very off-topic, but in the last few years I've noticed more and more intelligent people misspelling words phonetically ("unphased" instead of "unfazed").

I can understand someone flubbing pronunciation (eg "macabre", "learned"), but what is causing this other phenomenon? Are people (Harvard professors!) not reading as much as they used to? Are they less concerned about editing? Is this the last great challenge for spellcheck?

jerf• 17 years ago

For better or worse, drift is inevitable. Words with unique or very unusual phonetics are all but doomed to regularization. Long-term irregularity is reserved for the most common words, in general.

Things like that still make me twitch, but we're getting to the point that if you spell it "unfazed" you'll get a "correction" from your friendly local spelling-nazi-wannabe.

kwamenum862• 17 years ago

The most intelligent people in the world make mistakes...pretty sure spelling error is inconsequential for him.

aristus3• 17 years ago

Of course the mistake is not important. I'm just wondering about how it happens. If someone learns most of their words from books, you can tell because they will use a word correctly but say it oddly. I'm wondering what causes someone to use a word correctly but spell it phonetically. Are we speaking more and writing less? Hard to believe, no?

ciscoriordan• 17 years ago

Possibly it's because you're seeing more writing done in-browser as opposed to in a word processor that has spell check?

batasrki2• 17 years ago

How would the spell check figure out that you meant unfazed instead of unphased? They're both properly spelled in the sense that they're not a mangled collection of letters.

jrockway• 17 years ago

In the past, people had editors edit their writing before making it public. Now, they let people like you do the editing for them, saving the expense of having a real editor.

And oh yeah, writing comes together a lot faster now. You can have an idea in the morning and be on the front page of social news sites by the afternoon. When things happen that quickly, there is bound to be a brain-o (or typo) in your writing.

batasrki2• 17 years ago

For that matter, there's been a surprising number of people that put "it's" where they meant "its". I've noticed that this is trending up lately, as well.

10ren• 17 years ago

I don't recall seeing the word "unfazed" in print before (though google says it's ten times as common as "unphased").

Turns out "faze" is a word, since 1830: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/faze

The correct spelling was "feeze", but popular usage altered it...

unalone5• 17 years ago

I've always been curious to know how much of Facebook was Zuckerberg and how much was other people. A lot of people are quick to slap him down, but quite a few accounts say that he's as brilliant as he's credited for.

jmtame3• 17 years ago

i don't think he's good at coming up with ideas, but he has shown repeatedly that he will execute the hell out of a project.

neilc2• 17 years ago

i don't think he's good at coming up with ideas

How would you know?

zandorg• 17 years ago

He was offered a near $1-million offer from Microsoft, just for a job there, so his ability's not in dispute (unless $1-million is peanuts nowadays).

jmtame3• 17 years ago

wasn't that to acquire the app he built which suggests new music to listen to on your computer? and he rejected that and decided instead to go to harvard?

i bet he was just trying to buy more time to build something bigger. from what i've heard, he was very much on a rapid fire mode with his projects. if one failed or didn't grow very quickly, he wouldn't wait long before moving on to another one.

kolya3• 17 years ago

Does it matter if he came up with it? I think brilliance isn't always in coming up with the idea. Often it is the ability to see one idea of many, the one that appears ordinary to everyone else, and zero in on it.

thinkcomp2• 17 years ago

It does to me.

mixmax• 17 years ago

"Of course, at that time I thought that social networking sites were a complete waste of time -- both for the users and those developing the sites -- so I earnestly tried to talk Mark out of squandering his precious Harvard education on such a frivolous endeavor. "You think you're going to compete against Friendster and Orkut?" was the general outline of my argument. There were already too many social networking sites out there, I claimed, and building yet another one was clearly a waste of time."

Interestingly the argument against building a social network is still the same, and inevitably someone will come along, not listen to the advice and create the next facebook. These things seem to be cyclic in nature.

liuliu• 17 years ago

When Google startup, many people suggested that there are too many search engines out there and yet another search engine will not succeed. However, after Google, there is no major search engine emergence. For SNS, maybe there will be a next Facebook, but the chance is much rare than before. In Orkut/Friendster era, not so many people daily live on social network. For now, everyone online knows SNS and Facebook. That is the most obvious barrier for new comers, people's custom.

unalone5• 17 years ago

This.

Everything is cyclical and doomed to fail until something better breaks that repeating pattern. It happened with Amazon before Web 2.0, when everybody thought it was doomed to fail. I'd bet it happens with Facebook.

It deserved repeating, because I don't think some people get it: Friendster had a few users. Myspace had a lot. Facebook has every single college student and now it has every single high school student, and almost every person checks it at least once per day, and in the last 6 months it's been picking up in every demographic. Facebook is a part of life for those people, in a way that Twitter or Tumblr or Flickr or even a huge site like Youtube is not. It's not going down without a fight.

cos• 17 years ago

Well, of course: Facebook started by serving a specific niche (campus social life) that was very large, but that no social networking site specifically focused on. By doing so, it built critical mass quickly.

Lots of new social networking sites are starting these days focusing on specific niches, and they're very useful within those niches. And then there's ning and its ilk, which are "meta-niche" social network sites.

There are also still a number of very large unserved niches that create openings for new Facebook-like social network sites. (I'm actually kicking around the idea of going for one of those that I happen to be very familiar with)

cschneid• 17 years ago

I buy into the argument that social networks aren't stable entities. Because the main element is friending somebody, it is incredibly awkward to unfriend somebody, or denying a friend request.

So a boss asks to be your facebook friend, and all of a sudden, you have to be super careful about privacy settings, other friends, talking trash, etc. Now it's become linkedin.

But hey, check out this new social network. Hop on a new network that's growing, and keep up with your friends, who you can convince to also join.

Repeat.

dilanj• 17 years ago

How did the author 'almost kill facebook' if Zuckerberg was 'unphased' by his argument in this single conversation they had?

jsomers• 17 years ago

I don't think he is being entirely serious in this post, which is sprinkled with self-deprecation masquerading as egotism.

cpr2• 17 years ago

It struck me as egotism masquerading as self-deprecation.

It'd be like my talking about how I almost destroyed Microsoft because I used to tease Gates about he was wasting his time programming those silly microcomputers, when he was hacking late at night on his 8080 assembler/linker/simulator in the PDP-10 machine room at the old Harvard CRCT. (Which happens to be true. ;-)

herval2• 17 years ago

He must keep thinking he is relevant, you know... It's pretty much like "you know I'm responsible for the credit mark crisis because once upon a time I bought a house"

thinkcomp2• 17 years ago

I will always give The Harvard Crimson and the press at large more credit than Mark for spreading Facebook.

abrahamsen• 17 years ago

Matt Welsh could also claim some credit for making Linux popular. He wrote most of the user oriented documentation back when Linux was new, and founded the Linux Documentation Project.

davidw• 17 years ago

Oh... that Matt Welsh! Cool, yeah, I had the O'Reilly book with the cowboy on it.

snprbob86• 17 years ago

While this is interesting, it is just one bullet on my list of reasons not to grade based on class participation...

herval2• 17 years ago

I'd add "not take business advice from teachers" to your list too...

fleaflicker• 17 years ago

fleaflicker has a "front office" feed displaying a league's recent activity. I launched it 4 months before facebook's friend feed. A cool idea but hardly original or patentable.

jonknee• 17 years ago

It's also the major reason I'm not on Facebook. It makes stalkers out of friends and just isn't something I'm interested in.

neilc2• 17 years ago

It's almost surely patentable, I think. A generic activity feed is not novel, of course, but the context (using it for social activities, methods for selecting what appears in the feed) is significant.

vlad• 17 years ago

"I suggested to him that they really needed to find a way to get people to login to the site regularly. With most social networking sites, you sign up, add your few dozen friends, and maybe for one or two weeks get a kick out of messaging them as they join your friend list. But after that, there's little or no reason to keep returning to the site -- as a result your profile just stagnates. Well, wouldn't you know it -- a few months later Facebook came out with the News Feed feature which shows you what all of your friends are up on on an up-to-the-minute basis. Pure genius! Had I only thought to patent the idea..."

Although Matt is obviously joking, the question is why did he even write this, if not to try to take some credit for the news feed? I've thought of at least half a dozen ideas identical to what YC had later funded, and the reality is that between the time I thought of it and the appearance of the same thing a few months later, the actual development of that began months earlier, and likely multiple groups formed and applied with a similar idea, and I did not develop or apply for funding for the idea. However, in his case, it doesn't sound like he even had a similar idea, but is just confusing giving somebody goodwill advice with having a piece of the credit in the creation of any features that are released in the next three months.

berlinbrown• 17 years ago

Yea right.

Cry me a river.

How I almost killed Facebook

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