Facebook won because Zuckerberg had insider feel for college social dynamics
Evidence
Facebook’s rise in the face of this existing competition was something remarkable to behold. Over the course of 2004, it leapfrogged from campus to campus, landing everywhere with a splash. It arrived with better, more stable software, but that wasn’t the key to its success. Still enrolled at Harvard, Zuckerberg and his team had an on-the-ground feel for the college social environment and its vectors, and thus a deep intuition of what could make his site seem rewarding and essential to his target audience. It didn’t hurt that it was based at Harvard, an object of some fascination on other campuses. The student newspapers welcoming Thefacebook give the best sense of how well it managed to encapsulate what users were looking for—namely, an affirmation of their social significance. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 992
Categorization
- XREF: Very direct support for the reader’s existing article ‘Grafting & Growth’ in reverse: instead of infrastructure grafted from within, Facebook’s advantage was intimate knowledge of the host environment. — connects to: Facebook succeeded through execution and network effects, not invention — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 982; Facebook won by representing existing campus networks rather than creating new ones — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 996; Facebook’s adolescent-designed practices were institutionalized for the whole population — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1423
- DEEPTHINKING: The claim that Facebook succeeded through ‘insider intuition’ rather than technical superiority anticipates a whole strand of platform-entrenchment analysis.
Broader Connections
- Facebook won by representing existing campus networks rather than creating new ones
#expands(0.85) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 996 - Facebook’s adolescent-designed practices were institutionalized for the whole population
#expands(0.80) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1423