Well, before you ask us to quote you the construction of the next Facebook website, consider the following:
1. “Facebook,” as it was known when it first launched in 2004, was the culmination of a bunch of smaller concepts, all created by Mark Zukerberg. Among them were things like Facemash and Course Match. He had a proof of concept and used it as a platform to build Facebook.
2. They worked day and night to get it off the ground.
3. Mark Zukerburg himself was a developer, which allowed him to do most of the coding for the site, without having to initially hire a workforce.
4. The initial investment of the two founding members of Facebook was $1,000 each. Basic monthly hosting costs were around $100 per month. This was in 2004.
5. They had a very specific target user group in mind.
6. They kept it simple.
7. Gets “help” from other college students. College students are cheap!
8. They had no development overhead.
9. Facebook, as it stands today, is again the culmination of a bunch of test concepts that have been refined and defined over the years, with thousands of man hours spent developing the site.
10. To keep the service running, they had to get venture capital (VC) funding. About 10 months into his life, they were loaned $500,000 to help expand the service and keep it alive.
11. The web is literate with social networking sites that have just disappeared into obscurity with very little mention these days. Some were released too early, others couldn’t keep up with the demand and as a result the user experience suffered, while some were too feature rich and simply confused the user.
12. Facebook had an advertising model that allowed it to keep something afloat in the early days. It also managed to get over a million users in the first 10 months of its existence, which is quite an exceptional feat.
13. They were very lucky. It seems that they did not quite understand what they were doing. They thought it was just another project and once they expanded beyond the college market it would fail.
14. They initially focused on a niche market/segment, and only once it proved its worth did they expand the service.
15. Open source went mainstream in the early 2000s and allowed founders to build Facebook, a complex database-driven website without paying for a database license. This would not have been possible a couple of years earlier. (One could argue that this is one of the reasons that led to the demise of the “first” social networking site, sixdegrees.com, as it used Oracle.)
Social networking websites are not new. Sixdegrees.com was launched in 1997 and has been around for a while. They have probably only gained worldwide social awareness in recent years, however, if you still want to build a “successful” social media website, you will most likely need the following:
1. Long time
2. The Skill Set: Programming/Marketing/Networking and Big Money
3. Patience
Facebook worked because they had a team made up of people who:
1. They went out: they hit the road with their idea, they went from campus to campus installing and configuring “The Facebook” – they spread the word
2. Scheduled sometimes night and day.
3. We got people to fund this idea
4. He had unbridled determination, naivety, experience, and cynicism.
5. We weren’t afraid to have some fun!