Faces Behind Facebook Talk Future Plans

UCSD GUARDIAN  -- May 23 -- The Facebook, launched in February 2004, now has an office, permanent employees and more than $12 million invested in stocks, as well as 2.6 million users at 730 colleges across the nation, Moskovitz said.  “I plan on adding 100 new schools this weekend,” Moskovitz said. This summer, Facebook plans on doing some “aggressive hiring” with hopes of making a lot of things a lot better. Specifically, Moskovitz said he hopes to improve on groups and parties and make the system faster and more reliable.   Most sites, such as Friendster, are open networks, but Thefacebook is closed.  This ensures that users are tied together mainly by their schools; therefore, they are meeting people with whom they already have something in common. Zuckerburg started a small Web site for a laugh to find the hottest students at Harvard. The site, Facemash.com, was shut down within 12 hours by the administration.  Facebook launched the following week. Within the next week, half of the Harvard undergraduates had signed up and Zuckerburg enlisted his roommate, economics major Moskovitz, to help move the site to other campuses. “We never market anything,” says Moskovitz. “Everything is word-of-mouth.” It makes money through advertisers that want to target college students. 

Mark Brooks: Friendster was the catalyst...social networks do well under tighter and tighter verticals.  i.e. LinkedIn for business, Facebook for college connections, myspace for music oriented.  Friendster could have capitalised on users needs for grouping their friends in ever diminishing circles, by allowing users to form multiple closed networks.  The connectors are driving the social networking boon, and they simply have too many contacts to be able to organise them easily.  Noone really delivered an easy way for the power users/connectors to do sort their contacts conveniently.