There's a lot that goes into it. Before Facebook was Friendster. Which failed spectacularly because they tried to have some sort of n-squared graph of friends that took thw whole thing down. What FB got right in the early days was it didn't crash. We take that for granted now in the age of cloud everything.

Also, there was Classmates.com. A way for people to connect with old friends from high school. But it was a subscription service and few people were desperate enough to pay.

So it's wasn't just the idea waiting around but idea with the right combination of factors, user-growth on the Internet, etc.

And don't forget Facebook's greatest innovation - requiring a .edu email to register. This happened at a time when people were hesitant to tie their real world personas with the scary Internet, and it was a huge advantage: a great marketing angle, a guarantee of 1-to-1 accounts to people, and a natural rate limiter of adoption.

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wewewedxfgdf 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

There's always a trail of competitors who almost got the magic formula right, but for some feature or luck or timing or money or something.

The giant win comes from many stars aligning. Luck is a factor - it's not everything but it plays a role - luck is the description of when everything fell into place at just the right time on top of hard work and cleverness and preparedness.

Google Search <-- AltaVista, Lycos, Yahoo

Facebook <-- MySpace, Friendster

iPod <-- MP3 players (Rio, Creative)

iPhone <-- BlackBerry, Palm, Windows Mobile

Minecraft <-- Infiniminer

Amazon Web Services <-- traditional hosting

Windows (<-- Mac OS (1984), Xerox PARC

Android <-- Symbian, Windows Mobile, Palm

YouTube <-- Vimeo, DailyMotion

Zoom <-- WebEx, Skype, GoToMeeting

	▲	awesome_dude 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Before iPods and iPhones, people thought that those spaces were "solved" and there was no room for "innovation" mp3 players were commodity items, you could buy one for a couple of dollars, fill it up with your favourite music format (stolen) and off you went. Phones too - Crackberry was the epitome of sophistication, and technological excellence. Jobs/Apple didn't create anything "new" in those spheres, instead he added desireability, fancy UX that caught peoples' attentions

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c22 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Not a guarantee. I used to find abandoned .edu mailing lists so I could create accounts at arbitrary schools.