What made the Facebook website so successful-?

The ability to “poke” others.

Besides having a fairly clean, and at the time pretty useful, product (compared to sloppier MySpace, which it overtook), FB has been the beneficiary of a great deal of free media P.R. – which, in my opinion, has kept it afloat even as it’s become less useful and more obnoxious. Of course, they were probably careful to get their foots in the door with features that made people depend on it (replacing mailing lists for events and stuff).

You see a pretty similar situation with Apple, which has an even less useful product line. Very few professionals in any field outside of maybe graphic design (and that only for legacy reasons) would take Apple products seriously for their work, but the marketing is incredibly good – and for people who want to dick around (as The Onion put it), the products work perfectly well.

Anyway, getting the press to give you free PR often makes all the difference. It explains Apple, reality TV, Sarah Palin, and a lot of other extremely dumb things.

@erichw1504 yes and the ability to seemingly flirt by announcing you are single again. Of course having a hot profile photo won’t hurt…

@bolwerk yes free media = forward momentum whether it’s good or bad or dumb right-?

@mazingerz88: I would guess so. Though, if it’s unusual enough to be reported in the mainstream American press, it’s a safe bet it’s not that important.

Facebook is a way to stay connected with those that you care about without a phone call.It also provides a daily laugh.

@Pied_Pfeffer yes but other sites do the same thing so what is it that is unique about Facebook-? Was it the speed in which it was deployed outside the US as well-?

@mazingerz88 My only other experience is with MySpace and Classmates. Neither had the number of members that Facebook does.

I created a group for our high school class, and out of 250 students, we now have almost 100 FB members in the group. Our 30th anniversary is this year, and it wouldn’t surprise me if there is a greater turnout due to the re-connections in the past few years due to Facebook.

Before MySpace, there was Friendster. It’s now a gamer social networking site.

Before all this crap, I think MySpace.com was an unrelated site you could use to upload files and download them elsewhere – before the days of ubiquitous USB thumb drives.

The right time and right place, I guess. I signed up for Multiply ( a comparable social sharing site) long before Facebook was ever invented, but it never took off the way Facebook did.

Bored kids flocking to it to be cool and because they had nothing better to dowith their time.