I'm not sure this helped. A social networking site is only as useful as the number of people on it. I expect Facebook would have grown faster without exclusivity.
I think exclusivity was key - and probably facebook's main difference from other networks (in it's early days). A social network isn't only about aggregating as many people as possible - this can also have a contradictory effect. What is much more important is the relevance of the community to you. Would you rather join a network with ~500 weak contacts or one with your 4 most important? The current popularity of facebook is also inherently causing a lot of people to stop sharing their personal lives on facebook.
But lastly let's not forget, that many elder social networks simply screwed up - both friendster and myspace got big troubles to scale their systems (database integrity etc.) - whereas facebook has a culture strongly driven by engineers (however that's gonna turn out... but facebook definitely has got fantastic uptime).
One last thing: build a social network that effectively and nicely solves the problem of the different social communities a person belongs too - and you might just as well build the next fb.
I'm not sure this helped. A social networking site is only as useful as the number of people on it. I expect Facebook would have grown faster without exclusivity.
I think exclusivity was key - and probably facebook's main difference from other networks (in it's early days). A social network isn't only about aggregating as many people as possible - this can also have a contradictory effect. What is much more important is the relevance of the community to you. Would you rather join a network with ~500 weak contacts or one with your 4 most important? The current popularity of facebook is also inherently causing a lot of people to stop sharing their personal lives on facebook.
But lastly let's not forget, that many elder social networks simply screwed up - both friendster and myspace got big troubles to scale their systems (database integrity etc.) - whereas facebook has a culture strongly driven by engineers (however that's gonna turn out... but facebook definitely has got fantastic uptime).
One last thing: build a social network that effectively and nicely solves the problem of the different social communities a person belongs too - and you might just as well build the next fb.