With all the talk these days about creating open systems on the consumer web, it's important to note that Facebook is growing rapidly today because it pursued the opposite strategy early on.
To achieve rapid organic traffic growth and high retention rates on the consumer web, new sites have to initially be restrictive. This is more true today than ever before, as competition for user attention is only increasing. Facebook applied this rule of thumb well by...
- restricting your social network to fellow students at your own university, and;
- adopting flexible privacy features that could be customized to your individual tastes.
So while a site has to be unique, valuable, easy-to-use and free in order to achieve viral growth, one of the easiest ways to think about new models is to consider how restrictive they are. Opening them up, no doubt comes later in the product lifecycle once a large user base exists, and Facebook has done this, both by i) expanding the number restrictive networks a user can have (they went downstream by adding high schools, upstream by adding workplaces, and also crossed over to cities/regions) and ii) overlaying these restrictive networks with social networking tools (like groups, discussions, events, etc.).
Zuckerberg's description of Facebook's platform as a social graph is a good one, because they have enabled their users to slice, dice and protect their social lives across these networks and groups, in a simple, highly functional way.
If you buy into this as the reasoning behind why Facebook is now growing so quickly, then rBlock is on the right path to achieve similar growth, by also being initially restrictive, but in a very different way.
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