The article, What Makes A Winning Social-Networking Site?, summarizes a large panel discussion titled “Social Networking Winners and Losers.”  Representatives from Facebook, MySpace and other social networking sites took turns to discuss what makes a social network “successful”.  What they found out was that the definition of success varies from person to person.  Some feel like success is only attained when you have the ability to “exit” and sell off the network; however, other people only want to build the company/network without creating such an “exit strategy.”  Now if you define success with the size of the social network, you will be interested to know that then according to this panel discussion that then a social network’s success is indeed a fluke.  According to Mike Speiser (who created a talent competition social network and sold it to Yahoo), every social network creates its base in the same way: “by telling everyone at the start-up to send a link to the site to everyone in their address book.”

Personally, I was very disappointed in this article/panel discussion, because I feel like they didn’t really analyze exactly why certain social networks are growing and others are not.  I mean, if everyone is creating it’s social network in the same manner (”send the link to your friends”), why in some cases do people feel inclined to send the link and in others people just ignore it?  I feel like Facebook expanded so rapidly, because they expanded in a logical fashion.  Facebook first started as a project at Harvard University.  Once half the undergrads had joined, then it was expanded to other Boston schools which was smart since Harvard students probably know plenty of other people that go to other schools in Boston (just like I am sure a large number of Cornell students know people at Ithaca College).  Then Facebook expanded to include the rest of the Ivy League.  This was another smart move, since in high school, classes are segregated by intelligence levels, so people who ended up going to Harvard probably took high-school courses with (and were friends with) people who went to other Ivy League schools.  Each time Facebook expanded its online community; it made sure that it expanded to a new network that had plenty of connections to current network of users.

Another reason that Facebook’s expansion methodology worked so well was because it was based on eligibility rather than just “send a link to the site to everyone in [your] address book.”  Just think, Facebook is new, you are at Harvard and have exhausted all of the possible people you can “friend.”  All of a sudden, MIT is added to Facebook and now, all of these new potential friends are eligible to join and become your friend.  My first reaction would be to check if these friends had joined yet and if not, send them an IM to join.  Facebook was able to create the desired result of “[sending] a link to the site to everyone in [your] address book” without directly saying it.  So in conclusion, I feel like there is more to the growth of an online social network than what this article describes, and that the successful social networks have taken more steps to ensure their growth than just telling people to email everyone in their address book.