"I'm pretty sure that, given those instructions, young Boz would build a social network and make it immediately available to everyone. It would obviously seem like a mistake to him to limit membership to a small subset of the population. Some other social network might come along and just open its doors to everyone and he would never overtake them!
As you probably already know, the situation I describe actually happened; there was one social network that grew incrementally while another opened its doors to the world. Fast forward five years and things haven't turned out the way young Boz might have expected. As it turns out, the path Facebook took to connecting everyone in the world was not the shortest and that has made all the difference. By starting small and expanding outward we built a community. By integrating networks that had originally been separate we had to focus on privacy. By throwing open the floodgates of growth in increments rather than all at once we were able to focus on keeping a consistent design and building scalable infrastructure. These things are now part of the DNA of our company and they affect everything we build." - Boz
IMO, Facebook won because it uses real names. It's a lot faster to find people (especially people you've lost touch with) when you can see their names.
As you probably already know, the situation I describe actually happened; there was one social network that grew incrementally while another opened its doors to the world. Fast forward five years and things haven't turned out the way young Boz might have expected. As it turns out, the path Facebook took to connecting everyone in the world was not the shortest and that has made all the difference. By starting small and expanding outward we built a community. By integrating networks that had originally been separate we had to focus on privacy. By throwing open the floodgates of growth in increments rather than all at once we were able to focus on keeping a consistent design and building scalable infrastructure. These things are now part of the DNA of our company and they affect everything we build." - Boz
https://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=82081294140