Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds like they were trying to emulate the early days of FB some people pine for where you had to have a .edu email address to sign up. I know a few friend were hopeful that Google+ meant they would no longer see posts from their racist uncle or gullible aunt. Start out with that same kind of exclusivity and hopefully it builds this exclusive mystique so when you open it up to everybody you get a flood. Perhaps the…
Facebook had what turned out to be an accidentally brilliant way of bootstrapping networks and trust. Fundamental problem: social networks with no-one on them are not fun and not sticky. Fundamental problem 2: if anyone can read what you're writing, it's not a social network, it's a blog. So you can't just let anyone see what people are writing. The way FB handled that in the early days was that by default, people in…
Re: Why Google+ Failed
#371In the early days, you could only friend people at your school because that's who was colocated on your MySQL shard. Fully general addressing of sharded objects was added quite a bit later, about when they opened to non-.edu addresses.