facebook success story // canavarlar

facebook mark zuckerberg

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/startups/news/2007/09/ff_facebook

"How Mark Zuckerberg
Turned Facebook Into
the Web's Hottest
Platform

He didn't have much
choice but to sell.
It was summer 2006,
a little more than
two years after Mark
Zuckerberg had
created Facebook in
his Harvard dorm
room as a way for
him and his friends
to better connect
with schoolmates. In
the intervening
years, he'd raised
$37.7 million from
venture capitalists
and transformed his
modest Web site into
a certified social
phenomenon. College
kids across the
nation clamored for
access, which
Zuckerberg doled
out, school by
school. By mid-2006,
about 7 million
users, most of them
college students,
had a Facebook
account.

..."

"...

But even Sposato was
surprised at the
response from
Facebook users when
Picnik was included
as one of the 85
initial applications
in Facebook
Platform, the new
development tool.
Within three days,
more than 100,000
users downloaded his
program — about 10
times more than he'd
anticipated. Because
News Feed instantly
and automatically
notified friends
whenever someone
downloaded Picnik,
word of the
application spread
exponentially.
Sposato called
colleagues in a
desperate — and
ultimately
successful — hunt
for extra server
capacity and
bandwidth to avoid
outages. Currently
almost 250,000
Facebook users have
installed Picnik on
their pages, making
it the network's top
photo-editing tool.

....
"

"...

Skeptics may argue
that we've seen this
movie before — in
1999, say, when
anyone with a vague
concept for a Web
site could get VC
backing. And, they
point out, nobody
actually does pay
for Facebook
applications. Still,
the startup costs
for developers are
extremely low, and
the potential is
high. For the
Internet, email was
the killer app — a
program so useful
that it transformed
the platform into a
massive
communications tool.
There's no killer
app for Facebook
yet. But if someone
can develop one,
they will be sitting
on a gold mine.

..."

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