yoda Posted October 3, 2011 Posted October 3, 2011 So ? As I said' date=' Myspace was doing 50-100 million by 2007. So what great problem did FB solve ?[/quote'] I am only familiar with FB to the extent of what I read from their engineering pages. Not sure what is the timeline of their features/challenges. However, it is well known that FB engineers used to be put in "lockdown" by Zuckerberg himself, not being allowed to leave their desks till they wrapped up major functionality. Given that most of the guys hired by FB are pretty smart, we can assume they were doing things more challenging than the usual.
punjabi_khota Posted October 3, 2011 Posted October 3, 2011 I am only familiar with FB to the extent of what I read from their engineering pages. Not sure what is the timeline of their features/challenges. However, it is well known that FB engineers used to be put in "lockdown" by Zuckerberg himself, not being allowed to leave their desks till they wrapped up major functionality. Given that most of the guys hired by FB are pretty smart, we can assume they were doing things more challenging than the usual. Ofcourse they are doing pretty challenging things. But my point was (in response to Sarchasm's post), that the basic idea and implementation of that idea of FB was no great technological advance. I am sure there are a whole of lot unique and exciting problems FB is solving right now.
Yoda-esque Posted October 3, 2011 Posted October 3, 2011 Ofcourse they are doing pretty challenging things. But my point was (in response to Sarchasm's post), that the basic idea and implementation of that idea of FB was no great technological advance. I am sure there are a whole of lot unique and exciting problems FB is solving right now. Why did FB prosper while other networking sites fade ? Was it primarily a usability thing ?
akshayxyz Posted October 3, 2011 Author Posted October 3, 2011 PK - (I might have missed your point completely) - but, if you are talking about solving challenging technological problems. Then perhaps not many people would agree that PageRank was the most technologically challenging problem of that time - which is the single most thing that made Google's searches significantly better than its peers - before it was public knowledge. In fact, IMO, Map-reduce and GFS (google file system) was even more innovative/technologically advanced artifact than that and has contributed to Google's success more than PageRank - in my opinion. And there are many companies which work on more challenging problems - e.g. in image similarity (used in visual search) - like.com (and i guess there was one more that got acquired by google) - that solved more technologically mathematically complex problems. Just that Google solved the most fundamental problem of www in most effective way at the right time. And, so is the case seems to be with FB - they solved the social networking problem in better way, when it was getting out of hands (myspace). E.g. today exclusivity may not sound like a big deal, but contributed significantly to initial quality of FB's userbase - the problem which was plaguing social network space at that time.
punjabi_khota Posted October 17, 2011 Posted October 17, 2011 Speaking of high-tech startups ... http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/17/video-collaboration-software-maker-vivu-acquired-by-polycom/ Vivu was started in 2008 by desis in India+US....has been acquired by Polycom (the video conferencing leader)...
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