I've been seeing the term "social networking" popping up everywhere ever since Facebook was introduced to our college. At that time we were using the application purely for fun, it seemed. Find your friends, see how many you've got compared with others, and join an inordinate amount of groups. As the technology has matured, though, I'm finding that at least in our own world of academia we're referring to it more and more as a business tool. Just last week in my own rather orthodox sales class we used the example of Facebook as a site to research potential sales clients' likes and dislikes. It works both ways, it seems: businesses can find out more about potential employees and average employees can discover what they need to connect with people at other organizations. Who knows whether this will actually play out like this in the real world.

From what I've been able to gather, Jessica Flannery (a co-founder of Kiva) experienced the power of "micro-loans" to help impoverished people create their own business startups and in a way take their lives into their own hands when she was doing various philanthropic projects. Inspired, she parterned with her husband Matt Flannery (a computer programmer) to create a platform on the Internet for the masses to provide these micro-loans. I think that, given the nature of their business and their history, this couple is driven by the desire to help philanthropic organizations. They are driven to see people succeed who wouldn't ordinarily. The interesting thing about their model is that, I think, it already existed in various incarnations throughout the world. Microfinance isn't a new thing, so it's been proven to be effective at being mutually beneficial. What they did is take an existing platform and expose it to the mass market of the Internet. Therefore, I think their risk in this startup was lessened by the fact that they had had prior experience in already existing microfinance operations and could reference those business models as needed.

Okay, guys, I'll try to get the ball rolling. As I've been researching Facebook, it seems to me like Mark Zuckerberg (founder) was a really fortunate guy. He created a basic social networking application by himself in about two weeks, at a time when people were just realizing how the technology could be useful to them. So, as far as I can guess as to why he has been so successful #1) he already had good programming skills to accomplish the task and #2) his timing was great. He also benefited–and I'm not sure he was aware that this model would be best–by starting small and only releasing the application to his own university first. After the initial market was convinced of the usefulness of the application, the idea just snowballed as people told their friends about it and demand grew. A mass release might not have worked so well as it would have lacked the closeness of the first Harvard market that in turn generated positive buzz about his product. Also, I think that appealing to colleges in particular made the application stronger in that it caused people to think of it as more directly relevant to them. Myspace, at least in my opinion, seems a bit too far-reaching and impersonal. As to some good reasons why Facebook is so different from other social networking sites, I can't really say. Maybe somebody who has used Facebook in addition to other sites can comment.