Facebook's success is no coincidence

Facebook founder Mark Zackerberg

On the surface, this is just a good luck Internet rookie. But with a close understanding of the company, the more you feel that their success stems from planning than by coincidence-perhaps this is the most poignant part of Facebook.

The February Bay Area is sunny, with green hillsides and blue clouds on either side of America's 280 interstate highways, making us feel like a small icon on the Windows XP desktop. 2 o'clock in the afternoon, finally came to Facebook this magical company. In their new home, Matt introduced me to a man. He sat at 5 tables and spelled it on a table in the form of an island. Away from the window of good light, behind a more and more meeting room. We shook hands, and then I saw him look familiar, then thought for a long time, finally feel like ... "Are you" Mark? He said yes.

He is Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's founder and CEO, who has just won the title of Forbes ' youngest rich list. I have also become one of the few people in the country who has held hands with the 4 billion-dollar 25-year-old new richest man.

Facebook has come a long way from the outside, and ComScore's access curve from birth to the present is as perfect as it seems. Inadvertently, the 1000-person venture has overtaken Google's visit to become the first-largest website in the United States. On the face of it, this is just another good luck Internet rookie, but the more I get to know the company, the more I feel that their success seems to be planned rather than coincidental-but the fact that he's come all the way is a real coincidence. Maybe this is the most awesome place on Facebook?

Now, let me be the layman to see some of the first-hand observation, and share with you.

Simple and useful is kingly

Forgot how to get into this topic anyway, I talked to mark about Facebook's blue-white logo. This may be one example of the many features of Facebook that compare the features of Facebook's products. Facebook's logo is very simple, Mark's intention is to minimize the design, so that it in all cultures, all regions are ordinary, good collocation. The word I can think of is "hundred-match".

Now the world's most popular single size notebook, mostly black cover, and there is no logo. The simpler the design, the more the occasion is suitable for a variety of different needs. It is hard to imagine a pink notebook with Hello Kitty, which will be popular in all ages and markets, like black, white and blue notebooks, even though some people will like it wildly.

Like logos, Facebook tries to shrink the design of all features to the minimum number of conventions that all users need, and to take the bottom line. All of the country's Facebook is the same interface, they are like religion guarding the global product, a design. Different regions, different people's pages, perhaps the only difference is their name, and related content. As for the function? Because of its simplicity and restraint, there is no way to simply call Facebook a US web site, or a young person's website, because it pursues the minimum number of conventions needed for global communication-the smallest, the part that is required by the largest audience.

Unlike other Web sites that opened the world to users in the first day, Facebook's pace of expansion seems cautious. Before Facebook opened to other schools, it first got 3,000 users of Harvard Square. 3,000 users are a trivial number for most websites, but for Harvard's 5,000-undergraduate school, it's a firm grip on the Harvard market. After a market dominance, Facebook opened to universities around Boston and slowly expanded to other Ivy League universities. Only later did he cautiously join the high school, then the company, until very later, to allow all the users to register. Mark is well aware of the truth that instead of being second in every market (one of the best negative examples is hi5.com), it's better to take one. When a city reaches the tipping point of explosive growth, the next battleground is turned.

In the two-storey office of Facebook, in addition to Silicon Valley's standard open office environment, a stunning computer screen, the most striking is the ubiquitous disorientated board game box. Disorientated is a board of games that Facebook's old staff often mentions in a conversation, and the game, which was born in 1957, is on a world map. 2 to 6 men occupied each country with their forces. Each player can put all the troops in a country to guarantee a certain foolproof, but only occupy a country, can also be dispersed to many countries, to ensure that the largest area, or compromise strategy. The interesting thing about this game is that the one-hour to three-day-long, unequal-play process is the end of the world with one side destroying all the enemies.

Facebook's expansion is a real-world version of the disorientated game. Entering those territories first, how to enter, and when to enter the next one becomes crucial, and the game is not entangled in tactics (it is simply a dice decision). The flag on the head of the Facebook office is decorated at the present stage, but in the process of starting a global expansion, it is more like flag, gradually expanding from the United States to Europe and Asia through phased, more than 10-nation-by-country approaches. Through clear strategic planning, Facebook has won most of the world. Now more than 70% of the world's traffic from Facebook is the result of a preliminary victory outside the US.

In fact, when I was in high school, Mark was a disorientated fan, and he used to rewrite the game himself, but I forgot to ask the Facebook office if the game was the version he was rewriting.

When it comes to Facebook's expansion, one of the interesting details is that Facebook has cleverly exploited some of the spreading undercurrent to bring itself from a powerful region, or a crowd, to another region with weaker influence. Taking the university as an example, Facebook's absolute advantage at Harvard is beyond the reach of Stanford University on the West Coast. Facebook's marketing department is smart enough to find that high school is a link or undercurrent that connects the two universities. Through a strategic open high school, Harvard students drove them to other students in high school, some of them at Stanford, and infiltrated a new territory.