The Real Challenge is Relevance

How do you stay relevant with 500 million or 1 billion members? How do you make sure you don’t turn into the next ICQ, Orkut or Myspace? Finding the answer to relevance is a lot harder than answering the “money” question. And I can guarantee that this is what keeps people at those companies awake at night. Is that unreasonable? Do you think that nothing can destroy the growth of Facebook?

Unfortunately history has proven that people are extremely fashion cautious, disloyal and eager to move on to the next best thing. I remember when Friendster grew to 10 million members overnight and friends of mine announced they were starting their own social network: “suckers!” is what I thought. I reasoned that with 10 million members nobody would ever catch up to Friendster. They had what investors call, and love, the “first mover advantage”. Well, we all remember what happened to Friendster (my friends turned their social network into a thriving and very profitable business and the only local network that beats Facebook in their market).