> Had there been FB pages from the start of the web, you'd probably would have never seen so many custom sites in the first place.
I’m not sure about this. AOL, Prodigy and CompuServe all had vibrant online communities. However, what you could do was much more limited than the federated web, and they were silos.
Without the competition of “I’ll host my own server, and search engines will index it”, I wonder if FB and it’s predecessors would have been able to figure out what to build.
Well Facebook was built on the failures of MySpace which in turn was built on the failures of Friendster, and so on. People who wanted their own space were always making their own space, and the rest would go to whichever social network was the most relevant at the time.
Facebook wasn't built on MySpace's failures, they were both operating at the same time. People moved to Facebook because it was more intimate and less commercialized while MySpace turned into a dodgy spam heap.
I’m not sure about this. AOL, Prodigy and CompuServe all had vibrant online communities. However, what you could do was much more limited than the federated web, and they were silos.
Without the competition of “I’ll host my own server, and search engines will index it”, I wonder if FB and it’s predecessors would have been able to figure out what to build.