Buchheit: Friendster failed by prioritizing an impossible six-degrees-of-separation feature
Paul Buchheit · 20VC: Y Combinator's Paul Buchheit on Creating Gmail Version 1.0 & Leadership Lessons from Working With Zuckerberg and Larry Paige · Nov 1, 2017 · at 17:10
Paul Buchheit, Y Combinator Partner and creator of Gmail, contrasts Friendster's failure with MySpace's simplified approach to user network connections.
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“Friendster, but they could have been maybe Facebook, but they got fixated on this idea that when you browse through profiles, it had to show you kind of the six degrees of separation between you and this person, and so that feature, it turns out, is sort of computationally impossible at scale, but they became so fixated on it that they actually basically let the product die while they were trying to figure out How to do this impossible thing”
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