February 7, 2009 by Matt Thomas
The first week of the Harvard premier of Facebook was a real eye opener for Zuckerberg and the rest of the team. Adoption rocketed, spreading like wildfire through the campus and, before long, practically everyone at Harvard had a profile. It was then that the developers hit upon the gimmick that would fuel the next stage of the site’s expansion, exclusivity.
Ease of use and quality aside, the real appeal of Facebook was that only some people could get a profile. As anyone who has ever tried and failed to get into an exclusive restaurant or bar will tell you this creates a very potent desire to get in. For this reason as soon as the programme was rolled out to the rest of the Ivy League, adoption was almost instantaneous, in turn creating a buzz in the shall we say, less prestigious universities.
This was clever on two fronts, firstly because it built up the aforementioned exclusivity factor but secondly because it allowed Facebook to manage its growth without overloading servers and sending costs through the roof early on. A scrappy upstart site of Facebook’s type would never have been able to deal with this kind of explosion in popularity otherwise.
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