Facebook: A New Idea or Reinvention?

Facebook: A New Idea or Reinvention?

When a brand is launched, one of the first questions that comes into the minds of business analysts is whether this is a new idea or a reinvention. Facebook is hot and a huge company when it comes to value, but with its recent upset in launching its IPO, many have lost trust in investing in the stock market.

Debating about Facebook’s IPO flop is another thing. What we will be discussing is whether Facebook is a new idea or a reinvention.

Basically what makes a new idea different from a reinvention is the fact that has anything existed in the past similar to it? In Facebook’s case, there certainly have been many social networking websites to come and go, but there are still a number of factors that make it pivotal to study the situation.

For those who have seen “The Social Network”, a movie based on Facebook co-founders Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin, the idea of creating, what is now easily the biggest social networking website on the internet today, wasn’t just that a light bulb popped up above their heads, it was a slow process of realising the need to make something already existent even better.

Some might say that you cannot reinvent the wheel and everything new is based on a fresh idea, but then, there are those who say there is always a need to make that wheel even better than it originally was.

Before the creation of Facebook, there were a number of social networking websites like from the starting days of Nexopia, Orkut and a recently toppled giant, Myspace. All these websites had one thing in common and that was to add the people that you knew and interact with them through messages, posting pictures and such.

Facebook just took that whole idea to a higher level by introducing status updates to photo tagging along with extremely addictive games that has people spending hours each and every day on one website.

What Mark Zuckerberg did so cleverly was to incorporate all of the good things from these websites, take the bad stuff out and add a number of new things to make it and one-in-all and better place to hang out.

Facebook certainly did require some new ideas to make it unique from the other websites like your relationship status. I don’t think that any of those other sites had such a vast and detailed user profile of each person as Facebook does and people certainly love that.

Knowing what each and every person is doing in their lives is just human nature to be intrigued about and Facebook took full advantage of that by allowing you to view what your friends were up to all the time and at the same time, broadcast yourself to the world.

In the end, those who believe that Facebook is a one of a kind idea might be right since it was innovation that boosted it so much, but still, there are a number of sites before Facebook that basically allowed you to do the same things but just in a different way.

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Posted by Syed Hassan Bokhari on Jun 3 2012. Filed under Business, Editorial, Infotainment, Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.