How did Facebook become bigger than other sites?

[Adam]

First off, The Social Network movie is part FICTION.
Now, from a "tech guy" point of view, there were major things. MySpace became slow, unresponsive, too much spam, too many Fake accounts, etc. Facebook is the total opposite of MySpace if you pay attention to the small details. Facebook is fast, very responsive, real names are in and fake MySpace names are out of style, Facebook is simple, really simple. Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook CEO) is about simplicity, uptime, and having the site stay fast and responsive. Facebook killed over 90% of the spam. Facebook is more unique when it comes to technical details that the over user wouldn't know about. Facebook is open-source, which means developers can easily make addons to Facebook (Apps, software, programs, games, etc.). Facebook's system of status updates, commenting, liking, etc. made it also stand out from MySpace. On MySpace you could only Add, message, and post profile comments. Facebook added their Status Updates which changed the meaning of a social network. If you compare 2009 Facebook to 2007 MySpace, MySpace wouldn't even seem "social", it would just be a network, a place for people to connect. It's very easy to find people that you know through Facebook search. I can keep going and going since I am a developer and I understand the technicalities that the average user wouldn't. Now that you read this, you can see there were tons of difference between the two. Most people who don't understand the technicalities would just generalize them as "social networks", "they are the same thing" etc.

Now, another thing people will say is "MySpace was cool, you could design your profile, listen to music, watch videos, etc." but it's not even worth it anymore. For music, people use iTunes; for movies, people use Netflix; for TV, people watch Youtube, Hulu or actual TV; instead of adding those fake celebrity MySpace pages people can now connect directly to the celeb via Twitter or through their Facebook "Like" page. MySpace was purchase by a corporation in 2005, the corporation knew nothing about technology or innovation, and that lead to downfall. You are not supposed to sell your tech company or website to a corporation, unless your selling it to a tech corporation (Facebook, Google, Twitter, Yahoo, etc.). It's like selling a construction company to a record company, it won't work, only possibly if you keep the original team to continue to run the construction company.

Try to visit MySpace now, I just did a few seconds after reading your question and my browser almost crashed. I don't understand how their homepage can even be slow and unresponsive, it wasn't even that slow in 2007/08.