Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Social networking, seven years early
SocialNet in 1997
SocialNet launched in 1997 around the idea of a virtual cyberspace where one person would be a dog and another a cat, with different rules for how they would interact with each other in an alternate reality.
Facebook and real identity
Facebook was the first to get real identity, which is a very important dimension of social networking. People often lump all these sites together and miss that Facebook was first on that dimension.
Google's parallel
Google followed the same pattern. It was not the first search engine, but it was the first with PageRank, an automated approach, and on that dimension it was dramatically better than everybody else. The hope is that Facebook turns out to be the last social networking site.
Why did earlier social networks lose to Facebook?
Friendster launched in 2002 and Myspace in 2003, and both let people join under made-up names and profiles. Facebook started in 2004 as a site for university students who signed up with their school email addresses. Posts there came from people who were who they said they were. Facebook overtook Myspace in monthly visitors in 2008.
How did PageRank beat earlier search engines?
Before Google, engines such as AltaVista and Lycos ranked pages mostly by how often search words appeared on them. That made them easy to game, because a page could simply repeat popular words. PageRank used the links pointing to a page as a signal that other people valued it. Links were far harder to fake in bulk than words on a page.
How did LinkedIn use real identity?
Reid Hoffman co-founded LinkedIn in late 2002, and the site launched in May 2003. Each profile represented a real professional, with a work history that colleagues could see and confirm. That made introductions through mutual contacts something people could trust.