Barely 2 years ago,  Friendster was No.1 in Singapore. The incumbent had an average of 907,000 visitors monthly with users spending almost 2.5 hours on average on the site.
Today, Facebook gets about 160 times more traffic than Friendster. And Friendster? It was bought over for a mere S$140million last year by online payment solutions provider MOL Global, part of a Malaysian conglomerate owned by billionaire businessman Vincent Tan.
So how did Mark Zuckerberg’s baby get to be so big and beautiful?
Third-party applications: As geeky as this may sound, it was application developers that gave us everything from throwing virtual sheep to having zombie wars that made us spend more time on Facebook. The engineers there could not have thought of every possible game or frivolous poke you’d want to send to a friend, so they let others do it for them. The plan worked so well that developing apps for Facebook moved from hobby to marketing campaigns by companies to get our attention.
Simple to be social: Before Facebook, the easiest way to share a web page you found was to send it by IM or email. Some professional news sites had that feature where you could “email this article to a friend”. Facebook changed everything. It was not only simple to post something to your news stream, but they made every single action, post, picture, and video easy to forward, like, reply, and comment. Who would have thought there’d be a need to comment on every single photo and even the album? Or have a threaded discussion on a one-liner post about your dog? Apparently, that’s exactly what we wanted.
Discovery: Friendster was big at a time when the world just got used to IM. If you didn’t know your friend’s alias or email, you could not add them. Creating a network was hard. Also at that time, people were rather paranoid about the Internet and often never used their real names. Facebook bucked the trend and applied discovery to the way we network by using the data we shared to recommend people we should be connected to. I recall in 2008, almost every friend I had who started using Facebook talked about how they managed to hook up with old school mates they hadn’t seen in ages. But in order for Facebook to help us with this discovery, it required true data. We had to leave our anonymity behind at forums and IRC and entrust social networks with our true identity.
Despite its success, Facebook faces big challenges ahead, foremost of which are concerns over privacy and competition from rivals like fast-rising Twitter and MySpace (which never took off in Singapore).
For now though,  Facebook is the undisputed king of social networks with a worldwide user base of over 400 million. With moves toward location-based and physical interactions, Facebook’s dream of connecting everyone and everything to one large shared network appears to be coming true.
Benjamin Koe is the co-founder of social media monitoring solutions provider, JamiQ. He was formerly a consultant with a global public relations firm, and before that a technology journalist.