College.com: another failed Facebook clone

[TC] College.com: Returning To Facebook’s Roots:

Largely the expansion has paid off for the Facebook, with the site’s growth rate hastening after each change. However, the changes have left some users wistful for a time when Facebook was a place just for college students. College.com plans to serve those users.

It’s a funny way of returning to Facebook’s roots. The registration is open to anyone, with or without a .edu email, meaning that there is no way to restrict this to college students. This was one of the changes that Facebook implemented. On College.com, anyone can join any college network. Facebook was initially only available at a few select schools and has always used your email address to validate college affiliation. There are also dating compatibility tests, flash cards, professor ratings, and a variety of other features. Part of Facebook’s initial appeal was its clean interface and a limited feature set. Unlike, you know, MySpace.

So really this is not returning to Facebook’s roots at all. It’s just another botched attempt to capitalize on the college student market that Facebook has conquered long ago.

People search business just got overhyped

[TC] People Search Business Just Got More Complicated As Facebook Enters Market:

Facebook just announced that they are now allowing public searches of their users by people without Facebook accounts. … To the extent any one service such as Facebook (or LinkedIn, etc.) gather lots of centralized information about a large group of people and then make it available for general search, these people search engines become much less important. If these startups were public entities, their market valuations would dip today.

So now anyone can find out if John Smith has a Facebook account without signing up. Revolutionary! To actually view anything besides a thumbnail, though, you still need to get an account. Back to square one. I guess nothing really changed after all.

Perhaps it’s just an SEO trick. From their blog entry:

In a few weeks, we will allow these Public Search listings (depending on users’ individual privacy settings) to be found by search engines like Google, MSN Live, Yahoo, etc.

Seems like an easy way to add millions of additional pages to Google’s index. More pages in the index lead to more hits lead to higher advertising revenue. This is something that others have been taking advantage of already. Rapleaf, for example, has been crawling social networks and making that data publlic for a while now.

Like sands through the hour glass, TechCrunch discovers an ancient Facebook rumor

[TC] Like Sands Through The Hour Glass, Another Person Is Claiming To Have Founded Facebook:

The New York Times has discovered a new claimant for the title of founder of Facebook. Aaron Greenspan, a Harvard classmate of Mark Zuckerberg claims that he created the original college social networking system, before either Facebook or ConnectU were founded. Mr. Greenspan is said to have established a web service that he called houseSYSTEM in 2003, 6 months prior to Facebook launching.

It’s not especially surprising that the mainstream media has only discovered this now, but I thought TechCrunch is supposed to be on top of all this social networking stuff. Aaron Greenspan posted an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg back in September 2006 in which he made his claims:

Remember that web site you signed up for at Harvard two days before we met in January, 2004, called houseSYSTEM – the one I made with the Universal Face Book that pre-dated your site by four months? (You left it out of your speech at Stanford, which is why I ask.)

Well, it was posted on an obscure web site, so maybe no one noticed. No, wait. The letter was discussed on Slashdot, WebProNews, and a bunch of minor blogs. Crap.