22 year-old founder of Facebook wants 1 1/2 billion dollars

Probably anyone with any sort of programming skill has repeatedly slapped their forehead over the last year at the money made from some very basic PHP scripts and what APPEARED to be really silly ideas.

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Think about it. If a few years ago, someone came to you, and said, "Umm, yeah, we're looking to take, like, Geocities/AOL, and mix it with Blogger, and AOL Instant Messenger, but uglier, and maybe add some awkward MP3.com-type features, and use the awesome power of ColdFusion, and we have an awesome domain name - MYSPACE, get it, like My Web Space, like My Space ..." Really, could you have stopped laughing?

What if someone said, "yeah, I see a website where students at every college upload their pictures and personal info, like Blogger, except only other students at their college see it, and they can join clubs and stuff, and groups, like any group available, and they can post pictures doing bong hits, and do the whole thing with a PHP/MySQL ball..."

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My reaction would have been, "yeah, I don't see why college kids would post pictures of themselves doing illegal stuff, first of all, dumbass. Second, why join an online group when REAL groups are available, in real life? REAL groups have REAL people of the opposite sex there? And third, why use YOUR facebook when their college probably already has one? Even with that, why not use Blogger and AIM and Yahoo Groups like everyone else?"

Shows what I know.

Yeah, I could have created this stuff. It doesn't take a CS major or programmer. However, my skills cover enough scripting (perl/ruby) and server admin to have pulled it together. Yet, I didn't! It never occured to me to make something as bloody simple and minimally better than what is already available.

This goes to show it's all about the users. If you are not a user, if you are not in their shoes, it is very hard to anticipate what excites them.