First, another giant difference between CU Com and Facebook was in the page design. Facebook was designed to be super-clean, and super-fast loading. To load a CU Com page required probalby 50 graphics to load, which was visibly slower. People are impatient.

Second, another great example of this would be the “portal” websites that existed before google came around. Excite, Yahoo, AltaVista, etc thought that by adding more features to their search engine they would draw more people to their websites. “If you can get your news, stock quotes, weather, /. posts, etc all on one page, and we put a search box above it, more people will type searches into that box.” I used my.excite.com for a few years, but then Google gave me better search and a cleaner website.

Looking at these two issues together makes me wonder which factor is stronger, whether it’s “doing one thing best”, which can be applied to many different businesses, or if it’s “clean fast design” which is very web-specific.