Facebook’s rise in the face of this existing competition was something remarkable to behold. Over the course of 2004, it leapfrogged from campus to campus, landing everywhere with a splash. It arrived with better, more stable software, but that wasn’t the key to its success. Still enrolled at Harvard, Zuckerberg and his team had an on-the-ground feel for the college social environment and its vectors, and thus a deep intuition of what could make his site seem rewarding and essential to his target audience. It didn’t hurt that it was based at Harvard, an object of some fascination on other campuses. The student newspapers welcoming Thefacebook give the best sense of how well it managed to encapsulate what users were looking for—namely, an affirmation of their social significance.

Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, loc. 992