But what if, conversely, we had entered the market in late 2001, just after the dot com bust, lost funding, had our company depleted to a single employee, were abandoned by our coworkers, had our friends turn their backs on us, and to top it all off, and broke up with our long-time girlfriends? Would we have had the fortitude to continue with your company? Could we have emerged as one of the most influential and lasting companies of the dot-com era? Well, that’s precisely what happened to Evan Williams, founder of Blogger.com.

The Start of Blogger.com, 1999

Back in 1999 Evan Williams, along with some of his close friends, founded Pyra Labs and soon thereafter, launched its first product, Blogger.com. Though they enjoyed some initial success – quickly gaining a loyal user base and investment backing – by 2000, with the downward spiraling trend of the startup funding and eventual dot com bust, Pyra’s resources began to run dry. By January of 2001, after their second failed acquisition deal, the idea of a Pyra becoming a successful startup seemed all but lost.

From Bad to Worse

That’s when the series of inauspicious events began to occur for Evan Williams. With no money left to pay salaries, Williams’ startup Pyra Labs began to experience a mass exodus of employees, many of whom Williams had initially recruited from his circle of friends. Even long-time girlfriend and Pyra labs co-founder, Meg Hourihan, lost faith in Williams and the future of their company, eventually parting ways with both. Despite his precarious situation, Williams never lost faith in himself nor his company.

Going It Alone

Without employees for his company, or even friends for morale support, Evan Williams trudged forward as the sole employee of Pyra Labs. Somehow he managed not only to keep the Blogger.com service running, which at that point had several thousand users, but also continued to grow and expand the utility of the service. Through the struggle, Williams taught himself Linux system administration and Java, just to keep the servers running. During this time he also launched the first for-pay features of Blogger, which incorporated his innovative “reverse advertising” scheme – a system in which users pay a nominal fee to not have advertisements posted their sites.

Turning of the Tide

By 2002, Evan Williams launched Blogger Pro, the paid-for version of Blogger and managed to bring some new employees to his company. Soon thereafter, Pyra managed some significant licensing deals of its Blogger service. And, as we all know how the rest of the story goes, in October of 2002, Pyra managed to get acquired by Google. Not only does Blogger.com remain as one of the most popular websites and services on the web today, but it also stands as an emblem of the success that an individual can achieve with a little bit of faith and determination, no matter what dire circumstances he or she faces.

On to Better Things…

Evan Williams Left Pyra Labs in 2004, just one year after its acquisition by Google. In 2006 he co-founded Obvious Corp., where he’s been behind his latest project, the increasingly popular social-networking/micro-blogging service Twitter.

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However, the short period since News Corp’s acquisition of MySpace has not only proven the critics had underestimated the value of Facebook, but perhaps even that Zuckerberg had undervalued the potential of his own company. The retrospective view of the News Corp deal seems to be at a consensus as perhaps the net bargain of recent years. This past year, New Corp has been the dominant media conglomerate who’s shares have outperformed those of its major competitors including, Walt Disney, Viacom, CBS, and Time Warner – much in thanks to MySpace; while each of its competitors shares have either remained unchanged or are down for the year, shares of News Corp are up 10% for the year. But Facebook can do even better.

Although MySpace commands a much larger audience, I still believe Facebook has more value for 5 Reasons:

1. Facebook was built on personnel integrity. This is the single most significant factor behind the success of Facebook. That is, your friends on on Facebook, are your friends in the real world as well. Users are able to find old friends by searching real names, whereas most people on MySpace go by aliases. (This also brings up a subsidiary issue in that although MySpace may have more users, some of those users make up several aliases, artificially inflating the number of MySpace users.) But more importantly, this underlying aspect encourages commitment from its users. Because Facebook keeps you connected with your real friends, leaving the network is almost equivalent to abandoning your friends, whereas, I can imagine MySpace users leaving their online aliases as they mature.

2. Facebook values privacy. This is important for two reasons. First, Facebook users know their audience and are therefore more comfortable with publishing genuine information about themselves. Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, it minimizes the potential for users to become victims to online predators, as has been the case for some MySpace users.

3. Facebook has better site layout. Not only does Facebook have a clean, slick layout, but it is also devoid of the excessive and often offensive barrages of advertisements that engulf MySpace. As a result, Facebook users are able to easily navigate through its pages and focus on what matters the most – their network of friends.

4. The few ads that Facebook does allow, provides more value to both its advertisers and the users. Because Facebook is based on real people and real college networks, advertisers have a targeted demographic based on class, age, education, geography, and income that they can reach easily. And because the advertisers can reach the right audience, the users get advertisements that are actually relevant and desired, such as notification of on campus events, job opportunities, social club meetings, and parties. In contrast, MySpace users are often bombarded with advertisements to generic dating sites and mass marketing promotions.

5. Facebook is ever-evolving. Facebook continues to put additional features based on user recommendations and feedback that have taken the site beyond the status of merely a social networking site. There are those features that provide utility, such as Facebook Mobile, as well as ones that make the site more enjoyable, such as photosharing. Facebook has now become the number one photosharing site on the web with its users uploading more photos than Flikr and many other sites that are based exclusively on photosharing. More recently, Facebook has added media sharing feature that has proven that Facebook is up to date with the technological trends of time. And of course, there’s the unique NewsFeed feature, which was initially met with much criticism, but has eventually become a staple of its users daily lives.

As the internet moves out of Web 2.0, I suspect people will begin to abandon their online aliases, and many social networking sites will become the artifacts of a bygone era. As its users mature and grow out of the pop phase of internet activity, only those networking sites that are built on substance and are willing to keep up with the ever-evolving standards technological innovations will stand the test of time. It is this exact combination that Facebook, more than any other social networking site, has displayed thus far, hence making Facebook worthy of a serious investment by a company seeking to create a dominant online prescence with lasting potential.

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