“i know the u.s. isn't great, but washington, oregon and the upper half of california really could be a wonderful country one day.”

-_why

My buddy Chris Smoak and I came up with these four basic conditions for building a successful social networking site:

1. A site must provide value to the individual to attract new users.

2. When no/few users, the value to the individual can't be something derived from having other users (sense of community, vanity, etc).

3. If you have a firehose, disregard.

4. If you don't have retention, you'd better have a really big firehose.

It takes two to talk. How did enough people evolve the capability to speak at the same time to make it a worthwhile adaptation?

Let's pretend that at some point one man, let's call him Lurg even though he wouldn't have had a name given that his parents couldn't speak, was born with the ability to speak. The ability would be of no use, since Lurg would have had no-one else to talk to.

However, it is likely that if Lurg had siblings, they could have spoken to each other. If the ability to speak to one another gave the siblings an advantage in maintaining a more coordinated social group (and thus possibly larger and more effective), they may have had more offspring, even if their mates did not carry the gene for speech.

I'm probably re-assembling all of this from Before the Dawn.