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As if the world can't get enough of Facebook, it looks like investors love the company, too. 

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Now Facebook is raising the target price range for its shares ahead of the big IPO. 

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And as we wait for Facebook's big debut, Dan Simon took a look back at the social networks that didn't make it.

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It may be the biggest, but Facebook wasn't the first social network. 

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To understand its rise, you also have to look at the missed opportunities, the blunders from the competition.

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Facebook from the very beginning has focused like a laser on the quality of their product, the quality of the user experience.

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Something that wasn't done by rival sites like MySpace and Friendster, according to industry insiders like Greg Gretsch.

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Friendster's problem was performance. When their usage spiked, they had...

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their page load times went from almost instantaneous to taking 30, 40 seconds. Users wouldn't put up with that.

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The fall of MySpace was even more pronounced. 

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Rupert Murdoch bought the site in 2005 for $580 million. Last year, it sold for $35 million.

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Those two companies both thought of themselves more as sort of fashion 

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and truly social businesses whereas Facebook, through Zuckerberg, thought of itself as a company using technology to make the world more social. 

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He didn't think of it, and he still doesn't think of it to this day as a quote, unquote "social network."

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As the competition floundered, Zuckerberg assembled a world-class team of engineers, focusing entirely on the product, constantly rolling out new features.

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We're making it possible to build a completely new class of apps.

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And allowing other innovative companies to build on top of its platform.

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Facebook enabled the rise of Zynga, which made video games social. Zynga mushroomed into a $5 billion company.

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More than a dozen developers have worked with us to build social music apps.

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The Facebook tentacles are long. Virtually every company and every new digital service considers its Facebook strategy.

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It has a capacity to bring sort of this social interaction that we have with our friends throughout everything that we do in life. And the potential of that is vast.

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But challenges lurk ahead. Facebook has lagged in mobile, part of the reason it shelled out a billion dollars for Instagram. 

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It also needs to keep growing its advertising and its user base while having to continually fend off competitors.

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What Mark Zuckerberg worries about is not the Googles of the world. What he worries about is the upstart, the three guys in a garage that figure out the new social network.

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With seemingly unlimited money and talent, Facebook appears to have few obstacles. 

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But in the world of technology it's dangerous to think that way. Just ask the folks at BlackBerry and Yahoo!
