• Reuters, Thursday, April 12, 2007 10:45 AM

Facebook is enjoying a run of success that almost no one anticipated. The social network of late has been eating rival MySpace's lunch, adding new users and more page views at a torrid pace. Only six months ago, critics were saying the company was faced with a membership crisis.

Yesterday, the company added new features designed to simplify how users navigate through individual member profiles to keep tabs on friends and associates. It also added portal-like pages that provide a bird's eye view of the groups they belong to or might join.

The secret to Facebook's recent success is its ability to learn from its mistakes. Unlike MySpace, which has been exercising a very heavy corporate hand recently (to the chagrin of its users), Facebook has quietly been soliciting user feedback to all of the moves it makes.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO, discovered the hard way -- after a site design allowing access to too much personal information drew a severe protest from users. The company was forced to make an immediate change, but since then, Facebook has more than doubled its user base from 7.5 million to 18 million.

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