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And both came out of nowhere with all the resources needed to top established services. They give me the creeps.

You may feel like they came out of nowhere, but both filled niches that had long existed and that companies were either not trying to fill, or were trying to fill but doing so incompetently. In Google's case, had AltaVista done a few things differently, nobody would be using Google now. Lycos and Yahoo might have had a chance as well, at least in some areas - Lycos, Yahoo, and AltaVista were all around 4-5 years before Google.

With Facebook, there were literally 100s of directories floating around that were developed privately or created for internal use by universities, the government, and corporations, and quite a few probably could have beaten Facebook to the punch had people thought on a larger scale.

Same thing with Twitter. There was clearly a market for it and nobody seriously tried or did it "right" until Twitter came along. "Right" involves making it simple enough to be picked up quickly or generating superior results over the competition.

It may seem like these companies came out of nowhere, but the markets they dominate definitely didn't come out of nowhere.

It may seem like these companies came out of nowhere, but the markets they dominate definitely didn’t come out of nowhere.

Prob an element of randomness as well - *Some* company was going to succeed in that space and with social networking it’s mostly about gaining a critical mass of users. There’s got to be a bit of a “wining the lottery” aspect to all of this as well.