The Facebook Effect.
The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World.
by David Kirkpatrick.
Prologue
Oscar Morales was fed up. It was holiday time in his hometown of Barranquilla, Colombia, just after the 2008 new year. The gentle-spirited civil engineer with a gift for computers was spending his days at the bucolic nearby beaches with his extended family. But despite the holidays, like much of the country his thoughts were dark, and occupied with the suffering of a little boy named Emmanuel.
Emmanuel was the four-year-old son of Clara Rojas, who had been a hostage in the jungles of Colombia for six years. Her son had been born while she was held by the guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known by its Spanish initials, FARC. FARC held a total of seven hundred hostages, including Colombian presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt, kidnapped along with Rojas during the 2002 campaign.
Sympathy and sadness about the plight of FARC"s hostages was an ever-present fact in contemporary Colombia, as was fear about what the powerful and murderous revolutionary army might do next to disrupt the country. But the case of Emmanuel had lately acquired outsized prominence in the popular press. For some time President Hugo Chavez of neighboring Venezuela had been attempting to negotiate with FARC about releasing Betancourt and others. Then abruptly in late December the guerrillas announced Then abruptly in late December the guerrillas announced that they would soon turn over Rojas, her son Emmanuel, and another hostage to Chavez. In a nation exhausted from a decades-long battle with the violent guerrillas, this was a rare piece of good news. "People were longing for a gift, for a miracle," says Morales, thirty-two. "And Emmanuel was a symbol. The whole country was feeling the promise: "Please let Emmanuel get his freedom. We would like that as a Christmas present from FARC."" that they would soon turn over Rojas, her son Emmanuel, and another hostage to Chavez. In a nation exhausted from a decades-long battle with the violent guerrillas, this was a rare piece of good news. "People were longing for a gift, for a miracle," says Morales, thirty-two. "And Emmanuel was a symbol. The whole country was feeling the promise: "Please let Emmanuel get his freedom. We would like that as a Christmas present from FARC.""
But as the new year arrived, Emmanuel still hadn"t been freed. Then, in the first days of January, Colombian president Alvaro Uribe went on national television to deliver the shocking news that it appeared that Emmanuel was not even in the possession of FARC! It turned out Emmanuel had become seriously ill some time earlier, and FARC had taken him away from his mother, Clara, and dumped him with a peasant family. He was now, unexpectedly, in the government"s hands.
The nation was still on holiday with plenty of time to watch the news, which was all about poor, sick, abandoned Emmanuel. Morales"s politically engaged extended family, hanging out by day at the beach, debated what might happen next. "People were happy because the kid was safe, but we were so f.u.c.king angry," Morales says. "Forgive me for using that word but we felt a.s.saulted by FARC. How could they dare negotiate for the life of a kid they didn"t even have? People felt this was too much. How much longer was FARC going to play with us and lie to us?"
Morales wanted desperately to do something. So he turned to Facebook. Though the service wasn"t yet even translated into Spanish, Morales spoke fluent English, as do many educated Colombians, and had been maintaining a profile there for over a year, posting his own information in Spanish and connecting with old college and high school friends. Spending time on Facebook was already a daily ritual for him.
In Facebook"s search box he typed the four letters "FARC" and hit enter. There were no results. No groups. No activism. No outrage. Groups devoted to almost everything under the sun were common on Facebook. But when it came to FARC, the citizens of Colombia had become used to being angry but cowed. In effect, the entire country had been taken hostage, and this had been going on for decades.
Morales spent a day asking himself if he was willing to go public on Facebook. He decided to take the plunge, and on the 4th created a group against FARC. "It was like a therapy," he says. "I had to express my anger." He wrote a short description of the group"s simple purpose-to stand up against FARC. A self-confessed "computer addict," Morales was skilled at graphics tools, so he designed a logo in the form of a vertical version of the Colombian flag. He overlaid it with four simple pleas in capitals running down the page, each one slightly larger than the last-NO MORE KIDNAPPINGS, NO MORE LIES, NO MORE KILLINGS, NO MORE FARC. "I was trying to scream like if I was in a crowd," he explains. "The time had come to fight FARC. What had happened was unbearable."
But what should he call his group? On Facebook it"s conventional to give groups names like "I bet I can find one million people who hate George Bush." But Morales didn"t like such t.i.tles. They were juvenile. This was not a contest. This was serious. Yet he liked the idea of a million. A famous Spanish song is called "One Million Friends." One million people against FARC? The word voices voices sounded more literary. One million voices against FARC-Un Millon de Voces Contra Las FARC. That was it. sounded more literary. One million voices against FARC-Un Millon de Voces Contra Las FARC. That was it.
After midnight on January 4, Morales created the group. He made it public so that any Facebook member could join. His personal network included about one hundred friends, and he invited them all. He was tired. At 3 A.M A.M. he went to bed.
At 9 A.M A.M. the next morning he checked his group. Fifteen hundred people had joined already! "Woooooooo!!!" Morales howled in delight. This was an even better response than he had expected! That day at the beach he told his extended family about the group and asked them to invite their own Facebook friends to join. Most of them were avid Facebook users as well, and they hated FARC, too. By the time Morales returned home in the late afternoon, his group had four thousand members.
"That"s when I said to myself, "Okay, no more beach, no more going out."" He was ready to get serious. "I felt, "Oh my G.o.d! This is what I want! A committed community around the message.""
A Facebook group has a "wall," where members can post thoughts, as well as discussion forums that allow organized, long-lasting conversations among many members. Morales soon bonded with several people who were posting there with special vigor. They exchanged instant messaging and Skype addresses and cell-phone numbers so they could continue their conversations offline.
As more and more Colombians joined the group, members started talking not only about how mad they were about FARC, but what they ought to do about it. On January 6, just the second full day, a consensus on the page was emerging that the burgeoning group should go public. By the time it hit eight thousand members, people were posting on the discussion board, over and over, "Let"s DO something."
Late on the afternoon of the 6th, his newfound Facebook friends, especially two he was speaking to by phone, convinced Morales that he should propose a demonstration. When he did, the idea was received on the wall and discussion board by acclamation. By the end of the day the group, still operating only out of Morales"s upstairs bedroom, had decided to stage a national march against FARC. It would be February 4, one month after the formation of the group. Morales, who was used to being left out of things since he lived in a provincial city, insisted the march take place not only in Bogota, the capital, but also many other places throughout the country, including of course his hometown of Barranquilla.
So Morales created an event called the National March against FARC. He and his co-organizers, several of them already as consumed by the project as he was, immediately got pushback from unexpected quarters. Members in Miami, Buenos Aires, Madrid, Los Angeles, Paris, and elsewhere argued that it should be a global demonstration. Morales didn"t even realize people living outside Colombia had joined the group. These Colombian emigres were on Facebook partly to stay in touch with things back at home. They wanted to be involved in this movement, too. So it became a global march.
What ensued was one of the most extraordinary examples of digitally fueled activism the world has ever seen. On February 4, about 10 million people marched against FARC in hundreds of cities in Colombia according to Colombian press estimates. As many as 2 million more marched in cities around the world. The movement that began with an impa.s.sioned midnight Facebook post in one frustrated young man"s bedroom led to one of the largest demonstrations ever, anywhere in the world.
Facebook"s very newness helped Morales"s demonstration garner attention in Colombia. Though several hundred thousand Colombians were already using Facebook, it had not appeared on the radar of the average citizen. So when the press began covering plans for the upcoming demonstration, its stories focused heavily on the astonishing impact of this strange American import and the "Facebook kids," as many articles and TV and radio programs called them. Though Morales and his co-organizers were mostly in their early thirties, the country was also captivated by the possibility that younger people were not cowed by FARC.
Once Colombian president Alvaro Uribe and Colombia"s political establishment saw this Facebook uprising emerge, they did everything they could to make it a success. After a week or two the local army commander began providing Morales with three bodyguards and a car, which he used through February 4. Mayors and city governments throughout the country worked closely with demonstration volunteers to grant march permits.
But what remains remarkable is the way so many Colombians on Facebook signed up on the group under their real names. By the day of the march there were 350,000. Despite decades of fear and intimidation, Facebook gave Colombia"s young people an easy, digital way to feel comfort in numbers to declare their disgust.
Even after news about the march had become a daily drumbeat in the press and the website had turned into a key promotional tool, Facebook remained central. "Facebook was our headquarters," says Morales. "It was the newspaper. It was the central command. It was the laboratory-everything. Facebook was all that, right up until the last day."
Morales himself had volunteered to coordinate the local demonstration in Barranquilla. He expected about 50,000 people to show up. In fact 300,000 did, about 15 percent of the city"s population. They filled more than ten city blocks. At exactly noon, Morales read a statement that the group had jointly agreed upon. It was broadcast on television all over Latin America. Demonstrators gathered even in remote places like Dubai, Sydney, and Tokyo. On local TV news, one woman was interviewed in the crush of the Bogota march. Had she been personally injured by FARC Had she been personally injured by FARC, the interviewer asked? "Yes, because I am Colombian," she replied. Morales and his group members had tapped into frustrations deep in the collective national psyche.
While pressure from President Uribe has played a major role in weakening FARC, the demonstrations seem to have struck their own blow. In a sign that the guerrillas were acutely aware of the impending march, on the Sat.u.r.day before it took place they announced that they would release three hostages, all former Colombian congressmen, as a "humanitarian" gesture. Ingrid Betancourt and fourteen other hostages were rescued in a commando operation by the Colombian army in July 2008. In interviews she recalled listening to a radio in the jungle on February 4, surrounded by her FARC captors. She said she was deeply moved when she heard the demonstrators chanting in unison, "No more FARC! Freedom! Freedom!" Then the guerrillas couldn"t stand it and turned off the radio. Oscar Morales is telling me about this in a coffee shop in Manhattan in late 2008. As he does, his voice catches. Tears well up. His group and the subsequent demonstration made him into a national and international celebrity. But the conviction and concern that fueled his creation of Un Millon de Voces Contra Las FARC remains alive. Today he devotes his entire life to the anti-FARC crusade.
Though Facebook was not designed as a political tool, its creators observed early on that it had peculiar potential. During the first few weeks after it was created at Harvard University in 2004, students began broadcasting their political opinions by replacing their profile picture with a block of text that included a political statement. "People were using it back then to protest whatever was important," says Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz. "Even if they were just upset about a minor issue with the school." People from the beginning intuitively realized that if this service was intended as a way for them to reflect online their genuine ident.i.ty, then an element of that ident.i.ty was their views and pa.s.sions about the issues of the day.
"The Colombia thing," says Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook"s founder, "is a very early indicator that governance is changing-[and of how] powerful political organizations can form. These things can really affect peoples" liberties and freedom, which is kind of the point of government....In fifteen years maybe there will be things like what happened in Colombia almost every day."
Now, two years after Morales"s stunning success, one can find Facebook-fueled activism and protest in every country and community where the service has caught on-and that is pretty much all of them in the developed world. Facebook, along with Twitter, famously played a role in the revolt against the outcome of the mid-2009 elections in Iran. As New York Times New York Times foreign affairs columnist Tom Friedman pointed out, "For the first time, the moderates, who were always stranded between authoritarian regimes that had all the powers of the state and Islamists who had all the powers of the mosque, now have their own place to come together and project power: the network." It was on Facebook that defeated Iranian presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi told his followers when he thought it was time for them to go into the streets. And when a young woman was tragically killed during one of those protests, it was on Facebook that video of her murder emerged, to be shared worldwide as a symbol of Iranian government repression. The Iranian government, embarra.s.sed, tried several times to shut off access to Facebook. But it is used so widely in the country that it was difficult to do so. foreign affairs columnist Tom Friedman pointed out, "For the first time, the moderates, who were always stranded between authoritarian regimes that had all the powers of the state and Islamists who had all the powers of the mosque, now have their own place to come together and project power: the network." It was on Facebook that defeated Iranian presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi told his followers when he thought it was time for them to go into the streets. And when a young woman was tragically killed during one of those protests, it was on Facebook that video of her murder emerged, to be shared worldwide as a symbol of Iranian government repression. The Iranian government, embarra.s.sed, tried several times to shut off access to Facebook. But it is used so widely in the country that it was difficult to do so.
How could Colombia"s anti-FARC movement go from A to Z-from one man in his bedroom to millions in the streets-so quickly? Why should Facebook turn out to be a uniquely effective tool for political organizing? How did founder Zuckerberg"s decisions at crucial moments in the company"s history increase its impact? And in what ways do its unprecedented qualities help explain the rapidity with which Facebook has become a routine part of the lives of hundreds of millions of people around the world? As the rest of this book will explore, many of the answers lie in a set of phenomena I call the Facebook Effect.
As a fundamentally new form of communication, Facebook leads to fundamentally new interpersonal and social effects. The Facebook Effect happens when the service puts people in touch with each other, often unexpectedly, about a common experience, interest, problem, or cause. This can happen at a small or large scale-from a group of two or three friends or a family, to millions, as in Colombia. Facebook"s software makes information viral. Ideas on Facebook have the ability to rush through groups and make many people aware of something almost simultaneously, spreading from one person to another and on to many with unique ease-like a virus, or meme. You can send messages to other people even if you"re not explicitly trying to. It"s how Un Millon de Voces Contra Las FARC grew so fast from its very first night.
Any member who joined was merely making a statement about himself-"Yes, I am against FARC." A new member was not necessarily saying "send this information to my friends," he was just joining the group. But as each new person joined, Facebook took that information and distributed it to the News Feeds of that person"s friends. Then when those people joined the group, Facebook reported that news to their their friends" News Feeds. Something like Morales"s anti-FARC campaign that taps into a latent need or desire can spread virally with lightning speed, making groups huge overnight. friends" News Feeds. Something like Morales"s anti-FARC campaign that taps into a latent need or desire can spread virally with lightning speed, making groups huge overnight.
Large-scale broadcast of information was formerly the province of electronic media-radio and television. But the Facebook Effect-in cases like Colombia or Iran-means ordinary individuals are initiating the broadcast. You don"t have to know anything special or have any particular skills. Twitter is another service with a more limited range of functions that can also enable powerful broadcasting over the Internet by any individual. It too has had significant political impact.
This all may be either a constructive or a destructive force. Facebook is giving individuals in societies across the world more power relative to social inst.i.tutions, and that may well lead to very disruptive changes. In some societies it may destabilize inst.i.tutions many of us would rather stay the same. But it also holds the promise-as is starting to be shown in Egypt, Indonesia, and elsewhere-of posing challenges to long-standing repressive state inst.i.tutions and practices. Facebook makes it easier for people to organize themselves.
There"s no reason why the self-organizing component of the Facebook Effect only need apply to serious gatherings, of course. In mid-2008 a Facebook group organized a huge water fight In mid-2008 a Facebook group organized a huge water fight in downtown Leeds, England. And in September 2008 more than a thousand people spent twenty minutes or so smashing each other with pillows in Grand Rapids, Michigan. in downtown Leeds, England. And in September 2008 more than a thousand people spent twenty minutes or so smashing each other with pillows in Grand Rapids, Michigan. They heard about the pillow fight on Facebook They heard about the pillow fight on Facebook. Public pillow fights became something of a fad around the world as Facebook-empowered young people embraced a new way to blow off steam.
The Facebook Effect can be no less powerful as a tool for marketers, provided they can figure out how to invoke it, a topic we will explore in greater depth later. Similarly, the Facebook Effect has potentially profound implications for media. On Facebook, everyone can be an editor, a content creator, a producer, and a distributor. All the cla.s.sic old-media hats are being worn by everyone. The Facebook Effect can create a sudden convergence of interest among people in a news story, a song, or a YouTube video. One day recently I had been working on this book and hadn"t paid any attention to the news. I happened to see that a friend"s News Feed read "Dow up 3.5%." I would in the past have received that information from Yahoo News, or from radio or television.
The games business, one that is playing a big role in Facebook"s development, has already figured a lot of this out. The best games take advantage of the Facebook Effect, with the result that some games are played by as many as 30 million members per week. PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo Wii were the platform choices of the previous generation. Now, however, all the video-gaming consoles are starting to build in Facebook connectivity as well.
As Facebook grows and grows past 500 million members, one has to ask if there may not be a macro version of the Facebook Effect. Could it become a factor in helping bring together a world filled with political and religious strife and in the midst of environmental and economic breakdown? A communications system that includes people of all countries, all races, all religions, could not be a bad thing, could it?
There is no more fervent believer in Facebook"s potential to help bring the world together than Peter Thiel. Thiel is a master contrarian who has made billions in his hedge fund betting correctly on the direction of oil, currencies, and stocks. He is also an entrepreneur, the co-founder, and former CEO of the PayPal online payments service (which he sold to eBay). He was the very first professional investor to put money in Facebook, in the late summer of 2004, and he"s been on the company"s board of directors ever since.
"The most important investment theme for the first half of the twenty-first century will be the question of how globalization happens," Thiel told me. "If globalization doesn"t doesn"t happen, then there is no future for the world. The way it doesn"t happen is that you have escalating conflicts and wars, and given where technology is today, it blows up the world. There"s no way to invest in a world where globalization fails." This is a bracing thought, coming as it does from one of the world"s great investors. "The question then becomes what are the best investments that are geared towards good globalization. Facebook is perhaps the purest expression of that I can think of." happen, then there is no future for the world. The way it doesn"t happen is that you have escalating conflicts and wars, and given where technology is today, it blows up the world. There"s no way to invest in a world where globalization fails." This is a bracing thought, coming as it does from one of the world"s great investors. "The question then becomes what are the best investments that are geared towards good globalization. Facebook is perhaps the purest expression of that I can think of."
I had only been marginally aware of Facebook until a public relations person called me in the late summer of 2006 and asked if I would meet with Mark Zuckerberg. I knew that would be interesting, so I agreed. As Fortune Fortune magazine"s main tech writer in New York, I routinely met with leaders of all kinds of technology companies. But when this young man-then just twenty-two-joined me at the fancy Il Gattopardo Italian restaurant in midtown Manhattan, it was at first hard to accept that he was CEO of a tech company of growing importance. He wore jeans and a T-shirt with a line drawing of a little bird on a tree. He seemed so unbelievably young! Then he opened his mouth. "We"re a utility," he said in serious tones, using serious language. "We"re trying to increase the efficiency through which people can understand their world. We"re not trying to maximize the time spent on our site. We"re trying to help people have a good experience and get the maximum amount out of that time." He showed no inclination to joke around. He was very focused on commanding my attention for his company and his vision. And he succeeded. magazine"s main tech writer in New York, I routinely met with leaders of all kinds of technology companies. But when this young man-then just twenty-two-joined me at the fancy Il Gattopardo Italian restaurant in midtown Manhattan, it was at first hard to accept that he was CEO of a tech company of growing importance. He wore jeans and a T-shirt with a line drawing of a little bird on a tree. He seemed so unbelievably young! Then he opened his mouth. "We"re a utility," he said in serious tones, using serious language. "We"re trying to increase the efficiency through which people can understand their world. We"re not trying to maximize the time spent on our site. We"re trying to help people have a good experience and get the maximum amount out of that time." He showed no inclination to joke around. He was very focused on commanding my attention for his company and his vision. And he succeeded.
The more I listened the more he sounded like one of the successful-and much older-CEOs and entrepreneurs I talked to regularly in my job. So I casually told him I thought he seemed like a natural CEO. In my mind it was a huge compliment, one I did not give lightly. But he acted insulted. His face scrunched up with a look of distaste. "I never wanted to run a company," he said a few minutes later. "To me a business is a good vehicle for getting stuff done." Then for the rest of the interview he continued to say the kinds of things that only focused and visionary business leaders are capable of saying. From that moment I was confident Facebook"s importance would grow. I wrote a column after the meeting called "Why Facebook Matters." The following year my coverage of the company in Fortune Fortune deepened when Zuckerberg invited me inside the company to do an exclusive story about its groundbreaking transformation into a platform for software applications created by outside ent.i.ties. That announcement began to change how the world perceived Facebook. By the end of 2007 I had begun to believe Facebook would become one of the world"s most important companies. If that was the case, shouldn"t somebody write a book about it? deepened when Zuckerberg invited me inside the company to do an exclusive story about its groundbreaking transformation into a platform for software applications created by outside ent.i.ties. That announcement began to change how the world perceived Facebook. By the end of 2007 I had begun to believe Facebook would become one of the world"s most important companies. If that was the case, shouldn"t somebody write a book about it?
Now a 1,400-person corporation based in Palo Alto, California, Facebook has revenues that could reach $1 billion in 2010. Zuckerberg, now twenty-six, remains CEO. As a result of his determination, strategic savvy, and a fair dollop of luck, he maintains absolute financial control of the company. If he didn"t, Facebook would almost certainly today be a subsidiary of some giant media or Internet company. Buyers have repeatedly offered astounding sums of money-billions-if he would agree to sell it. But Zuckerberg is more focused on "getting stuff done" and convincing more people to use his service than he is on getting rich from it. In keeping the company independent he has kept it imbued with his own ideals, personality, and values.
From its dorm-room days, Facebook has looked simple, clean, and uncluttered. Zuckerberg has long had an interest in elegant interface design. On his own Facebook profile he lists his interests: "openness, breaking things, revolutions, information flow, minimalism, making things, eliminating desire for all that really doesn"t matter." Despite the founder"s interest in minimalism, however, there is much about Facebook that inclines toward excess. Facebook is all information all the time. Each month about 20 billion pieces of content are posted there by members-including Web links, news stories, photos, etc. It"s by far the largest photo-sharing site on the Internet, for instance, with about 3 billion photos added each month. Not to mention the innumerable trivial announcements, weighty p.r.o.nouncements, political provocations, birthday greetings, flirtations, invitations, insults, wisecracks, bad jokes, deep thoughts, and of course, pokes. There"s still a lot of stuff on Facebook that probably really doesn"t matter.
Popular though it may be, Facebook was never intended as a subst.i.tute for face-to-face communication. Though many people do not use it this way, it has always been explicitly conceived and engineered by Zuckerberg and colleagues as a tool to enhance your relationships with the people you know in the flesh-your real-world friends, acquaintances, cla.s.smates, or co-workers. As this book explains in detail, this is a core difference between Facebook and other similar services-and has introduced a particular set of challenges for the company at every turn.
The Facebook Effect most often is felt in the quotidian realm, at an intimate level among a small group. It can make communication more efficient, cultivate familiarity, and enhance intimacy. Several of your friends learn from your status update, for example, that you"ll be at the mall later. You don"t send that information to them. Facebook"s software does. They say they"ll meet you there, and they show up.
When Facebook is used as it was originally designed-to build better pathways for sharing between people who already know each other in the real world-it can have a potent emotional power. It is a new sort of communications tool based on real relationships between individuals, and it enables fundamentally new sorts of interactions. This can lead to pleasure or pain, but it undeniably affects the tenor of the lives of Facebook"s users. "Facebook is the first platform for people," says Esther Dyson, the technology pundit, author, and investor.
Several other factors make Facebook unlike any Internet business that preceded it. First, it is both in principle and in practice based on real ident.i.ty. On Facebook it is as important today to be your real self as it was when the service launched at Harvard in February 2004. Anonymity, role-playing, pseudonyms, and handles have always been routine on the Web-AOL screen name, anyone? But they have little role here. If you invent a persona or too greatly enhance the way you present yourself, you will get little benefit from Facebook. Unless you interact with others as yourself, your friends will either not recognize you or will not befriend you. A critical way other people on Facebook know you are who you say you are is by examining your list of friends. These friends, in effect, validate your ident.i.ty. To get this circular validation process started you have to use your real name.
Closely connected to its commitment to genuine ident.i.ty is an infrastructure intended to protect privacy and give the user control. It doesn"t always work, but Zuckerberg and other company officials say they care about it a lot. "Having the friend infrastructure and an ident.i.ty base ultimately is the key to safety," says Chris Kelly, Facebook"s longtime head of privacy, who recently took a leave to run for California state attorney general. "Trust on the Internet depends on having ident.i.ty fixed and known." If you have doubts about who you are communicating with online, your privacy is at risk. But if you know who is around you, you can authoritatively determine who you would and would not like to see your information.
Privacy, an issue we look at in greater detail in a later chapter, has been a major concern of Facebook"s users from the beginning. They often have not felt that it was sufficiently protected, and have periodically revolted in order to say so. Facebook has generally weathered these controversies well. But the issue is fraught-it is a central concern not only of Facebook"s users, but, as we will see, of Zuckerberg as well. He knows that Facebook"s long-term success will probably be defined by how well it protects its users" privacy. Recently the company has set about simplifying and improving the controls that determine who sees what about you.
The social changes that will be brought about by the Facebook Effect will not all be positive. What does it mean that we are increasingly living our lives in public? Are we turning into a nation-and a world-of exhibitionists? Many see Facebook as merely a celebration of the minutiae of our lives. Such people view it as a platform for narcissism rather than a tool for communication. Others ask how it might affect an individual"s ability to grow and change if their actions and even their thoughts are constantly scrutinized by their friends. Could it lead to greater conformity? Are young people who spend their days on Facebook losing their ability to recognize and experience change and excitement in the real world? Are we relying too heavily on our friends for information? Does Facebook merely contribute to information overload? Could we thus become less informed?
What does being a "friend" on Facebook really mean? The average Facebook user has The average Facebook user has about 130. Can you really have 500 friends, as many do? (I have 1,028, but then I"ve been writing a book about the company.) What about 5,000, Facebook"s maximum? For some, Facebook may generate a false sense of companionship and over time increase a feeling of aloneness. So far there is little data to show how widespread this problem may be, though as our use of electronic media continues in coming years it will certainly remain a widespread concern. about 130. Can you really have 500 friends, as many do? (I have 1,028, but then I"ve been writing a book about the company.) What about 5,000, Facebook"s maximum? For some, Facebook may generate a false sense of companionship and over time increase a feeling of aloneness. So far there is little data to show how widespread this problem may be, though as our use of electronic media continues in coming years it will certainly remain a widespread concern.
Once I was sitting with Zuckerberg in a modest French bistro a mile or two from Facebook"s headquarters, just before closing time. He told me he"d never eaten steak frites before, so I"d urged him to order it. As other tables emptied out, we moved on to coffee and the staff started mopping the floor. Zuckerberg was, as always, wearing a T-shirt, but since it was a little chilly he had on another of his staples-a fleece jacket. I asked him what he thought he was doing when he created Thefacebook (the company"s original name) and how his thinking about it had evolved since the early days. His answer was all about transparency. Appropriately enough, Zuckerberg himself is almost compulsively candid.
"I mean, picture yourself-you"re in college," he began. "You spend all your time studying theories, right? And you think about things in this abstract way. Very idealistic. Very liberal at this inst.i.tution. So a lot of these values are just around you: the world should be governed by people. A lot of that stuff has really shaped me. And this is a lot of what Facebook is pushing for.
"Dustin [Moskovitz] and Chris [Hughes] [his Harvard roommates] and I would sit around and talk with other people I was taking computer science cla.s.ses with. And we"d talk about how we thought that the added transparency in the world, all the added access to information and sharing [enabled by the Internet] would inevitably change big-world things. But we had no idea we would play a part in it....We were just a group of college kids." Then he describes what happened once Thefacebook launched: "Little by little-"Oh, more schools want this"; and "Okay, more types of people want this."...And it just kept getting wider and wider, and we just went, "Wow."
"Then one day it kind of hit us that we could play a leading role in making this happen and pushing it forward....And what seemed obvious to my group of friends who were just armchair intellectuals talking about this in college-about how transparency coming from people would transform how the world works and how inst.i.tutions were governed-it was like, "Hey, maybe other people aren"t aren"t actually pushing this, and maybe it takes this group of people who grew up thinking these things and having these values to push it forward. Maybe we shouldn"t give up."" And he laughs. actually pushing this, and maybe it takes this group of people who grew up thinking these things and having these values to push it forward. Maybe we shouldn"t give up."" And he laughs.
Mark Zuckerberg was never one to defer to authority figures. Facebook started out as his own revolt against Harvard"s unwillingness to build an online facebook. But what he built turns individuals into the authority. The entire service revolves around the profile and the actions of people. Facebook empowers them at the expense of inst.i.tutions. In building it, Zuckerberg transferred a little bit of his own power to all the service"s members.
Facebook is bringing the world together. It has become an overarching common cultural experience for people worldwide, especially young people. Despite its modest beginnings as the college project of a nineteen-year-old, it has become a technological powerhouse with unprecedented influence across modern life, both public and private. Its membership spans generations, geographies, languages, and cla.s.s. It may in fact be the fastest-growing company of any type in history. Facebook is even bigger in countries like Chile and Norway than it is in the United States. It changes how people communicate and interact, how marketers sell products, how governments reach out to citizens, even how companies operate. It is altering the character of political activism, and in some countries it is starting to affect the processes of democracy itself. This is no longer just a plaything for college students.
If you use the Internet, you are increasingly likely to use Facebook. It is the second-most-visited site, after Google, and claims more than 400 million active users (as of February 2010). Well over 20 percent of the 1.7 billion people on the Internet worldwide now use Facebook regularly. Facebook added high school students in fall 2005 and opened to everyone in fall 2006. Now users around the world Now users around the world spend about 8billion minutes there every day (the average user spends almost an hour each day on Facebook). And even despite all its growth, the number of people there is growing at a mind-bending rate-about 5 percent a spend about 8billion minutes there every day (the average user spends almost an hour each day on Facebook). And even despite all its growth, the number of people there is growing at a mind-bending rate-about 5 percent a month month. Were the growth rates of both Facebook and the Internet to remain steady, by 2013 every single person online worldwide would be on Facebook.
Of course that will never happen. But Facebook already operates in seventy-five languages, and about 75 percent of its active users are outside the United States. About 108 million Americans are active on Facebook About 108 million Americans are active on Facebook, or 35.3 percent of the entire population, according to the Facebook Global Monitor, Facebook Global Monitor, published by InsideFacebook.com. That sounds impressive. But published by InsideFacebook.com. That sounds impressive. But 42 percent 42 percent of Canada"s population uses it. The largest number of Facebook users is still in the United States, but the next ten countries are a global mix. In order, they are the United Kingdom, Turkey, Indonesia, France, Canada, Italy, the Philippines, Spain, Australia, and Colombia. The ten countries in which it grew fastest in the year ending February 2010, according to the of Canada"s population uses it. The largest number of Facebook users is still in the United States, but the next ten countries are a global mix. In order, they are the United Kingdom, Turkey, Indonesia, France, Canada, Italy, the Philippines, Spain, Australia, and Colombia. The ten countries in which it grew fastest in the year ending February 2010, according to the Facebook Global Monitor, Facebook Global Monitor, were Taiwan, the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, Portugal, Thailand, Brazil, Romania, Lithuania, and the Czech Republic. were Taiwan, the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, Portugal, Thailand, Brazil, Romania, Lithuania, and the Czech Republic.
Unlike just about any other website or technology business, Facebook is profoundly, centrally, about people. It is a platform for people to get more out of their lives. It is a new form of communication, just as was instant messaging, email, the telephone, and the telegraph. During the early days of the World Wide Web, people sometimes said that everyone would eventually have their own home page. Now it"s happening, but as part of a social network. Facebook connects those pages to one another in ways that enable us to do entirely new things.
But this scale, rate of growth, and social penetration raise complicated social, political, regulatory, and policy questions. How will Facebook alter users" real-world interactions? How will repressive governments respond to this new form of citizen empowerment? Should a service this large be regulated? How do we feel about an entirely new form of communication used by hundreds of millions of people that is completely controlled by one company? Are we risking our freedom by entrusting so much information about our ident.i.ty to one commercial ent.i.ty? Tensions around these questions will grow if Facebook keeps extending its influence across more and more of the globe.
This book aims to explore these questions. But you can only understand how Facebook became such an amazing company and where it might go if you understand how it all got started in a dormitory in Cambridge, Ma.s.sachusetts, as the brainchild of a restless and irreverent nineteen-year-old kid.
1.
The Beginning.
"We have opened up Thefacebook for popular consumption at Harvard University."
Soph.o.m.ore Mark Zuckerberg arrived at his dorm room in Harvard"s Kirkland House in September 2003 dragging an eight-foot-long whiteboard, the geek"s consummate brainstorming tool. It was big and unwieldy, like some of the ideas he would diagram there. There was only one wall of the four-person suite long enough to hold it-the one in the hallway on the way to the bedrooms. Zuckerberg, a computer science major, began scribbling away.
The wall became a tangle of formulas and symbols sprouting multicolored lines that wove this way and that. Zuckerberg would stand in the hall staring at it all, marker in hand, squeezing against the wall if someone needed to get by. Sometimes he would back into a bedroom doorway to get a better look. "He really loved that whiteboard," recalls Dustin Moskovitz, one of Zuckerberg"s three suite-mates. "He always wanted to draw out his ideas, even when that didn"t necessarily make them clearer." Lots of his ideas were for new services on the Internet. He spent endless hours writing software code, regardless of how much noncomputing cla.s.swork he might have. Sleep was never a priority. If he wasn"t at the whiteboard he was hunched over the PC at his desk in the common room, hypnotized by the screen. Beside it was a jumble of bottles and wadded-up food wrappers he hadn"t bothered to toss.
Right away that first week, Zuckerberg cobbled together Internet software he called Course Match, an innocent enough project. He did it just for fun. The idea was to help students pick cla.s.ses based on who else was taking them. You could click on a course to see who was signed up, or click on a person to see the courses he or she was taking. If a cute girl sat next to you in Topology, you could look up next semester"s Differential Geometry course to see if she had enrolled in that as well, or you could just look under her name for the courses she had enrolled in. As Zuckerberg said later, with a bit of pride at his own prescience, "you could link to people through things." Hundreds of students immediately began using Course Match. The status-conscious students of Harvard felt very differently about a cla.s.s depending on who was in it. Zuckerberg had written a program they wanted to use.
Mark Zuckerberg was a short, slender, intense introvert with curly brown hair whose fresh freckled face made him look closer to fifteen than the nineteen he was. His uniform was baggy jeans, rubber sandals-even in winter-and a T-shirt that usually had some sort of clever picture or phrase. One he was partial to during this period portrayed a little monkey and read "Code Monkey." He could be quiet around strangers, but that was deceiving. When he did speak, he was wry. His tendency was to say nothing until others fully had their say. He stared. He would stare at you while you were talking, and stay absolutely silent. If you said something stimulating, he"d finally fire up his own ideas and the words would come cascading out. But if you went on too long or said something obvious, he would start looking through you. When you finished, he"d quietly mutter "yeah," then change the subject or turn away. Zuckerberg is a highly deliberate thinker and rational to the extreme. His handwriting is well ordered, meticulous, and tiny, and he sometimes uses it to fill notebooks with lengthy deliberations.
Girls were drawn to his mischievous smile. He was seldom without a girlfriend. They liked his confidence, his humor, and his irreverence. He typically wore a contented expression on his face that seemed to say "I know what I"m doing." Zuck, as he was known, had an air about him that everything would turn out fine, no matter what he did. It certainly had so far.
On his application for admission to Harvard two years earlier, he could barely fit all the honors and awards he"d won in high school-prizes in math, astronomy, physics, and cla.s.sical languages. It also noted he was captain and most valuable player on the fencing team and could read and write French, Hebrew, Latin, and ancient Greek. (His accent was awful, so he preferred ancient languages he didn"t have to speak, he told people with typical dry humor.) Harvard"s rarefied social status was neither intimidating nor unfamiliar. He"d attended the elite Phillips Exeter Academy, where you are expected to proceed to the Ivy League. He"d transferred there as a kind of lark. He"d gotten bored after two years at a public high school in Dobbs Ferry, New York, north of New York City.
Zuckerberg is the second-oldest of four children of a dentist father and a psychologist mother, and the only boy. The family home, though the largest in the neighborhood, remains modest. Its dental office in the bas.e.m.e.nt is dominated by a giant aquarium. The elder Zuckerberg, something of a ham, is known as "painless Dr Z." His website announces "We cater to cowards," and a sign outside the home office shows a satirical scene of a wary dental patient. Mark"s sisters, like him, are academic stars. (His older sister Randi is now a senior marketer at Facebook.) From his early years Zuckerberg had From his early years Zuckerberg had a technical bent: the theme of his bar mitzvah was "Star Wars." a technical bent: the theme of his bar mitzvah was "Star Wars."
The suite was one of the smallest in Kirkland House. Each of the two bedrooms came with bunk beds and a small desk. Zuckerberg"s roommate was Chris Hughes, a handsome, tow-headed, openly gay literature and history major with an interest in public policy. They dismantled the bunks-it was fairer, they decided, if n.o.body had to sleep on top. But now the two single beds took up almost all the s.p.a.ce. There was hardly room to move. The desk was useless anyway-it was piled high with junk. In the other bedroom was Moskovitz, a hardworking, Brillo-haired economics major who was himself no intellectual slouch, and his roommate, Billy Olson, an amateur thespian with an impish streak.
Each boy had a desk in the common room. In between were a couple of easy chairs. It was, like the entire suite, a mess. Zuckerberg had a habit of acc.u.mulating detritus on his desk and nearby tables. He"d finish a beer or a Red Bull, put it down, and there it would stay for weeks. Occasionally Moskovitz"s girlfriend would get fed up and throw out some garbage. Once, when Zuckerberg"s mother visited, she looked around the room embarra.s.sedly and apologized to Moskovitz for her son"s untidiness. "When he was growing up he had a nanny," she explained.
This warren of tiny rooms on the third floor pushed the boys toward greater intimacy than they might have shared under less constrained conditions. Zuckerberg was by nature blunt, even sometimes brutally honest-a trait he may have acquired from his mother. Though he could be taciturn he was also the leader, simply because he so often started things. A habit of straight talk became the norm in this suite. There weren"t a lot of secrets here. The four got along in part because they knew where each stood. Rather than getting on one another"s nerves, they got into one another"s projects.
The Internet was a perennial theme. Moskovitz, who had little training in computing but a natural penchant for it, kept up a constant repartee with Zuckerberg about what did and did not make sense online, what would or would not make a good website, and what might or might not happen as the Internet continued its inroads into every sphere of modern life. At the beginning of the semester, Hughes had zero interest in computing. But by midyear he too had become fascinated by the constant discussion of programming and the Internet, and started chiming in with his own ideas, as did Moskovitz"s roommate, Olson. As Zuckerberg came up with each new programming project, the other three boys had plenty of opinions on how he should build it.
In the common room of Suite H33 in Kirkland House, Ivy League privilege and high geekdom converged. What happened there turns out not to have been common, but at the time it seemed pretty routine. Zuckerberg was hardly the only entrepreneur beavering away on a business in his dorm room. That wasn"t too noteworthy at Harvard. Down every hall were gifted and privileged children of the powerful.
It"s presumed at Harvard that these kids are the ones who will go on to rule the world. Zuckerberg, Moskovitz, and Hughes were just three eggheads who loved to talk about ideas. They didn"t think much about ruling the world. But from their funky, crowded dorm room would emerge an idea with the power to change it.
Emboldened by the unexpected success of Course Match, Zuckerberg decided to try out some other ideas. His next project, in October, he called Facemash. It gave the Harvard community its first look at his rebellious irreverent side. Its purpose: figure out who was the hottest person on campus. Using the kind of computer code otherwise used to rank chess players (perhaps it could also have been used for fencers), he invited users to compare two different faces of the same s.e.x and say which one was hotter. As your rating got hotter, your picture would be compared to hotter and hotter people.
A journal he kept at the time, which for some reason he posted along with the software, suggests Zuckerberg got onto this jag while upset about a girl. "--- is a b.i.t.c.h. I need to think of something to make to take my mind off her," he wrote, adding "I"m a little intoxicated, not gonna lie." Perhaps that pique is what led him to the idea, mused about in the journal, of comparing students to farm animals. Instead, according to the journal, Billy Olson came up with the idea of comparing people to other people and only occasionally putting in a farm animal. By the time the program launched, the animals were gone completely. "Another Beck"s is in order," Zuckerberg wrote as he continued his Facemash chronicles. The entire project was completed in an eight-hour stretch that ended at 4 A.M A.M., said the journal.
The photos for the Facemash website came from the so-called "facebooks" maintained by each of the Harvard houses where undergraduates live. They were the pictures taken the day students arrived for orientation-the kind of clumsy, awkwardly posed shots almost everyone would prefer to disavow. Zuckerberg cleverly found ways to obtain digital versions from nine of Harvard"s twelve houses. Student newspaper the Harvard Crimson Harvard Crimson later called it "guerrilla computing." In most cases he was able to simply hack in over the Web. At Lowell House a friend gave Zuckerberg temporary use of his log-in. (The friend later regretted it.) At another house, Zuckerberg snuck in, plugged an Ethernet cable into the wall, and downloaded names and photos from the house computer network. later called it "guerrilla computing." In most cases he was able to simply hack in over the Web. At Lowell House a friend gave Zuckerberg temporary use of his log-in. (The friend later regretted it.) At another house, Zuckerberg snuck in, plugged an Ethernet cable into the wall, and downloaded names and photos from the house computer network.
The fact that he was doing something slightly illicit gave Zuckerberg little pause. He could be a touch headstrong and liked to stir things up. He didn"t ask permission before proceeding. It"s not that he sets out to break the rules; he just doesn"t pay much attention to them.
He started running the Facemash website on his Internet-connected laptop in mid-afternoon of Sunday, November 2. "Were we let in [to Harvard] for our looks?" the site asked on its home page. "No. Will we be judged by them? Yes." Zuckerberg emailed links to a few friends, later claiming he had only intended them to test it out and make suggestions. But once people started using it, they apparently couldn"t stop. His "testers" alerted their own friends and Facemash became an instant underground hit.
The Crimson Crimson somewhat eloquently opined somewhat eloquently opined on the appeal of the software afterward, even as its editorial scolded Zuckerberg for "catering to the worst side of Harvard students": "A peculiarly-squinting senior and that hottie from your Medieval ma.n.u.scripts section-click! Your blockmate and the kid who always glared at you in Annenberg-click! Your two best friends" respective significant others-pause...click, click, click!... on the appeal of the software afterward, even as its editorial scolded Zuckerberg for "catering to the worst side of Harvard students": "A peculiarly-squinting senior and that hottie from your Medieval ma.n.u.scripts section-click! Your blockmate and the kid who always glared at you in Annenberg-click! Your two best friends" respective significant others-pause...click, click, click!...We Harvard students could indulge our fondness for judging those around us on superficial criteria without ever having to face any of the judged in person." Yes, it was fun. for judging those around us on superficial criteria without ever having to face any of the judged in person." Yes, it was fun.
One gay resident of a suite near Zuckerberg"s was elated when, in the first hour, his photo was rated most attractive among men. He of course alerted all his own friends, who then started using the site. When Zuckerberg returned to his room at 10 P.M. P.M. from a meeting, his laptop was so bogged down with Facemash users that it was freezing up. But neighbors were not the only ones suddenly paying attention to Facemash. Complaints of s.e.xism and racism quickly started circulating among members of two women"s groups-Fuerza Latina and the a.s.sociation of Harvard Black Women. Quickly the computer services department got involved and turned off Zuckerberg"s Web access. from a meeting, his laptop was so bogged down with Facemash users that it was freezing up. But neighbors were not the only ones suddenly paying attention to Facemash. Complaints of s.e.xism and racism quickly started circulating among members of two women"s groups-Fuerza Latina and the a.s.sociation of Harvard Black Women. Quickly the computer services department got involved and turned off Zuckerberg"s Web access. By the time that happened, around 10:30 By the time that happened, around 10:30 P.M P.M., the site had been visited by 450 students, who had voted on 22,000 pairs of photos.
Zuckerberg was later called before Harvard"s disciplinary Administrative Board, along with the student who"d given him the pa.s.sword at Lowell House, his suite-mate Billy Olson (who, as the online journal noted, had contributed ideas), and Joe Green, a junior who lived in the next suite through the fire door, who had helped out as well. Zuckerberg was accused of violations Zuckerberg was accused of violations of the college"s code of conduct in the way the site handled security, copyright, and privacy. The board put him on probation and required him to see a counselor, but decided not to punish the others. If Zuckerberg hadn"t omitted the farm animal photos, he probably wouldn"t have gotten off so lightly. He apologized to the women"s groups, claiming he had mainly thought of the project as a computer science experiment and had no idea it might spread so quickly. of the college"s code of conduct in the way the site handled security, copyright, and privacy. The board put him on probation and required him to see a counselor, but decided not to punish the others. If Zuckerberg hadn"t omitted the farm animal photos, he probably wouldn"t have gotten off so lightly. He apologized to the women"s groups, claiming he had mainly thought of the project as a computer science experiment and had no idea it might spread so quickly.
Green"s father, a college professor, happened to be visiting his son the night Zuckerberg was celebrating his comparatively light sentence for Facemash. The soph.o.m.ore had gone out and bought a bottle of Dom Perignon, which he was exultantly sharing with his Kirkland neighbors. Says Green: "My dad was trying to drill it into Mark"s head that this was a really big deal, that he"d almost gotten suspended. But Mark didn"t want to hear it. My dad came away with the notion that I shouldn"t do any more Zuckerberg projects." It would later prove to be a very expensive prohibition.
But to everyone else, the episode was a clear sign: Zuckerberg had a knack for making software people couldn"t stop using. That came as little surprise to his roommates. They knew he had even been talking to Microsoft and other companies about selling a program he"d written with a friend as his senior project at Exeter, called Synapse. The software watched what kind of music someone liked so it could suggest other songs. His friends called the program "The Brain" and were especially excited when they heard Zuckerberg might get as much as a million dollars for it. If that happened, they pleaded, could he please buy a large flat-screen TV for the common room?
Zuckerberg kept making little Web programs, like one he created quickly to help himself cram for his Art in the Time of Augustus course. He had barely attended the cla.s.s all first semester. As the final loomed, he cobbled together a set of screens with art images from the cla.s.s. He emailed the other cla.s.s members an invitation to log in and use this study aid and add comments alongside each image. His cla.s.smates took his cue. After they all used it, he spent an evening scrutinizing what they"d said about the images. He pa.s.sed the final. He also wrote a program he called "Six Degrees of Harry Lewis," an homage to a favorite computer science professor. He used articles in the Harvard Crimson Harvard Crimson to try to identify relationships between people, and created a whimsical network of connections to Lewis based on these links. You could type in any Harvard student"s name and the software would tell you how they were connected to Professor Lewis. to try to identify relationships between people, and created a whimsical network of connections to Lewis based on these links. You could type in any Harvard student"s name and the software would tell you how they were connected to Professor Lewis.
He also worked on other people"s projects. After the Facemash episode he mended fences with the a.s.sociation of Harvard Black Women by helping them set up their own website. And he worked for a while with three seniors who aimed to build a dating and socializing site they called Harvard Connection. They had an idea for a service that would tell you about parties and provide discounted admission to nightclubs, among other intended features. But they weren"t programmers. The three, athletic six-foot-five-inch identical twins Cameron and Tyler Winkelvoss, both champion rowers on the crew team, and their friend Divya Narendra sought out Zuckerberg in November after reading about Facemash in the Crimson. Crimson. They offered to pay him to do the programming for their service. They offered to pay him to do the programming for their service.