Mark Zuckerberg on The Huffington Post

A Facebook Milestone: For First Time, Most Visited Site In U.S.

2009-12-29T14:11:10Z

According to analytics firm Hitwise, Facebook was the "most visited site in the United States on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day." This is a huge milestone for Facebook as it was the first time the company was the most visited site in the U.S. ever, beating out the search behemoth: Google.

Mark Zuckerberg Facebook: CEO Changes His Privacy Settings To Share All

2009-12-11T16:11:52Z

As a public figure it would be understandable if Zuckerberg didn't want his friends and family photos exposed to 350 million Facebook users and the web at large - but as the founder of a world-changing company that just did an about-face on the privacy recommendations that have been at its core throughout this massive period of growth, it makes more sense for Zuckerberg's photos to be as public as he recommends yours be.

Mark Zuckerberg: Facebook To Get New Privacy Controls, Kill Regional Networks

2009-12-02T07:40:59Z

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has just written an open letter to Facebook users regarding a privacy overhaul that is due to hit the site in the next few weeks. Soon, users will be able to selectively choose, on a per-post basis, who can see the content they post to the site. Facebook is also going to remove regional networks entirely, largely because some of those networks (like China) consist of millions of users, which makes them useless from a privacy standpoint.

Steve Jobs More Popular Than Oprah, Ashley Olsen, Teen Study Shows

2009-10-13T08:06:11Z

Junior Achievement surveyed US kids aged 12-17 and asked them to choose the entrepreneur they most admired from a list provided. Surprisingly, teens chose a business legend from the technology sector over fashionistas, Facebook and even the Queen of Daytime. Steve Jobs was selected over Tony Hawk, Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, Kimora Lee Simmons, Oprah Winfrey and Mark Zuckerberg.

Mark Zuckerberg: Why I Stayed Facebook CEO Even Though Many People Thought I Should Quit

2009-10-12T12:16:45Z

Most entrepreneurs eventually step down and hand their companies over to professional CEOs, often at the insistence of their investors.

Mark Zuckerberg hasn't done that.

Why not?

Because he's following a different model, one that has worked extremely well in the technology industry. In this model, the founder remains CEO of the company and surrounds himself or herself with a strong executive team. In these clips, Mark explains why he has chosen this course.

Facebook Movie: Aaron Sorkin's The Social Network Script Review

2009-10-10T11:53:18Z

In Sorkin's May 2008 draft, our story starts with Zuckerberg, one hand on the computer the other on a shot glass, creating www.Facemash.com (a superficial website where the user votes on which co-ed is more attractive) after his girlfriend tells him she wants nothing to do with him. Out of sheer accidental brilliance, Zuckerberg crashes the Harvard Internet connection in his building, making him an instant campus celebrity.

Aaron Greenspan: The Fallacy of Execution (and Sex), or Why Mark Zuckerberg Doesn't Answer Questions About Facebook's Origins

2009-10-05T02:01:46Z

Running a company in Silicon Valley, you hear a lot of advice. It is sometimes offered by those esteemed individuals who are invited to speak on panels at conferences, by professors, by family members, by friends, by enemies, by the wealthy, by the not-as-wealthy, by the invested, and by the generally apathetic. Some of it is definitely good advice and some of it is definitely bad, and it comes regardless of whether or not the people giving it are actually qualified to do so. Often, it directly contradicts advice you've heard in the past. What is truly striking is that so frequently advice comes in the form of the cliché: the pat phrase that will supposedly solve all of your problems and transform you and your business into the next success story on the front page of The Major Newspaper--and of all the business clichés in the world, there is none that I hear more, and that I hate more, than the vague, poorly-defined and generally ill-conceived notion that "execution" is more important than "the idea."

There are a number of analogies that are quite illustrative when examining why the idea-versus-execution paradigm is pointless to even discuss in the first place. The simplest analogy among them is sex. There are two genders that we generally recognize: male and female. Both have their role in sexual reproduction; without one or the other, it is by definition impossible for sexual reproduction to take place. It would be pointless (and also wrong) to argue that male sex cells are "more important" than female ones, or vice-versa, which is why it's not an argument you see very often in journals that biologists read, such as Cell or Nature. If we suppose that a successful company, like a successful embryo, needs two complementary inputs to form--in this case, both a profitable idea that solves a problem, and execution on that idea--where the lack of either one guarantees a result of failure, then it should be patently obvious why it doesn't make sense to weigh one of those source's importance against the other's. (Granted, there are also a number of differences between companies and mammals, but there's a good chance that it's the similarities that led you to read this in the first place.)

Despite such thinking, or perhaps in spite of it, many people go on to assume that execution is more important than the idea, perhaps because anyone can have an [intriguing and profitable] idea--another common notion that is also false. Some of those same people continue to draw myriad conclusions from their apparent insight. These conclusions are similar to the kind of mathematical results that can be derived by dividing by zero. (In eighth grade, our math teacher proved that 0 = 1 by doing just that.) One such false conclusion is that "the idea actually doesn't matter at all," implying that the importance of the idea is equal to zero, and that "with proper execution, any idea can be made into a successful company." This is of course false. There are some ideas--say, the combination iron/cellular telephone, the imageless television, or the disposable jumbo jet--that even the best execution can't save. Put another way, the above conclusion means that there are no bad ideas, even while reality clearly indicates this not to be the case.

Another problem with the idea versus execution argument is that while the word "idea" has a relatively clear meaning, the word "execution" does not. Effectively, it refers to everything that isn't the idea, and in turn, that means that "execution" refers to a whole wide array of confounding factors that would make any serious student of statistics blanche. Funding? It's part of execution. Hiring decisions? Execution. Corporate culture? That would fall under execution. Engineering? Also execution. Marketing? Execution. Ethics? Oddly enough, ethics also falls under execution, which raises an interesting point.

There's another cliché that says, "rules are made to be broken," and indeed some rules seem to be. When those same rules are also laws, however, the situation becomes more complicated. If successful execution on an idea--for the sake of argument, one that could save millions of lives--requires breaking a law, is it worth executing on? Or if the legality of execution isn't clearly illegal, but falls into a gray area, does that change things? What if executing involves murdering one person (the literal case of idea versus execution)? What if the idea's benefit is nebulous in all of the above cases? Personally I would argue that regardless of the idea, execution strategies clearly involving even gray areas of the law should be out of bounds for entrepreneurs, if only because paying endless legal fees is rarely good for business.

There are plenty who might disagree, though, notably including every software mogul most people have ever heard of. Bill Gates, Larry Ellison and even Steve Jobs are not celebrated for their kindness or moral rectitude. Just as we do with oil and energy, as a society we tend to accept that the benefits of using software outweigh the costs of developing it, which sometimes can include the strategic destruction of other programmers' companies and careers.

If and when it happens, all of this, too, is "execution." While I wasn't present when Microsoft, Oracle or Apple got started, I did happen to be around for the beginnings of another technology company in 2004 to witness what the word execution meant then.

I've been told time and again that the reason Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook succeeded over my own at Harvard is that I simply didn't "execute," while my classmate did. And so without casting any blame, I'd like to put everything that notion implies to rest. In his latest thirty-minute-long interview, Mark didn't mention anything about the fully-functional and heavily-marketed houseSYSTEM integrated student portal that was far more than a mere idea, the "Facebook" component that he joined along with his co-founders, the hours he spent visiting and re-visiting the site in January of 2004, or the Harvard College Student Entrepreneurship Council that created it, let alone the decades-long history of face books at educational institutions across the country. That doesn't mean that those products, organizations and events never happened, however. There's plenty of evidence indicating that they did.

So the next time you consider the importance of execution in a business situation, take the time to analyze exactly what it is you mean. The phrase "execute better" has never helped anybody. It's just about as helpful as telling someone to "do everything better," which is at best not helpful at all, and at worst insulting, since it demonstrates a lack of interest in getting to any real core issue. Worse yet, by endorsing a litany of things you never meant to, you'll identify yourself as one of those shallow Silicon Valley types who doesn't really think things through. And if we ever want to get out of our present economic slump, the last thing we need is more people in the Valley who don't think.

Aaron Greenspan is President & CEO of Think Computer Corporation and the author of Authoritas: One Student's Harvard Admissions and the Founding of the Facebook Era.

Jose Antonio Vargas: Young Voices in The Future of News -- Connection, Conversation, Community

2009-10-01T12:18:08Z

"The future of news."

Such an incredibly loaded phrase, soaked with history, imprisoned by its own myths and misconceptions, usually the subject of much doom-saying, finger-wagging, "look-at-what-the-Internet-and-technology-has-done!" tone. Search for yourself. Type "the future of news" on Google and drink the misery. Talking about the future of news too often translates to talking about the past.

That's exactly how I felt when a friend, a fellow 20-something journalist, tweeted the news release of a 10-part public television series called "The Future of News," produced by the Newseum in Washington, D.C. and scheduled to air next year. "You've got to be kidding," the friend wrote in a subsequent instant message. "This is the future of news?"

Smoking: Messages On Cigarette Packs May Be Counterproductive

2009-09-28T16:22:25Z

In June, President Obama signed a law requiring tobacco companies to post large, graphic warnings on cigarette packs. However, new research suggests that, for a certain set of smokers, those allusions to death may actually increase the likelihood they'll light up.

Facebook: 300 Million Strong, Cash Flow Positive

2009-09-15T19:09:17Z

SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook Inc. said Tuesday it achieved an important financial milestone, bringing in more money than it spent in the last quarter. The social networking site previously had said it didn't expect to achieve that goal until next year – even though the company already has been valued in the billions.

In a blog post on Facebook's Web site, founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote that the company became "cash-flow positive" during the second quarter, which ended in June.

Kevin Morris and Glenn Altschuler: In Your Face(book)

2009-07-23T17:55:12Z

Review of The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal . By Ben Mezrich. 260 pages. Doubleday Publishing

Q: When is a book not a book? A: (1) When it is Facebook; (2) When it is The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal.

The soft pornmeister of yuppy nonfiction, Ben Mezrich, author of Bringing Down the House, is back to tell the story of the founding of the hugely successful social network, Facebook. In an "Author's Note," he lays out his methodology:

I do employ the technique of re-created dialogue. I have based this dialogue on the recollections of the participants of the substance of the conversations. Some...took place over long periods of time, in multiple locations, and thus some conversations and scenes were re-created and compressed. Rather than spread these conversations out, I sometimes set these scenes in likely settings.

He then acknowledges that the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, "as is his perfect right, declined to speak with me for this book despite numerous requests."

So wait, a lot of this is, like, made up? And isn't Zuckerberg the whole story? As the guy said in the movie, it's Quiz Show hearings without Van Doren -- it's Hamlet without Hamlet.

The book -- which begs to be called a novel -- is set on the campus of Harvard University, its Finals Clubs and dormitories. The characters are cardboard cut-out versions of clever and connected college kids. The story is populated with Victims and Victimizers. The central victim (and, the all but acknowledged central source) is Eduardo Saverin, the Brazilian Young Enterpriser who used some of the $300,000 he made trading stocks during his sophomore summer to bankroll the embryonic stages of Facebook. Cast as roadkill are the strapping twins, Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, Varsity Crew members by day and internet entrepreneurs by avocation.

And, of course, there's Zuckerberg, a fleece-hoody and Addidas-sandals-wearing geek with a golden touch, as outwardly unemotional as Mr. Spock but ruthless in his determination to dominate. You half expect him to appear in the book sitting in a jacuzzi in Palo Alto with a laptop on his knees, telling a bevy of bodacious blondes, "Now the entire world is mine...all mine! Haha hahahahah!! Aaahhahahahaha!!!!"

Mezrich's conceit is that the Victims were lambs led to the Zucker-slaughter. The twins, he tells us, thought they had hired Mark to design their website and Eduardo thought he was his partner. Aided by the slimy Silicon Valley serial entrepreneur Sean Parker, Zuckerberg relentlessly rolls Facebook into the behemoth that it's become. Until, of course, in a final gooey twist, Parker makes a misstep and Zuckerberg zaps him. "Ahahahahah!!! Mine, all mine. Hahahahahah!!!"

Actually, there doesn't seem anything especially accidental about the accidental billionaires. If this book says anything it's that these kids wanted to make shitloads of money and decided that a social network was the way to do it. And that Zuckerberg knew what he was doing.

Mezrich misses few opportunities for pulp fiction digressions. He describes what it feels like to be drunk ("the pleasantly warm flush to his normally sallow cheeks"); the buildings at Harvard ("complete with iron bars, ornate masonry, and a great limestone boar's head carved into its arched pinnacle"); and the girls that neck with the nerds ("his hands roamed under her open white shirt, tracing the soft material of her red bra, his fingers lingering over her perky, round breasts").

With the exception of the author, who will cash in on a film version, it seems clear to us that it does no one any good to see people slammed and stereotyped with the sour-grapes recollections of their former associates. For all we know, Zuckerberg may have screwed his college colleagues. But, unlike Julia Angwin's excellent book Stealing MySpace, the only case The Accidental Billionaires can make is a case of beer.

The "invention" of Facebook raises all kinds of interesting and important questions, including the viability of contracts between students, ownership of intellectual property in an academic setting, the proper role of the University in mediating disputes, and, of course, the features that made Facebook so popular. But Mezrich isn't interested in laying them out -- he'd rather imagine the scene of Eduardo and Mark getting laid in a dorm bathroom.

In an age blessed with heavyweight business analysts -- from Michael Lewis to Ken Auletta -- it's too bad that Facebook went face down at the hands of bare-knuckled bantam Ben.

Disgrasian: The Facebook Movie Puts the zZzZ's in Zuckerberg

2009-07-16T13:23:43Z

Does anyone really care about the Facebook Movie? Or, for that matter, Facebook? Sure, Facebook currently boasts 250 million users, and Mark Zuckerberg had his official coming-out party as a mogul on Oprah a few months back, but all that really means is that your Mom is now on Facebook, sending you Growing Gifts once a week, trying to friend your friends, forcing your guilty conscience to take down your many stoned pics, while you take refuge more and more on Twitter, where you're safe for now, where your Mom will only migrate to in a few years once she's figured out its goshdarned lingo ("Twitted...or tweeted?"). So I guess what I'm really asking is, does your mom care about the Facebook movie? And will she actually spend $14 on a movie ticket to see how the most popular social networking site came to be?

These are the questions I had while slogging through Aaron Sorkin's 162-page first draft of The Social Network, aka The Facebook Movie, based on Ben Mezrich's book, The Accidental Billionaires, that was written without Zuckerberg's cooperation and came out this week. (Mezrich also wrote Bringing Down the House, about the MIT blackjack team who stole millions from various Vegas casinos, which became the movie 21.) Facebook reps have declined to comment on the book, and employees were reportedly sent letters months ago telling them not to speak with Sorkin.

p. 114

One reason Zuckerberg and Co. might not care about -- or rather, care for -- the Facebook Movie is that, contrary to reports that the script makes him out to be an "obnoxious nerd," The Social Network does him one worse: it makes him into a dull one. He spends a sizable chunk of the script's 162 pages sitting in a deposition room, talking to lawyers, getting sued by two different parties. There are a few scenes in which he is either seen writing code or...wait for it...talking about writing code. HTML code, people! Other than getting laid by an Asian chick in a bathroom stall at a "nice club in Cambridge..(playing)...thumping...house music" -- whatever that means -- Zuckerberg's life comes across as a rather joyless verging on meaningless grind.

From p. 131, right around the time when Zuckerberg's first CFO, Eduardo Saverin, is getting phased out of the company, and replaced by Napster founder Sean Parker, the script's wild man:

"Coding tear"?

Even Sean Parker, who was anointed the "rock star" of The Social Network in another script review, isn't a particularly interesting Silicon Valley bad boy. We're supposed to believe that he's some kind of 22 year-old visionary iconoclast, but he comes off more like a mid-level Hollywood douchebag.

He orders lacquered pork and foie gras and appletinis at a trendy Tribeca eatery (p. 102)!

He dates a Victoria's Secret model (p. 121)!

He goes to a sorority party and makes a phone call explaining the significance of picture-sharing while a 17 year-old girl sprinkles coke on her boobs nearby (p. 154)! Then gets busted!

Scintillating stuff, right? David Fincher seems to think so. And maybe, just maybe, your Mom will, too. If she hasn't moved on to Twitter by the time the movie comes out, and isn't too busy figuring out what the deal is with RT's and #'s.

p. 37

Bob Iger: "People Are Going To Pay" For Content Online

2009-07-08T11:39:04Z

As the media moguls gather here in Sun Valley, Idaho, for their annual schmooze-fest, there is one phrase on everybody's lips as they emerge from their sports-utility vehicles: "paid content."

Facebook Movie Coming - And The Zuckerberg Casting Rumors Begin

2009-06-24T14:56:33Z

Facebook, the social networking giant, is hitting the big screen -- but it's not the story of some young Americans' drunken escapades. The proposed film, tentatively titled The Social Network, adapts Ben Mezrich's new book, The Accidental Billionaires, which documents the Web site's founding by Harvard students in 2004.

Facebook CEO Says IPO a Few Years Away

2009-05-20T18:36:57Z

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg hopes to eventually take his company public but said it won't be for a few years, and stressed that the world's largest online social network is in no immediate need of capital.

Aisha Tyler: And The Geeks Shall Pwn The Earth

2009-04-08T15:57:36Z

When I was a kid, my parents predicted it. Years ago, somehow, they knew.

I would stumble home wailing after another humiliating encounter with the school jackass or neighborhood bully, the cackling taunts of the "cool kids" still ringing in my ears, they would coo soothingly, "don't worry about that stupid bully, honey. Buck up, hose that burning bag of poop off the front porch, and go do your Calculus homework. When you're grown, you'll be successful and that same jerk will be pumping your gas." ₁ A Cold comfort when you're blubbering through a face full of tears and a steaming geyser of a nosebleed. How was I to know, how were any of us to know, in those early days, how eerily prescient our parents would be?

Eerie indeed, because thankfully for recovering childhood nerds like me, geeks have recently, finally, come into vogue. Witness the ambivalent, doughy sexiness of a Seth Rogen, or the oddly attractive post-pubescent cool of a Michael Cera, or the dry, vegan post-irony of an Ellen Page. At long last, the socially inept are fulfilling that long-predicted destiny to rule the world -- or at least the internet and the magical realm of Apatow.

Walking happily hand in hand with the rise of the geek is the rise of the gamer. Once a shameful pastime, pursued in a darkened room on a tapestry-covered cat-shredded sofa, and fueled by Jolt Cola and Funyuns, gaming is now the hip pastime of responsible mortgage-holding adults. The sexy Blu-Ray playback of the PS3, the aggressive muscularity of the Xbox, and the kooky addictiveness of the Wii has made gaming not just socially acceptable, but cool. And with games like Rock Band and Dance Dance Revolution, gaming has become a wholesome family pastime, and no longer only the domain of sweaty, furtive, sexually confused eighth-graders. (Well, they may still be furtive and confused, but they put a happy face on it while mom's cranking out "Livin' On A Prayer" on that little plastic "guitar.")

With its increasing cool, gaming has also spawned a proliferation of websites focused on the world of gaming. One site I like combines the best of comedic and lifestyle websites with gaming analysis and culture. Pwnordie.com offers reviews, cheats, walkthroughs, game/film mash-ups, and videos showing everything from celebs playing their favorite games to how to reconfigure your deck to be a multi-region DVD player (Ah, nerds. So socially inept, yet so technologically resourceful.) The internet is lousy with great (and really not very great at all) gaming sites -- part of the fun is searching them out (because you, like all great post-modern fully evolved nerds, have unlimited time to sift through the folds of the internet looking for undiscovered digital treasures amongst the copious ads for viagra and porn. Don't you? Need more Mountain Dew? )

In fact, the new nerd is nerd no more, but fanboy -- brilliant, obsessive, encyclopedic, self-referential, redolent of Quizno's, sarcasm, and disdain for the dumb, the media illiterate and the technologically uninitiated. One look at pwnordie (and, indeed, our technology-obsessed culture in general) reveals the sparkling new order of things. On the way down: popular, entitled, glad-handing jocks turned popular, entitled, glad-handing insurance brokers (or hedge fund managers or petrochemical lobbyists or credit default swap speculators). Shooting upwards like a pre-crime law officer with a jetpack and sick-stick: hyper-motivated social networking site-creating wunderkinder (or indispensable internet search engine inventors or idealistic community-organizing Harvard Law graduates). "Gossip Girl" and its ilk be damned: the new, new hierarchy likes fashion, makeup, and celebrity just fine, but obscure podcasts, obscurer bands and really obscure iphone apps are what really get the kids going.

Wikipedia.org (which, as we all know, is the authoritative resource for all things geeky) defines the geekslang (otherwise known as "leetspeak") word "pwn" as "to appropriate or to conquer to gain ownership. The term implies domination or humiliation of a rival, used primarily in the Internet gaming culture to taunt an opponent who has just been soundly defeated (e.g. "You just got pwned!"). Now, finally, that same concept can be applied to society at large. Social networking, perpetual connectivity, online culture, cross-platform synergism, hyper-intellectuality -- all once the domain of the fringe, are now the aspirational goal of the many (witness the popularity of such unapologetic geeks as Mark Zuckerberg and Malcolm Gladwell, or the stupefying longevity of Apple founder Steve Wozniak's run on "Dancing with the Stars"). At long last, the meek are doing some of that inheriting we've all heard about.

Or at the very least, they finally get to stop being embarrassed about carrying an overloaded backpack, reading graphic novels (comic books to you), driving a fuel-efficient hatchback and bringing their lunch to work in a reusable lunch bag. Because the new, new nerdiness is not only cool, it's green. And green is the ultimate in geek cool.

So arise, postmodern techno-knight. Tie up your pant leg and alight your bicycle. Illuminate your iphone, download your podcast, and faithfully tweet your twitter. The world, at last awaits you. Pwn it. ₂

_{1. This is not a condemnation of the entirely honorable career of gas pumping. The great American men and women who pump gas are to be admired and applauded. And not to be smoked within 100 feet of.}

_{2. No curbstomping, however, please.}

Michael Wolff: It's the Beginning of the End of Facebook

2009-04-01T12:07:01Z

The wheels are coming off the bus at Facebook. There is one sure sign, one incontrovertible indicator at technology companies that need cash and have no business plan, of maximum identity crisis, even on-the-verge-of-meltdown turmoil: the departure of the CFO.

Gideon Yu, Facebook's CFO since summer 2007, left the building yesterday.

Before that, another CFO left Facebook less than two years ago--which indicates that Facebook's ubiquity and sheer fabulousness are masking either growing pains or long-term turmoil.

The CFO in a company that depends on higher and higher valuations to keep its investors happy is the second most important person in the enterprise and often the paramount figure. Getting rid of your CFO is only a smidgen different from getting rid of your CEO.

Continue reading at newser.com

Raymond Leon Roker: Fast Times at Facebook High

2009-03-29T19:31:28Z

Read this weekend's NY Times piece on Facebook's explosive growth (from 100 million to 200 million in one year). For all its recent user revolt--usually via their status updates, ironically--the only social networking site that matters is growing at 1 million users a day. But the article asks the legitimate question of how this growth--that now includes your mom, boss and old junior high friends--helps or hurts Facebook's community and usefulness. I guess it depends on how you use it.

I learned early on the downside of social media, having been publicly burned by my ex-girlfriend on Friendster. Thank god I only had about 60 friends back in the spring of 2003. But that was enough to teach me a few things about privacy controls and safeguarding my password and profile. I dread to think what an attack on my Facebook profile would mean with nearly 2800 friends getting a real time feed. Since then I've heard and witnessed several stories of friends and acquaintances who had exes stalk or terrorize them via MySpace or Facebook. Guess I was sort of a pioneer.

What the NY Times piece reminds us of is that in this ever connected and status obsessed online ecosystem, you have to constantly be vigilant about your connections and information. It's a given that perspective employers are looking at your profile, but less understood is how more benign connections and looser degrees of separation can come back to haunt you. When you leave a comment on a photo or add a friend, who sees that? And, more importantly, what do they make of that connection? Are you guilty by your associations when matched against somebody else's? Does your business competition derive trade secrets from your status updates, or even your wall posts, no matter how cryptic? Assume the answer is yes to all of these.

Facebook actually has some pretty smart privacy controls to limit your potential embarrassment and sequester your real friends from the randomness of your extended social graph. But the company estimates only 20 percent of its users know how to or chose to use them. It's worth exploring these tools and making some adjustments and always remembering that six degrees of separation is a myth. It's really one to two.

The other poignant question posed in the piece is how Facebook can hope to remain a place for multiple generations to congregate in harmony when you reach a state of critical mass (I'd say we're about there). And how do bosses and staff co-exist? And how do moms, their girlfriends, and even their moms mingle a profile or two over from their teenage kids? Creepy? Weird? The end of life as we know it?

"Uniting disparate groups on a single Internet service runs counter to 50 years of research by sociologists into what is known as 'homophily' -- the tendency of individuals to associate only with like-minded people of similar age and ethnicity." --NY Times

I really don't worry about the kids. Never have. As they say, the kids are alright. Always will be. In fact, I'd argue that until adults (read: moms and dads) really get Twitter, that will fast become the new hangout and real life status update. I'm sure, by now, Facebook status is as private as posting a note on the family fridge. But @whoever updates still have an air of intimacy to them, even if that won't last. One thing the Times article didn't discuss was how much Twitter's recent rise lead to Facebook's new look and more instant feel. Facebook may have also learned, though, that people liked its uniqueness and don't want it to be Twitter necessarily. At least not yet.

In the end, if you're not one of those with social media phobia, this is all about the pursuit of a more perfect digital map for your world. We all want to use these tools to do everything from find a job, get laid, bitch, share, or just show off. And only the slowest adapters fail to see the slippery edges of total inter connectivity (Watch that post!). For them, they'll learn soon enough. For the more experienced, and for those who learned the hard way, we'll hopefully be part of the next wave, on Facebook or beyond. Helping those super smart developers in the world's Silicon Valleys build us ever better water coolers.

This was originally posted on my blog

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Chris Goldberg: FaceTwitter Sucks: A Better Vision for the Social Networking Future

2009-03-24T12:28:40Z

Nobody loves Facebook more than me. I'm a rabid, evangelical Facebook addict. My page is so elaborate that a colleague once compared it to staring into the Matrix. I'm also that annoying guy who taunts my friends who still haven't joined. When they finally give in - and they always do - I'm the first to post on their wall: "Welcome to Facebook! You now actually exist!"

Whenever Facebook tweaks its layout I usually respond to inevitable uproar by dismissing the complaints as coming from whiners who can't embrace change, but now that Facebook's latest incarnation has had a chance to sink in it's clear the overwhelming majority disapprove. (An EW poll shows 92% "hate" it.) Some people are spewing more vitriol at the new Facebook than they are at the executives at AIG.

I hate to say it, but I agree with them this time. The new layout does suck.

Still, I'm not about to give up on Facebook. Social networking is here to stay and part of what makes Facebook work is that it puts everybody on one site. To jump ship now will slow our progress. Like our nation, Facebook is an imperfect entity but we should strive to make it better so that we can reap the rewards of a more ideal social networking future.

I'm no techie or computer nerd, but here's what I think happened and here's my vision of what Facebook could be.

We can psychoanalyze CEO Mark Zuckerberg all we want, but it's obvious the new design is his direct reaction to Twitter. I agree with those who question why Facebook, which has 175 million users, would feel threatened by Twitter, which has 6 million. Changing your entire layout as a pre-emptive strike on a far less useful flavor-of-the-month competitor seems irrational, no matter how many silly celebrities like to "Tweet." In trying to be more like Twitter, Zuckerberg risks losing what made Facebook work in the first place.

Status updates are one of my least favorite parts of Facebook, but the new design (focused on real-time, Twitter-like status updates) puts them right up in your grill whenever you sign on. Sure, going "real-time" instead of using algorithms for a more focused, less-frequently-updated newsfeed is a great scheme, making addicts like me feel the need to sign on even more than we did before - but who the hell cares that some dude you barely know is enjoying his soba noodle lunch, or that your cousin's hamster escaped yesterday?

It's nice that you can now easily hide all updates from the people you don't care about, but that's too black-and-white of a solution. What if tomorrow that same soba guy sends out an invitation to a screening of a cool independent film that his company made? Or, what if your cousin posts pictures of a family party in St. Louis that you want to look at? Sorry! You hid all of their updates! You're screwed.

Instead, you should be able to choose what kind of updates you want to see and what kind you don't. Quizzes, for example. ("So and so answered the quiz: What city should I live in?") I despise these asinine wastes of time and now all of the sudden everybody's quiz is foisted upon me 24/7 and I can't block them. Like "gifts" and "pokes," I'd be thrilled if I never had to see someone's stupid quiz result on my feed for the rest of my life.

What do I want to see?

In my mind Facebook should be a living, breathing "word of mouth machine."

I want to know which movies, bands, books, websites, articles, and videos my friends have just discovered and want to share. I want to know when a creative friend has an art gallery opening for her paintings, or is launching a new bar or restaurant, or is going to be in New York for the weekend. I want to know about the hotel my friend recommends for a Spring getaway, or about the amazing hiking trail someone discovered on a recent trip to Wyoming.

Facebook already does some of this through status updates - kind of - but also through other means. One of the things that blasted Facebook above and beyond MySpace was the wise decision to open itself up to outside people and companies to invent applications that expand its usefulness.

Some examples:

The iLike application allows you to create a list of your favorite bands - not just so you can show them off on your profile - but so that they can send you updates when those bands announce shows in your area. If you decide to buy tickets you can opt to add that to your newsfeed so that friends can see you're going. It's a great way for bands to promote themselves virally, but it also helps consumers find out about new music and events in an organic way - through their friends.

There's also a number of similar applications for people to share their favorite books, including the one I use, Visual Bookshelf from LivingSocial. In such a horrible time for the publishing industry, particularly for young writers, what better way for people to learn about new books than to see which ones their friends are enjoying at the moment?

Finally, there's my favorite application: Dopplr. It allows you to input where you're going to be traveling on a given day and it automatically updates your feed to let people know where you're going to be. If you travel a lot for business (or pleasure) friends can easily be alerted if you're going to be in town. This can lead to opportunities for unexpected interaction in the real world. You might be in Miami Beach the same weekend as a friend you haven't seen in a long time and you'd never know it if not for Facebook.

And that's what Facebook should be about: making your *real* life more dynamic and interesting... so that maybe you'll have a better status updates than "I'm at home by myself watching Rock of Love Bus and eating chocolate balls."

But for the last two redesigns, Facebook has shoved these applications into the Siberia of the site, hiding them deep within your profile in the "Boxes" section that almost nobody bothers to visit. Now when we hear about the "applications" business booming it's on the iPhone, not Facebook, and that's a big mistake.

If the Facebook team was smart, they'd find a way to make these applications more central to the Facebook experience. They could even buy or steal the better application ideas and incorporate them right into the main framework of the site.

There should be a quick, easy, visually interesting way to give a thumbs up to a movie or restaurant, to recommend electricians and plumbers to your neighbors, or snorkeling companies to people who want to travel to the places you've been.

The possibilities are endless, but we're not going to get there with Twitter-like status updates dominating the site. As a friend of mine just posted in his status update yesterday: "FaceTwitter sucks!"

Chris Willman: Facebook's Lousy Facelift

2009-03-16T13:27:15Z

How "Twitteriffic" is the new Facebook redesign? Imagine that Apple panicked over the press the Google G1 phone was getting last fall and abruptly decided to remake the iPhone in the image of its upstart competitor--dropping the most desirable features and adopting the G1's bigger bulk, smaller screen, skimpy memory, lack of apps, and mediocre interface. We all know that could never happen: Apple has too much confidence in its own market dominance and design brilliance to blink like that. Yet, incredibly, Facebook--until last week, the Apple of social-networking services--decided to react to the Twitter "threat" by trying to turn itself into its relatively puny challenger. It's like Meryl Streep getting plastic surgery in order to more closely resemble Malin Akerman. Who'd have guessed that Facebook, of all the beloved services, could be capable of such a needlessly lousy facelift?

I think web historians can mark down March 13, 2009 as "the day they broke Facebook." Not that it's easy to pin it down to one date, because some users started getting shifted over a day or two earlier to "New Facebook." (Allusion to "New Coke" intentional.) But there's something unluckily apt about Friday the 13th being the completion date for everyone's home page involuntarily giving way to... The Change. (Menopausal allusion also intentional.) From every indication I can gauge, the reaction among Facebook partisans has been overwhelmingly blistering, making me wonder if they did any kind of market research at all that didn't involve sampling groups made up entirely of Twitter triumphalists. Earth to 24-year-old Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg: As of last month, Twitter was getting 54 million monthly visits, which sounds impressive, except that this genius thing you invented was getting almost almost 1.2 billion visits--or, in other words, was still about 20 times as popular as the nascent challenger. Remind us again, Mark, what it was you didn't like about that math?

Scrolling through all my friends' status updates in one 24-hour period between midnight Friday and midnight Saturday, I counted 40 unsolicited complaints from my pals about the changes. Some were generalized grumbling: "Bill Holdship wonders why the geniuses at Facebook felt the need to fix something that wasn't broken"... "Carla DeSantis wants the old Fecebook back! This one stinks"... "Mike Denneen thinks that when you have an update that 150 million users weren't waiting for, you ought to get it right the first time"... "Alison Bracker is thinking that if she wanted to be on Twitter, she'd be on Twitter"... "Mark Harris is glad to see that the plunging economy has not affected the gratuitous-redesign industry." And so on.

So my friends are naturally resistant to any change and, as former senator Phil Gramm would surely say, we're really just a nation of whiners... right? Not really--the complaints get pretty precise. Using my status update to poll pals about any specific objections they had to the remade Facebook, I was quickly besieged by dozens of very detailed responses. Some had to do with cosmetic changes like fonts and layout, to be sure. But what came through most clearly was that Facebook had broken a cardinal rule of business: When in doubt, offer the consumer more choices, not fewer. The new Facebook eliminates a good number of the channels users could formerly choose to receive information about their friends, in favor of diminished options and a bland, filterless uniformity. "My selectivity is gone," said one friend, Lesley Bracker, "now controlled by Facebook."

Why did Facebook take away so many of the options that users loved? That's easy--they want you to focus on your home page's main "stream," because, um... it'll remind you of Twitter's singular stream of info? It's difficult to catalogue all the ironies here. In some ways, Facebook and Twitter have long provided the same service, with FB's "status updates" being equivalent to the younger service's 140-character "tweets." The difference was, that's one of seemingly about a hundred things Facebook offered, whereas that's pretty much the only thing Twitter does. Rather than relish in the diversity of choices it gave users, though, Facebook is forcing everything into the same channel, and then trying to make these items look as indistinguishable from one another as possible. Links look like status updates look like wall posts look like wall-post responses--and with every tiny or large item now accompanied by a superfluous user photo, they all look like tweets.

What else is bugging my Facebook friends (who tend to be involved in the publishing, movie, and music industries, with some token teenagers mixed in)? Let them count the ways...

* Now gone is one of Facebook's most compelling features: the "live feed," which let users watch everything their friends did on the site, as they did it, instantaneously. To quote one friend of a friend: "'Live Feed' was my TV alternative. It was fascinating to watch. And even though they're touting this new FB 'Home' page as a real-time update, it does NOT automatically update itself." Even now, Facebook's help page continues to make this illusory promise: "The stream shows you all posts from your friends in real-time." Another friend used her status update to rebut that one: "Gayle Fine thinks someone needs to explain to Facebook that 'real-time' is only real time when you don't have to hit any buttons to refresh."

* Also missing is the ability to look at your friends' status updates as a distinct list, without having links or wall posts or other data mixed in. The scroll of status updates was always my first Facebook go-to. Yes, they're very similar to Twitter's tweets, but there was something about Facebook's elegant typography and layout that encouraged users to intermittently indulge in philosophical haiku or droll bon mots--as opposed to the constant barrage of overinformational "About to scratch myself" posts that Twitter seems to encourage.

* As far as I can tell, everyone hates having user photos show up alongside each link or wall post as well as status update--with the corners shaved off, like the tacky matte prints you or your parents used to pick up from the Fotomat in the 1970s. One of my friends made a different comparison: "James Sposto wonders, why are my corners rounded? That's so 2003--we all look like State Farm logos. (Believe me, I know.)" Another friend used his update to try to lobby for a mass demonstration: "Mark Philip Venema says: Join me in posting a blank thumbnail as an official protest so we can thumb our noses at FB's over-thumbnailing."

* As for the uniformity of type styles: "Ty Visconti thinks the big print is like playing bridge with the blue hairs. BINGO!!!!!" But in the interest, I did have a bare handful of friends who expressed neutrality about the changes, including this brave soul: "Ari Karpel isn't fazed by the new F'book look. So, the font is bigger. He's old anyway." So there's at least one demographic that's satisfied with the changes, then: Everyone who'd been hankering all along for "Facebook: Large Type Edition."

• "The feed no longer tells you when friends add new friends," writes journalist-pal Roy Rivenburg, "which was one of the main ways I discovered new friends. And it doesn't tell you when people join groups, etc. The 'Highlights' thing is useless -- not reader-friendly and rarely seems to change, so easily ignored." The "Highlights" referred to here--which is not for children, but ought to be--is the narrower column to the right of the main stream, which contains a mixture of... well, honestly, I'm still not sure what. It's where advertisements appear, along with a completely random mixture of other alerts that you used to be able to look up as a separate category. (Right now, my "Highlights" column is ironically informing me that five of my friends joined the group "The New Facebook Layout Sucks!," right below an invitation to "Become a Fan of Papa John's Pizza.")

* "Previously," my friend Jan Breslauer wrote me, "you had to go to a person's page to see something else someone posted on their wall, building in a level of semi-privacy. Now it's all part of the same grabbag feed. I am now disinclined to post any status updates or write on anyone's wall."

* "Someone posted 30 photos last night...and every single photo registered separately on my home page," griped one friend. Groused another: "A friend of mine sent a reminder to 11 people to 'Support Quincy Jones' Call for A Secretary of the Arts.' And all 11 reminders showed up in my feed. I don't want to block this friend from my feed, but I also don't want to see all 11 posts. It's ridiculous." Jen Grisé Ferentzy chimed in: "There will be a negative impact on charities, too. I used to go to the 'Lil Green Patch' once a week and spend 15 minutes giving plants/tending gardens (which donates to rainforest). I won't now because the newsfeed in that quantity would make everyone delete me!"

* Writes my friend Bracker, "Here's something new: it wouldn't let me send a private message containing a link without typing a code first--and not once, but twice!! Like I was buying from Ticketmaster, or something."

* As for games, fuggehdaboutit. It looks like Facebook has, unless they're just doing a really good job of hiding 'em. Evan Serpick devoted his status update to asking, "How do i see/get to my applications --I need Scramble!" Similarly: "Anne Hurley just wants to know where Word Twist is! I love you guys, but don't hide my games."

Wait, did you hear that: "I love you guys, but..."? Implicit in all this reproof is the idea that users feel let down by something with which they'd fallen hopelessly and intractably in lust. More than one of my friends even used the "B"-word: "I'm not using it as much because I hate the way it looks. I feel betrayed." It'd become so much a part of our lives that some of my friends feel like they've been disappointed by... dare we say it?... a friend. "Zuckerberg (AND his roommate) created Facebook," writes my friend Mark Hanser. "But he's immature and over his head. When something grows so large and becomes such a shared experience, it becomes a covenant. And once a covenant of millions concurs, the guy the created it can't go changing the previously agreed-upon conventions that everyone seemingly knows, uses and loves."

Well, yes he can, actually. Facebook is privately owned, not a governmentally controlled trust. It's free, too, so it's not as if we can threaten to take our subscription dollars elsewhere. As Ruben Pla wrote on a friend's page, "Never look a gift horse in the Facebook." I got to wondering a while ago what would happen if something so many of us have come to think of as almost like another appendage were to suddenly get arbitrarily amputated. Would we all collectively move over to another site--as some threatened to do during the recent "terms of service" controversy--or would this unlikely national community of tens of millions simply disperse and go back to bowling alone, as it were? It hasn't come to that; I don't know anyone who's actually dropped out. Most of us will stick with Facebook, to some degree, even if the service becomes two-faced, shitfaced, or simply faceless.

But as my friend Nick Redman writes: "It must be galling for the folks at FB to have news anchors and other assorted TV people constantly tweeting on air and pushing it, since these changes are a rather desperate attempt to Twitterize FB. It's a shame because the humor and uniqueness have been diluted, and once something ceases to be fun, it merely becomes tedious."

So, Sir Zuckerberg, please, even though we can't quit you, face up to the mass discontent and don't let Facebook die a slow death from gradual neglect. My friends just gave you about $10 million of market research. Consider the preceding blog as something akin to another popular feature you apparently just dropped: a friendly superpoke.

Facebook Terms Of Service Revert To Original Following Ownership Blow-Up

2009-02-18T09:59:19Z

Following user protests and a media blow-up over a change that went through weeks ago, Facebook cofounder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg says the social network will revert to its old terms of service.

Users were upset that Facebook said it owned their content after it was uploaded to the service. They also didn't like that a user's data wouldn't necessarily be deleted if that user quit Facebook.

Our take is: duh. Users should assume that as soon as they upload content to the Web, it's out of their control like a scarf lost to the wind.

Daniel Sinker: Face/Off: How a Little Change in Facebook's User Policy is Making People Rethink the Rights They Give Away Online

2009-02-17T16:58:07Z

Facebook's getting really good at the non-apology apology. They practiced it in 2006 when they first launched the now-ubiquitous News Feed. They did it again in 2007 when they launched their short-lived Beacon ad service. In 2008 when the New York Times and others reported that it was almost impossible to truly leave the service, they came back not apologizing again.

And now, in 2009, they're at it once again, not-apologizing with the best of them:

We're at an interesting point in the development of the open online world where these issues are being worked out. It's difficult terrain to navigate and we're going to make some missteps, but as the leading service for sharing information we take these issues and our responsibility to help resolve them very seriously. This is a big focus for us this year, and I'll post some more thoughts on openness and these other issues soon.

Did you catch it? Pretty good, huh? Not once does Mark Zuckerberg say he's sorry--or that they're changing their policy--but, boy-howdy, he sure does sound gosh-darned sad about it, doesn't he? You almost want to give him a Palin wink and pull a "who's got your nose" on him just to cheer the little fella up again.

So what's got billionare Zuckerberg so blue? Just that his service is claiming perpetual rights to all its 175 million users' content, even if you kill your account. And, wouldn't you know it, that's rankled some feathers outside of Palo Alto. From gossipy websites to privacy advocates, voices from all over the web are crying foul on the new Facebook Terms of Service that state:

You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof.

Those pictures of you at that party one time? It's theirs to do with as they please. That story you posted? That too. Your short film? Can I get a "You Betcha"? It used to be that when you left the service, you revoked Facebook's license to the content you'd left behind. But, says Zuckerberg, that's actually a pretty complicated request on a network as tightly woven as Facebook's:

There is no system today that enables me to share my email address with you and then simultaneously lets me control who you share it with and also lets you control what services you share it with.

That's true, to the degree that his analogy holds up. The problem is that he's using an e-mail address as his example and, as every fake Nigerian prince knows, e-mail addresses aren't very private. People aren't pissed about sharing their e-mail addresses any more than they're pissed about not being able to take back a message they sent once. People aren't pissed about sharing their stuff with other people, they're pissed about handing it over whole hog to Facebook. And they're even more pissed with the ramifications that Facebook's claims has to content like photos, videos, music, stories and the like. That Zuckerberg never even acknowledges that this is the problem makes it very hard to swallow explanations like this one:

In reality, we wouldn't share your information in a way you wouldn't want.

Which is funny, because it wasn't very long ago that their Beacon ad service was doing EXACTLY that. So, Mark, you can forgive the rest of the internet when they say they might not totally extend you that trust. Bummer.

Of course, the rest of the internet has murky Terms of Service too. A TOS is something you agree to every time you sign up on a website (hell, you've even agreed to one if you post comments here). Many of them lay perpetual non-exclusive claim to things you've created on their site. And if the Facebook flap makes people double check the fine print that they often skip over, then perhaps we've learned something useful. Perhaps it's the kick in the pants that's needed to finally move a modern approach to copyright like Creative Commons forward. Another plus.

But few sites ask their users to lay out all of their personal information, share their most-loved photos, bring their whole selves into the digital realm as Facebook does. And so a non-apology apology isn't enough. A promise to "communicate more clearly about these issues" is not enough. It is, in fact, the barest of minimums of what's being asked. But that's textbook Facebook non-apologies: why apologize when it can always just be explained a little more clearly. It's not a question of doing something wrong and undoing it, it's simply a matter of spinning it until people move on.

And, really, they've got all your content already--where are you going to go?

Update 2/18/09: Well that didn't take long--this morning Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg announced that "we have decided to return to our previous terms of use while we resolve the issues that people have raised." He now promises to update the TOS with community input and has started a group to help with that. If this wasn't a pattern with Facebook--do the wrong thing, then make it right--I'd be more encouraged. Until we see the new TOS, paint me sceptical.

Facebook Turns 5

2009-02-04T13:34:14Z

(CNN) -- A Web site started by a student as a way of staying in touch with friends celebrated its fifth birthday Wednesday as a billion-dollar business and a global phenomenon.

Mark Zuckerberg was 19 when he launched Facebook from a Harvard dorm in 2004. Within 24 hours, more than 1,000 of his Harvard classmates had signed up for the social-networking site and one month later half of those on campus had a profile.

Five years on, the Web site claims more than 150 million users worldwide while Zuckerberg, now 24, was named the youngest billionaire on the planet -- with an estimated fortune of $1.5 billion -- last year by Forbes magazine.

Tech Billionaires Losing Tons In Financial Crisis

2008-12-16T08:42:02Z

The tech industry has been brimming with billionaires over the last decade, especially since the birth of Web 2.0. But these are dark times, and the richest of the rich are certainly feeling it.

Don't feel too sorry for them, obviously (They're still billionaires.) But they've lost a lot more than you have.

Welcome to The Biggest Losers: Tech Edition. It's a quick summary of how much we estimate your favorite moguls have lost, ranked from least to first. Advance the slides using the 'Next' button in upper right corner of each slide.

Facebook Apps Chosen To Be Rewarded With Big Bucks

2008-07-24T08:37:49Z

At his keynote yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg announced the first recipients of grants from the fbFund - the $10 million pile of money from the Founders Fund and Accel Partners to fund Facebook apps.

The apps are pretty varied, and all of them are "useful" in some sense -- a new priority for the social network. That said, we were surprised to see there wasn't a single game on the list - although maybe Facebook game developers have plenty of dollars available through other sources.

Here are our five favorite fbFund winners (listed alphabetically):