Changing Our Institutions

One night over dinner I asked Mark Zuckerberg about Facebook's effects
on society—especially politics, government, media, and business.
He responded by talking about the potlatch. That's a traditional celebration
and feast of native peoples on the northwest coast of North
America. Each celebrant contributes what food and goods they can,
and anyone takes what they want. The highest status goes to those who
give the most away.
"Are you familiar with the concept of a gift economy?" Zuckerberg
asks. "It's an interesting alternative to the market economy in a lot of less
developed cultures. I'll contribute something and give it to someone,
and then out of obligation or generosity that person will give something
back to me. The whole culture works on this framework of mutual giving.
The thing that binds those communities together and makes the
potlatch work is the fact that the community is small enough that people
can see each other's contributions. But once one of those societies
gets past a certain point in size the system breaks down. People can no
longer see everything that's going on, and you get freeloaders."
Zuckerberg says Facebook and other forces on the Internet now create
sufficient transparency for gift economies to operate at a large scale.
"When there's more openness, with everyone being able to express their
opinion very quickly, more of the economy starts to operate like a gift
economy. It puts the onus on companies and organizations to be more
good, and more trustworthy." All this transparency and sharing and giving
has implications, in his opinion, that go deep into society. "It's really
changing the way that governments work," he says. "A more transparent
world creates a better-governed world and a fairer world." This is, for
him, a core belief.
While many would surely question Zuckerberg's idealistic notion
that a more transparent world will necessarily be better governed and
fairer, it's worth examining some of the effects the service is having.
Zuckerberg essentially argues that any individual's public expression
on Facebook is a sort of "gift" to others. That has different manifestations
depending on what kind of expression it is. In the most humdrum
of exchanges, when one high school student writes on another's wall,
"LOL that was a funny comment," it is merely the gift of being ourselves
in front of others, of including our friends in our lives. That's
hardly anything new. It's just happening in a new electronic neighborhood.
When it comes to political activism, Facebook offers a more fundamentally
altered landscape. In most cases we are irrevocably identified
by our names there. When we say something on a political subject we
are exposing our views. Others will not necessarily share them. The
"gift," so to speak, is what we do for others when we put our ideas out
there and make ourselves vulnerable to criticism, which can easily on
Facebook be directed at us under our real names. In Zuckerberg's view,
you are in essence making a gift into this free-sharing economy of ideas
if you comment on Facebook about, for example, President Obama's
health-care reform efforts. Think of it as a gift of opinion into the polity,
a gift of ideas that may ultimately strengthen the polity.
Joining a protest group on Facebook is unlike standing in a crowd
and holding up a sign at a protest. It may be easier to do in terms of
convenience, but it is a more public commitment. It's more like signing
a petition with our name and address in a way that many others can
immediately see. Think of how Oscar Morales hesitated that last night
before he took the leap of creating his group against FARC. Facebook
for the first time gave him a platform where he felt comfortable taking
the leap, whereas in the past in Colombia such expressions had often
been considered too risky.
Our act of expression is less fraught when we are passing on an
opinion about commercial behavior—telling what we think about a
company or product—or when we are merely forwarding something
like a news story weVe seen and found interesting. Nonetheless, we are
making a gesture of friendship and generosity, albeit in a way that Facebook
makes routine. And that gesture potentially alters the landscape of
business and media by enhancing the relative power of the consumer
vis-a-vis the company or large institution. In all these sorts of beneficial
expressions, you are rewarded for your contribution, typically by the reciprocal
contributions of friends, and often by a sort of chain reaction of
contributions by others you don't even know. Facebook is of course not
the only service that enables these effects either in business or politics.
Twitter, notably, is another. But Facebook is by far the largest tool of its
kind.
Will Anderson, a student at the University of Florida, experienced Facebook's
power after he became alarmed when he heard in early 2008
about a bill that had been introduced in the state legislature. It would
redirect state scholarship money that was going to liberal arts students
like him and divert it to those studying math and science. Like Morales,
he took a leap. Anderson started a Facebook group called "Protect
Your Bright Futures" and invited 200 Facebook friends to join. Within
eleven days the group had swollen to 20,000 members. That's when Anderson
received a phone call from Jeremy Ring, the state senator who
had sponsored the bill. He was withdrawing it. "You can't ignore 20,000
people," Ring told the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.
In Egypt, demonstrators in 2009 organized on Facebook to protest
a proposed law that would limit bandwidth consumed by Internet
users. Shortly afterward, the minister of communications significantly
amended the plan to address their concerns. In a country like Egypt,
where public protest can lead to torture and arrest, such successes are
especially striking. In Indonesia, a woman was arrested for the absurd
"crime" of criticizing a hospital in a private email to friends. After tens
of thousands joined a Facebook group complaining about this injustice,
she was released from prison and the focus of attention shifted to possible
malfeasance by prosecutors. These are both countries where in the
past, protesting publicly under your real name was risky.
Facebook has now become one of the first places dissatisfied people
worldwide take their gripes, activism, and protests. These campaigns on
Facebook work well because its viral communications tools enable large
numbers to become aware of an issue and join together quickly. When
police conducted drug raids in late 2008 on three nightclubs in Stellenbosch,
South Africa, a group on Facebook formed to protest the tactics
and gained 3,000 members in thirty-six hours. Comedian David Letterman
made a sexual joke about Sarah Palin's daughter, and 1,800 joined
a Facebook protest page within days. (Letterman later apologized.) Citizens
joined on Facebook to protest a jail expansion near San Diego; a
new parking lot in Dunedin, New Zealand; a campground for gypsies in
Bournemouth, England; a plan by the Philippine House of Representatives
to amend the country's constitution; and the relocation to Bermuda
of prisoners from the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay.
"I call this digital democracy," says author Jared Cohen. A former
student of Bush administration secretary of state Condoleezza Rice,
Cohen was hired by Rice to join the State Department's critical Policy
Planning staff. "Facebook is one of the most organic tools for democracy
promotion the world has ever seen," adds Cohen. When he arrived at
the State Department in late 2006 at age twenty-four, he was reluctant
even to mention Facebook in meetings. People there had barely heard
of it. But Facebook kept growing globally. By late 2008 it was being discussed
in the White House Situation Room, where President Bush and
his National Security Council staff gathered during crises.
During the waning days of the Bush administration, Cohen, Rice,
and other top State Department officials took notice of what had happened
in Colombia. Could Facebook, they wondered, enable people to
come together and take political action even in the most repressive societies?
Could it be an effective tool against terrorism? After all, Morales's
Un Millon de Voces Contra Las FARC was an antiterrorist movement.
The State Department started to pay close attention to groups like
Young Civilians in Turkey. This irreverent organization, whose cause is
tolerance and democracy in a very diverse Muslim country, is made up
mostly of students and young adults. Its symbol is a red high-top sneaker,
to humorously underscore its distance from the booted military that so
dominates Turkish daily life. Facebook has deeply penetrated Turkey's
population —most educated young people are users. Young Civilians
has 13,000 members on Facebook, which has become a primary communications
tool. In a country often torn by ethnic and religious enmity,
the group prides itself on including Turks of all ethnic groups and
beliefs, including Kurds, Armenians, and other longtime victims of discrimination.
Young Civilians uses Facebook to help organize marches
where gays march next to covered Muslim women.
In December 2008, Facebook, AT&T, MTV, Google, and Net video
company Howcast brought representatives of seventeen Facebookfueled
youth activist groups from around the world, including Young
Civilians, to Columbia University for a two-day conference called the
Alliance of Youth Movements Summit. The idea was to help protolerance
and antiterrorism groups cross-pollinate and return to their countries
strengthened by the exchange. Colombia's Oscar Morales came to
New York and addressed the groups, as did Bush administration undersecretary
of state for public diplomacy James Classman.
"This is public diplomacy 2.0," Classman said in a speech. "The
new technologies give the U.S. a significant competitive advantage over
terrorists. Some time ago I said that Al Qaeda was 'eating our lunch on
the Internet/ That is no longer the case. Al Qaeda is stuck in Web 1.0.
The Internet is now about interactivity and conversation. Now the Net
itself is becoming the locus of Civil Society 2.0. Meanwhile, Al Qaeda
keeps its death cult ideology sealed off from discussion and criticism."
Then he looked out at the group of young Facebookers from Burma,
Colombia, Cuba, Egypt, Lebanon, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, South Africa,
Turkey, the United States, and the United Kingdom. "You are the best
hope for us all," he said. He was applauding what seemed to be a new
willingness to take the risk of taking a political stand on Facebook. He
talked about it as a change in the balance of global power. Political activism
on Facebook illustrates what foreign affairs expert Farced Zakaria
in his book The Post-American World calls "the rise of the rest." Nonthe
facebook effect
traditional forces are gaining influence worldwide, Zakaria explains,
including nonstate sources of power like those manifested in Facebook
groups.
Until Facebook came along, there was hardly anywhere on the public
Internet where you had to operate with your real name. In most cases
anonymity remains rampant. That has often had unfortunate consequences.
As Classman said, Al Qaeda and the malefactors of the world
want to remain cloaked and to avoid open discussion with their adversaries.
And though it's less pernicious, think of the impulsive and often
vicious anonymous comments on many blogs, or the irresponsible interactions
that so often characterized behavior in AOL chat rooms. On
Facebook you must have the courage of your convictions.
If you troll through groups already functioning on Facebook, it isn't
hard to find examples of those that are in various ways facilitating crosscultural
understanding. Facebook has already been used, for example, to
connect a global group called the Muslim Leaders of Tomorrow—300
young Muslims from seventy-five countries, including a Saudi fashion
designer, an Iranian rapper, a Pakistani madrassa reformer, an American
blogger, and a Dutch lawyer. They gathered for a global conference
devoted to peace and justice in Doha, Qatar, in 2009, and continue to
work together as a group on Facebook.
Nonetheless, there are plenty of less friendly groups on Facebook,
including those showing sympathy for Al Qaeda. So long as they do not
contain explicitly hateful language or advocate illegal acts, they conform
to Facebook's terms of service. Positive messages are not assured of
dominating on Facebook.
While a willingness to be public about your views may be admirable,
some say that it is in fact too easy to join political groups on Facebook.
When you can express a view so readily, with one mere click of
your mouse, the conviction behind the expression may be proportionately
weaker and it's often unclear whether the number of people who
join a group or cause means very much. Attempting to answer the question,
three University of California at Santa Barbara political scientists
Changing Our Institutions"-
published in 2009 a paper they called "Facebook Is ... Fostering Political
Engagement: A Study of Online Social Networking Groups and
Offline Participation." By correlating student membership in Facebook
political groups with how involved they became in the real world, they
concluded that "membership in online political groups via the Facebook
platform encourages offline political participation."
Politicians too can benefit from Facebook's gift economy. Barack
Obama's 2008 presidential campaign used Facebook masterfully. Facebook
co-founder Chris Hughes, who joined the company full time after
graduating, later left to take a senior role in the campaign's online strategy
team. Obama of course had a large Facebook page, which gathered
millions of fans during the campaign. But in addition, local and regional
Obama campaigns invited supporters to join their own Facebook
groups, which allowed them to mobilize local supporters en masse.
Obama so mastered digital tools that some dubbed 2008 "the Facebook
election." Nick Clemons was director of Hillary Clinton's successful
primary campaign in New Hampshire and several other states.
Because of Facebook, he felt at a disadvantage. "On the Clinton campaign
we could definitely feel the difference because Obama was using
those tools," he says. "Someone says, Tm going to canvass for Barack
Obama/ and gets it out to thirty friends on Facebook. And if five people
send it out, it multiplies. They recognized this technology earlier than
anyone else, and it had a lot to do with them getting the energy and
commitment of that generation of people who had not been involved
in campaigns previously."
Obama remains the most popular American politician on Facebook,
with about seven million supporters of his public profile as of early
2010. ("Favorite music: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bob Dylan, Stevie
Wonder, Johann Sebastian Bach (cello suites), and The Fugees.") But
number two is former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah
Palin, with more than 1.4 million.
Palin's success demonstrates that Facebook is not the preserve of
any one political orientation. She has mastered the art of Facebook
politics. After she resigned from her post as governor of Alaska, she
began managing her public presence almost exclusively on Facebook.
In August 2009 she catalyzed national conservative resistance to President
Obama's proposed health-care reforms by asserting in a post on her
Facebook page that Obama aimed to create "death panels" to determine
who could live or die. When the note stirred up a national controversy
Palin did not respond at all until, five days later, she posted yet another
Facebook post titled "Concerning the 'Death Panels/" It got her massive
coverage in the traditional media and attracted several hundred
thousand new supporters. "Facebook is perfectly suited for someone
as polarizing as Sarah Palin," Ari Fleischer, former press secretary for
President George W. Bush, told the website Politico. "It's the ideal way
for her to keep in touch, to rev up her base and go around the mainstream
media." Another Facebook and Twitter master is Scott Brown,
the Republican candidate who came from nowhere to win the special
election in January 2010 for Ted Kennedy's Massachusetts senate seat.
Facebook has been embraced by many governments as a tool to communicate
more efficiently with citizens and employees, in situations
both large and small. After Hurricane Gustav hit Louisiana in early September
2008, Facebook targeted users in the affected region and used
a special announcement on the top of its home page to ask them all to
update their Facebook status with an indication about their safety. It
coordinated this information with state and federal agencies to provide
real-time data about human needs in the affected regions. It intends to
use similar procedures in future disasters. In a less dire example, after
thousands were denied access to Obama's January 2009 inauguration
and became stranded in a Washington underground tunnel for hours,
some formed a Facebook group called Survivors of the Purple Tunnel
of Doom. It quickly gained more than 5,000 members. Shortly thereafter,
Terrance William Gainer, the sergeant-at-arms of the U.S. Senate,
who was responsible for much of the inauguration security, came onto
the group's Facebook page, wrote a lengthy apology, and engaged in
dialogue with some who had been trapped.
Facebook communication is becoming routine for agencies at all
levels of government. When the New York City Department of Health
wanted to promote the use of condoms to prevent the spread of HIV, it
launched a Facebook page and application that allowed users to send
one another a little image of a so-called "e-condom." The commandant
of the U.S. Coast Guard updates his Facebook status using his
cell phone when he travels, and the top U.S. general in Iraq maintains
a Facebook page to answer questions about U.S. activities there. The
White House streams President Obama's press conferences on Facebook,
enabling users to comment in real time with one another next to
the event. Even the Saudi Arabian minister of information has created a
profile on Facebook, where he accepts journalists as friends, takes their
interview requests, and releases information. Now government leaders
in many places are starting to talk about making it possible to renew
driver's licenses and interact in other ways with government on Facebook.
Facebook is the biggest of a number of websites redefining news into
something produced by ordinary individuals and consumed by their
friends. I create some news for you, you create some news for me —
Zuckerberg's gift economy again.
When Thefacebook first launched at Harvard in 2004, on each person's
profile page was a list of all the articles from the archives of the
Harvard Crimson in which he or she was mentioned. The feature was
quickly removed. In a 2009 post for the Nieman Journalism Lab, Zachary
Seward, a student at Harvard back then, suggests "Zuckerberg . . .
realized that Facebook wasn't a tool for keeping track of news made
somewhere else. It was a tool for making news right there, on Facebook."
And that is in fact exactly how Zuckerberg has always viewed the
News Feed—a real source of relevant news, both about your friends and
about the world. Long before Facebook debuted News Feed in 2006,
Zuckerberg had meticulously articulated in his diaries exactly how its
updates would be real news, going so far as to create a style sheet and
grammatical rules for News Feed "stories."
News on the News Feed was far more personal than what any professional
media organization had ever attempted to deliver. It was ordithe
facebook effect
nary everyday information about what your friends were doing and what
they were interested in. Recall the rationale Zuckerberg gave internally
for the News Feed: "A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more
relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa." Now
your every move on Facebook might become news for your friends.
On campuses, the near-total penetration of Facebook at U.S. high
schools and colleges has rendered traditional campus print media—the
newspaper and the yearbook—far less urgent. People find out what's
going on and who's doing what on Facebook. It's possible that focusing
on this diurnal news may make people care less about serious events
more distant from them—those people dying in Africa, for instance. It's
one of many important Facebook-related social questions that deserve
further study.
Sean Parker, who helped Zuckerberg develop his basic views about
the service, is passionate about Facebook's importance in altering the
landscape of media. In his view, individuals now determine what their
friends see as much as the editor at the local newspaper did in simpler
times. Facebook permits your friends to, in effect, construct for you a
personalized news portal that functions somewhat like the portals of
Yahoo or AOL or Microsoft. If I see a friend post a link to something
in a field I know they're expert in or passionate about, I am more likely
to click it than I am to click something that shows up on my MyYahoo
home page. And in the inadvertent spirit of a gift economy, in return I
frequently post links to things I find interesting, useful, or amusing. The
ever-intellectual self-educated Parker calls it "networks of people acting
as a decentralized relevancy filter." A similar but more anonymous form
of sharing is facilitated by websites like Digg, Reddit, or Twitter.
If a message is powerful enough it can spread to a vast sea of connected
individuals, regardless of who originated it. Chris Cox, Facebook's
vice president for product and a close Zuckerberg protege, puts
it this way: "We want to give to everyone that same power that mass
media has had to beam out a message." The leveling of the playing field
is much in evidence. For example, it was via Facebook status updates
that newscasters at CNN first learned of the January 2010 earthquake in
Haiti, a network executive said that day on the air.
So how do traditional media organizations fit into this new personcentric
information architecture? Paradoxically, if they are to most
benefit from the Facebook environment they have to learn to function
within it as if they were individuals. The playing field has been leveled
by the site's neutral way of treating all messages as similar. Any
media company, newspaper, or TV station can create its own page on
Facebook. But then it faces the same mandate to generate interesting,
relevant, and useful messages that an individual does. Activity on a page
gets deposited into users' News Feeds—just like the activity on any
individual's profile. First you have to get someone to embrace you as
your "fan," much like becoming a "friend" of an individual. Then the
goal is to get people who see the information you produce to endorse
it themselves by clicking Facebook's ubiquitous "like" indicator or by
commenting on what you post. That forwards it further to their network
of friends and keeps it virally alive. Largely because of the efficiency of
this process, Facebook has become one of the top drivers of traffic to
major media websites, often behind only Google. Facebook may also
challenge conventional media financially over time—by, along with
other websites, drawing away the lucrative brand advertising that has
been a mainstay of TV, magazines, and newspapers.
Facing these changes, many major media companies are trying to
work with Facebook rather than against it. NBC, for example, in summer
2009 previewed an upcoming new series called Community exclusively
on Facebook. Only those who identified themselves as the show's
fans could see the preview episodes. NBC advertised on its own website
as well as on Facebook that these previews were available. The service's
penetration among the young and media-savvy demographic presumed
to be the show's audience meant that the preponderance of potential
viewers were already on Facebook. So limiting it to Facebook didn't
limit the audience so much as it provided information about exactly
who the audience was, since Facebook can provide aggregate demographics
of a page's fan base to companies.
The line between Facebook and old media is blurring. Verizon
has incorporated Facebook along with Twitter and a few other social
media websites into its FIOS broadband television rollout. You can log
in to Facebook on your TV using your remote, and on a split screen
use it to update your status and share information with friends about
shows you're watching. Some media companies, like the Huffington
Post, have deeply integrated Facebook into their websites so users can
use their Facebook identity to share and comment on stories and videos
with friends.
The next phase is likely to be a more thorough marriage between
Facebook and conventional media, especially television. As the FIOS
integration suggests, Facebook gives viewers a platform to in effect watch
TV with their friends. There are other ways to do the same thing. Facebook
has also made it quite easy for any video broadcast on the Web to
be accompanied by live commentary by Facebook users through their
status messages, which can be seen on any site's page that chooses to
integrate them. One of the first examples of such integration was when
CNN enabled users to comment online during the inauguration of
President Obama. You could watch the updates of all the other viewers
(which reached 8,500 per minute) or just those posted by people on
your own friend list. ABC.com did something similar during the 2009
Academy Awards.
A world in which each individual has a clear window into the contributions
of everyone else, potlatch-style, does not dovetail well with
how most companies are run. While employees of just about every
company in America are on Facebook in force, its intersection with
the classically structured corporation has been awkward and clumsy
so far. Gary Hamel, one of the great theorists of modern management,
considers that inevitable. "The social transformation now happening
on the Web," he explains, "will totally transform how we think about
organizations large and small." Hamel says historically there have been
only two basic ways to, as he puts it, "aggregate and amplify human capabilities."
They were bureaucracy and markets. "Then in the last ten
years we have added a third —networks. That helps us work together on
complex tasks, but it also destroys the power of the elite to determine
who gets heard."
Few companies have wrestled effectively with this contradiction.
Elites—such as the managers of the typical corporation—seldom willingly
surrender power and authority. Says author and strategy consultant John
Hagel: "Companies are facing the same issues that individuals are facing,
which is the degree of transparency and openness that's appropriate," he
says. "But in general individuals are moving more rapidly and developing
more appropriate social practices than institutions are." This is one of several
reasons why many companies now restrict the use of Facebook in the
office. The spread of Facebook as a communications medium so far has
been too rapid for most managements to have understood what it means.
Some executives, however, have embraced Facebook in the enterprise.
When they do they almost universally encounter social dynamics
that unsettle the corporate power equilibrium. At Serena Software, a
Silicon Valley company that was running out of gas as a provider of
software for mainframe computers, new CEO Jeremy Burton turned
to Facebook in late 2007 as a tool to shake up a hidebound, old-school
corporate culture. Serena even set aside a couple of hours weekly on
what it called "Facebook Fridays" for employees to establish Facebook
connections with co-workers, suppliers, customers, and anyone else.
Burton became Facebook friends with hundreds of Serena's nine
hundred employees. As a result, Burton gained useful insights into how
Serena functioned day to day. Employees casually posted details about
their jobs and sent him surprisingly candid Facebook messages. "People
feel more comfortable telling the CEO things on Facebook than they
ever would in person or with email," he says. "They feel if s more informal."
But informality comes with other costs. Burton's much younger
brother in England sometimes bluntly disagreed with what Burton said
on Facebook, in full view of employees and other friends.
Then came 2008's precipitous economic downturn. Serena, like
every other company, saw revenue plummet. Burton had to lay off
about 10 percent of the company's workers. Accordingly he had to decide
whether once an employee was laid off he ought to "unfriend" the
person on Facebook. He found the layoff process deeply unsettling, and
shared some of his feelings about it on Facebook. A couple of people
who were laid off sent him sympathetic notes there, acknowledging the
challenges he faced or proclaiming their time at Serena to have been
valuable no matter how unhappily it ended. He remained Facebook
friends with several people he fired.
At a completely different kind of company, global journalism and
financial information powerhouse Thomson Reuters, Editor in Chief
David Schlesinger found a similarly informal dynamic. He's a rabid
Facebook partisan who checks the service "easily two dozen times a
day/' and who, as manager of one of the world's biggest news services,
concedes, "I actually think the Facebook News Feed is real news. It tells
me news Fm interested in." He mostly uses Facebook to connect with
colleagues and employees but says the way he relates to people there
does not depend on where they work. "There are some journalists six
levels below me in the hierarchy with whom I have a very intimate relationship
on Facebook," he says. "A junior reporter who is my friend may
ask me for advice on a story when they would never dare do it by email
or telephone or in person. It's wonderful. I love it. The HR jargon for it
would be level-jumping." Schlesinger, like Burton, is a secure manager
who wants to empower people in his organization. Executives more
eager to exercise power themselves will not find it so comfortable. Most
of them—and we all know how many there are—stay off Facebook.
Companies are often eager to get marketers and sales executives
onto Facebook as its importance in that world grows. Sony Pictures, an
early Facebook advertiser, decreed back in 2006 that executives should
have Facebook profiles. At computer-chip maker Intel, the sales and
marketing departments conducted a sort of treasure hunt with an iPod
as the prize. To participate you had to start with clues at a fictitious
Facebook profile. But in order to see that profile you had to create one
for yourself.
From early on, companies have been approaching Facebook asking
for special features for enterprise use, but Zuckerberg has never been
particularly interested. Companies want, for example, to be able to sequester
employee conversations so absolutely no outside "friends" could
ever see their internal discussions. That remains impossible. Executives
at Facebook say such capability will eventually get built, it's just not a
high priority now as the company is growing so quickly among conChanging
Our Institutions
sumers. But co-founder Moskovitz feels strongly about building features
that help companies collaborate internally in the way that Facebook
has made it so easy to "collaborate" with your friends. The presumption
at Asana, Moskovitz ?s San Francisco-based start-up, is that electronically
facilitated collaboration will increasingly be built into the fabric
of every successful enterprise. At Facebook, Moskovitz consistently advocated
giving employees tools that empowered them inside the enterprise,
and many of his innovations remain in use there today.
Microsoft, the world's leading business software company and a
big Facebook investor and partner, has periodically campaigned to get
Facebook to enable a version of its service to work in conjunction with
Microsoft Office. That idea has consistently been met with yawns, to
the consternation of some at Microsoft. Now Salesforce.com, a smaller
but agile competitor of Microsoft, has launched a social network for
businesses called Chatter. Companies of many types are beginning to
experiment with that and similar products.
Facebook itself is both a beneficiary and a victim of the dynamics of
the gift economy its CEO is so partial to. The more users want to contribute,
the more activity they generate and the more page views Facebook
can use to display advertising. But because Zuckerberg has given
Facebook's users such powerful tools to express their views, the company
itself has regularly borne the brunt of user dissatisfaction when it
took actions people disapproved of. Digital democracy affects life inside
Facebook even more than outside it.
Zuckerberg accepts this as inevitable. "We're a vehicle that gives
people the power to share information, so we are driving that trend.
We also have to live by it," he says. That was tough enough to deal with
in the quaint days of the News Feed controversy, when Facebook had
fewer than 10 million users. Now, with the burden of more than 400
million empowered and contributing users, Zuckerberg's life is becoming
considerably more complicated thanks to the extraordinary tools he
has made available to all these people.