The Evolution of Facebook

On the first workday of 2009, Mark Zuckerberg—he of the rubber sandals,
T-shirts, and fleece jackets—arrived at work wearing a conservative
tie and a collared white dress shirt. "It's a serious year/' he told everyone
who asked. He was going to wear a tie all year, he explained, to underscore
the issues Facebook faced as growth reached stratospheric levels.
But it wasn't growth per se that made Zuckerberg feel he needed to
signal a new seriousness to his peers. It wasn't the need for "monetization,"
either. Rather, it was the challenges that come with being a rapidly
evolving communications platform that has already been embraced
by a mass audience.
Zuckerberg still sees Facebook as a work in progress. Toward the
end of 2008 I asked him what he considered its biggest challenge. "The
biggest thing is going to be leading the user base through the changes
that need to cpntinue to happen," he answered without any hesitation.
"Whenever we roll out any major product there's some sort of backlash.
We need to be sure we can still aggressively build products that are on
the edge and manage this big user base. I'd like us to keep pushing the
envelope."
Facebook was still less than five years old, but it had already brought
its users through a series of major changes. The inclusion of photos, the
introduction of the News Feed, and the expansion of Facebook through
the applications platform and the translation tools had each, in its own
way, fundamentally altered the product and transformed the user experience.
Now Zuckerberg and his engineers were planning further dramatic
changes. He wouldn't think of abandoning them. It was going to
be a serious year.
Even in late 2008, when Zuckerberg confessed these concerns about
keeping Facebook moving forward, he had already initiated a series of
changes intended to get users exchanging even more information with
one another. In September 2008, only two weeks after briefly celebrating
100 million active users, with a toga party, Facebook reorganized
profile pages in a way many found jarring. As always it led to loud user
protests. Inside the company the initiative was nicknamed "FB 95" in
an ironic and admiring wink to Windows 95—the Microsoft operating
system that finally and indisputably made Windows a mass-market
product and turned Windows-based PCs into a resilient worldwide monopoly.
This change to profile pages was supposed to similarly help
Facebook blanket the world.
The primary aim of the redesign was to increase the velocity of information
flowing between users —or "sharing," in the lexicon of Facebook—
and to simplify the site's design to make it easier to digest an
ever-increasing volume of information. In the most significant change,
two separate components of your profile were combined—the "wall,"
where friends sent you direct public messages, and the "mini-feed," the
personalized News Feed that displayed information about you. Now everything
that was about you was in one place. A central aim was to create
more launchpads for discussion. At the top of your profile was now a
box called the "publisher"—an enhanced version of the old slot where
you merely posted status updates. But the box was now for content of
all types, everything from quotidian updates of the classic sort—"I'm
getting into the shower now"—to photos, videos, and links to articles
and sites of interest around the Web. Whereas Facebook's old status
update box had prompted you with something like this "David Kirkpatrick
i s . . . ," now the publisher box included a much more open-ended
question: "What's on your mind?"
In order to ease Facebook's increasingly skittish users into the new
design, the company gave users a trial version almost two months before
requiring them all to shift over. It maintained old and new versions
in parallel. As Zuckerberg said, "The technology is the least
difficult part." Managing Facebook was becoming an exercise in crowd
psychology.
But careful user relations only went so far. Many users hated the redesign.
Thousands again joined groups protesting it, though not nearly
as many as had protested against News Feed. A few days after the redesign,
even computer executive Michael Dell joined a group called
Petition Against the "New Facebook." Young people especially were
attached to their old wall, which had been in place in one version or
another since late 2004.
On the day in July 2008 when Facebook first showcased its redesign,
influential tech journalist Michael Arrington wrote a prophetic item on
his widely read TechCrunch news site. It was titled "The Friendfeedization
of Facebook." FriendFeed was a small website started in October
2007 by several former top Google engineers. As Arrington pointed out,
it "expertly combined the idea of an activity stream that was first popularized
by Facebook with the microblogging trend introduced by Twitter."
Now, with its redesign, Arrington saw Facebook mimicking FriendFeed
by taking its own traditional News Feed content and blending it with
beefed-up status updates that resembled the so-called tweets on Twitter.
For the first time since it emerged, Facebook was now being forced
to react, at least in part, to the innovations of others. And while it may
have begun to look a bit like still-tiny FriendFeed, the major new force
in the equation was Twitter. Created in 2006, Twitter gives users a forum
to post updates of no more than 140 characters. To many, especially
people who don't use both, Twitter seems much like Facebook, because
both put great emphasis on rapid sharing of information between
individuals. But on Twitter people do not become "friends." Instead
you can sign up to "follow" anyone's tweets—the name users give its
telegraphic updates. Twitterers are not necessarily even people. A large
percentage of Twitter accounts use aliases or company names. And unlike
those on Facebook, Twitter connections are one-way. Facebook's
heritage is as an identity-based platform to communicate with people
you know offline, but Twitter is a broadcast platform—a medium perfect
for companies, brands, bloggers, celebrities, and anyone who has
something they want lots of people to know about.
There are undeniable parallels between the two products. The status
update is a central feature of both. Twitter, like Facebook, opened
itself up early as a platform for other applications. Indeed, many users
tweet and view the tweets of others on independent sites like Tweet-
Deck. Twitter one-upped Facebook as well in its blase approach to revenue—
in 2009, three years after it was founded, it still had virtually
none. Growth was its mantra, and it was getting plenty of it.
Twitter's momentum with users continued to build over the subsequent
months. Facebook was now large, established, and from the
press's point of view, a bit old hat. Twitter was the next thing. It quickly
became the "it" tech company, a status Facebook had occupied for
most of 2007 and 2008. Predictions that Twitter would supplant Facebook
were rife. Zuckerberg and his team were following Twitter closely.
They were extremely focused on the degree to which the enthusiasm of
the press and Silicon Valley cognoscenti had migrated to Twitter.
At an onstage interview at the Web 2.0 conference in early November,
two months after instituting Facebook's redesign, Zuckerberg said
he was "really impressed" by Twitter and called its service "an elegant
model." Around that same time Facebook got deep into secret talks to
buy Twitter—reportedly for $500 million in stock. The deal didn't happen,
among other reasons because Twitter's executives were not confident
in the potential value of Facebook's stock.
Facebook made yet another huge transition in late 2008. Zuckerberg
aimed to start embedding Facebook into the very fabric of the Internet.
In a fundamental change to its platform, the company launched Facebook
Connect. The launch was an appeal to developers to start building
on top of Facebook in a new way.
Connect makes it possible for any site on the Web to allow you to
log in using your Facebook account. That accomplishes several things.
It lets you bring your identity with you wherever you go online. Because
you can tell Connect to send information back into your Facebook
feed, it's a way to project information about the actions you take
on those sites back to your Facebook friends just as if they were actions
inside Facebook. It also enables Facebook to lend its virality—the way it
so efficiently transmits information from one user to many friends—to
any website that wants to take advantage of it.
For users, Facebook Connect offers what could turn into a universal
Internet log-in. Over 80,000 websites use it in some fashion, as of February
2010, and 60 million Facebook members are actively employing it.
Connect partners include about half of all the top 100 websites in the
world, as measured by the comSource research firm, Facebook executive
Ethan Beard told a conference audience. They range from Yahoo,
the world's largest content website, to big media sites like CNN, the
Huffington Post, Gawker, and TechCrunch, hot start-ups like Fanbase
and Foursquare, and devices like the iPhone and the Xbox gaming console.
"We aspire to be a technology that people use to connect to things
they care about no matter where they are," Beard told the conference.
(Remember how proud Zuckerberg was, way back in the fall of 2003,
when he said that with CourseMatch "you could link to people through
things"?)
When readers log in to comment or interact on one of these sites or
devices using Facebook Connect they are identified by their Facebook
photo and real name. This addresses a huge problem that has afflicted
blogs and news sites—the significant percentage of posts by readers that
have been extreme, insulting, and anonymous. When discussants log
in under their real names with Connect, the dialogue becomes more
civilized.
"Facebook Connect is the future of the way that platform is going to
work," says Zuckerberg. "I don't think it's going to be these little applications
inside Facebook. It will be whole websites that just use people's
information from Facebook in order to share more information." Now
he says that Facebook's internal platform, which enabled applications
to operate inside the bounds of the service, was merely "an important
training step."
Despite widespread enthusiasm for the opportunities Connect offers
to tap into Facebook's hundreds of millions of users, some potential
partners are skeptical. "It's a Trojan horse strategy," says the CEO of one
New York-based media company who pays close attention to Facebook
but has no intention of deploying Connect. He sees it as a method to get
between him and his customers. He predicts that once Facebook makes
sites dependent on its log-in and access to users, it will start making
demands. For now there is no charge to use Connect, but he expects
that to change.
Connect will also most likely become a vehicle for delivering advertising.
This possibility has been downplayed by executives thus far. But
Dustin Moskovitz, who speaks more freely now that he's left the company,
says sites that use Connect will ultimately be able to display ads
provided to the site by Facebook. "[They] will know which Facebook
user is on their site," he explains, "so [they] can use all of Facebook's adtargeting
information. That's absolutely core to the Connect strategy."
Sharing in the revenue that these targeted ads make possible on other
sites could become an important business for Facebook.
Another function of Connect is that it will give Facebook even
more information about users, including data no longer limited just to
what they do on Facebook.com.
In January, around the time Zuckerberg was donning his tie, a potentially
serious internal crisis erupted at Facebook. As President-elect
Obama was assembling his cabinet and advisers, he hired Lawrence
Summers to be the chairman of the National Economic Council at
the White House. When Summers had been secretary of the Treasury
under Bill Clinton his chief of staff had been Sheryl Sandberg. Summers
and Sandberg have remained close, and some senior people at the
company worried she might join the new administration and thought
it a real possibility. She decided to stay put. She was becoming an essential
partner to Zuckerberg.
In February, the year got even more serious. Facebook's legal department
posted a few changes to the company's "terms of service," the
legalese that is intended mainly to indemnify a company against lawsuits
by disgruntled users. This new version of the rules, which every
new user must stipulate they have read and agreed to, even though they
usually don't, were at first ignored by virtually everyone. But at 6 P.M.
on Sunday, February 15, a blog called the Consumerist, published by
Consumers Union, took a close look at the changes and published a
post titled "Facebook's New Terms of Service: We Can Do Anything
We Want With Your Content. Forever.7"
The article expressed alarm about the terms and quoted a section
about what happens to content you post: "You hereby grant Facebook
an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide
license (with the right to sublicense) to ... use, copy, publish,
stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display. . . ." Actually, that
terrifying-sounding language was unchanged from the previous version,
but in a key change, a subsequent clause had been excised. It said that
if you removed your content from Facebook, this license would expire.
Removing that clause changed everything, in the opinion of the Consumerist.
Its recommendation: "Make sure you never upload anything
you don't feel comfortable giving away forever, because it's Facebook's
now."
This post was quickly picked up by a number of other blogs and by
many in the mainstream press. Suddenly Zuckerberg was under unexpected
pressure. How, asked a swelling volume of articles appearing
around the world, could he assert he owned the information Facebook's
users posted there? He couldn't. And in his opinion, he hadn't. But unlike
in some earlier incidents, he was prepared to say so immediately.
By 5 P.M. Monday he had posted a lengthy and thoughtful response
on the Facebook Blog, titled "On Facebook, People Own and Control
Their Information." "In reality, we wouldn't share your information in
a way you wouldn't want," Zuckerberg wrote, attempting to reassure
users. But then he went on to explain the complicated new legal terrain
that a service like his now operated in. Users want to control their
own information, but they also want to control and sometimes move
information other users have entrusted to them—such as cell-phone
numbers, photos, etc.
It was not enough. A twenty-five-year-old user from Los Angeles
named Julius Harper quickly created a group called People Against the
New Terms of Service, which soon merged with another protest group
created by Anne Kathrine Petteroe of Oslo, Norway. By Tuesday the
The Evolution ofFacebook
group had 30,000 members. By Wednesday it was 100,000. Again the
tools for rapid communication and organization that Facebook gives its
users were being deployed against it. Meanwhile, the Electronic Privacy
Information Center and twenty-five other consumer protection
organizations were preparing to file a complaint with the Federal Trade
Commission on Wednesday.
Zuckerberg quickly surrendered, less than three days after the original
article appeared. At 1 A.M. on Wednesday, he announced on the
blog that Facebook was temporarily reverting to the old terms of service
while it decided what to do next. He had said even in his earlier note
that he agreed that much of the language in the terms seemed overly
formal and needed to be simplified. In this late-night note, he invited
Facebook's users to join a newly formed company group to discuss what
the terms ought to say, and promised "users will have a lot of input in
crafting these terms."
The following week Zuckerberg announced that Facebook had created
two new documents: a set of Facebook Principles to lay out the
"guiding framework" for company policies, and a "Statement of Rights
and Responsibilities" that would replace the old terms of service. He
asked people to comment on both, and announced that users would
be invited to vote for or against them before they went into effect. He
ended with a kind of rhetoric you seldom hear from CEOs: "History
tells us that systems are most fairly governed when there is an open and
transparent dialogue between the people who make decisions and those
who are affected by them. We believe history will one day show that this
principle holds true for companies as well, and we're looking [forward]
to moving in this direction with you."
In subsequent weeks Facebook lived up to its pledge. It invited the
creators of the original protest group, Harper and Petteroe, to help it
evaluate and organize comments about the documents. Zuckerberg
announced a vote that would be binding if at least 30 percent of Facebook's
users participated. Since, the week before, he had announced
that Facebook now topped 200 million active users, that meant 60 million
people would have to vote, an unlikely prospect. But he was at least
in theory submitting to the will of the people.
In the end only 666,000 votes were cast, with 74 percent of users
favoring the revised Statement of Rights and Responsibilities. The Consumerist
pronounced itself satisfied. Internet activists were impressed.
Jonathan Zittrain, a professor at Harvard Law School and author of the
alarmist book The Future of the Internet—and How to Stop It, wrote
an admiring article noting that Zuckerberg had encouraged Facebook's
users to view themselves as citizens—of Facebook.
Zuckerberg was pleased when I talked to him two weeks after the
results were announced. He planned more such votes in the future. "If
we do something controversial, what this will really mean is that we're
accountable to our users," he told me. "We now need to communicate
with them clearly about it. I think that keeps us honest/' It was a serious
year, but he was displaying a seriousness to match it.
In March 2009, Facebook made yet another dramatic set of changes,
this time explicitly aimed at co-opting Twitter. The changes in this redesign
were most visible not on your profile, with its "wall," but on the
home page where you first land in Facebook and see information about
your friends. The top of that page now sported a publisher box just like
the one on your profile. The message was getting louder—Share! Beneath
this box, the News Feed had morphed into what Facebook now
called a "stream," a continuous list of updates and other information
from friends. But the stream also included updates from a new source:
pages where you had become a "fan." Now becoming the fan of a commercial
Facebook page was almost identical to following a person or
company on Twitter.
The new streamed News Feed differed from the old one in two
fundamental ways. It was updated in real time (like Twitter), and it was
not based on an algorithm (neither was Twitter). The old News Feed
depended on software that watched your past behavior and attempted
to guess what you would be interested in. You could never be sure what
would surface. The new stream, by contrast, was what the eggheads at
Facebook loved to call "deterministic." You determine exactly what appears
there. Facebook added filters on the left side of the home page to
help you control what appeared in your stream. You could use them to
see videos, or photos, or status updates, for example. You could also put
friends and pages into groups to create different personalized views of
the stream. Now, for instance, you could see just family members, or
people from your high school class, or employees at Facebook, or your
best friends.
It was a heady and confusing mix. There remained a small algorithmic
section on the home page called Highlights, an unappealing list of
small items and tiny photographs on the lower right side of the page.
Few people found it very useful. And this time Facebook abandoned
the previous redesign's deliberately gentle introduction process. There
were no trial periods or parallel versions to ease users into the changes.
But it was immediately apparent that many of Facebook's 175 million
users did not like the changes.
Nor did the company's increasingly defensive staffers expect them
to. As soon as Facebook began to roll out the new design someone created
a satirical group entitled I AUTOMATICALLY HATE THE NEW
FACEBOOK HOME PAGE. Many of the group's members worked
at Facebook. Its description read: "I HATE CHANGE AND EVERYTHING
ASSOCIATED WITH IT. I WANT EVERYTHING TO REMAIN
STATIC THROUGHOUT MY ENTIRE LIFE." Staffers posted
facetious remarks. "BRING FACEBOOK BACK TO ITS FORMER
GLORY. HARVARD-ONLY," wrote one. "I will hate this redesign until
another iteration, in the event [of] which I will love this redesign and
vehemently oppose the successor," wrote another, sarcastically.
Two weeks after the redesign, yet another Twitter-like feature was
added—new privacy settings that enabled you to open parts or all of
your profile to everyone on Facebook. And in what would be the coup
de grace, plans were in the works to enable users to "fan" individuals.
Adding such asymmetric connections for individuals would more or less
complete Facebook's mimickry and make it possible to function essentially
as if you were on Twitter. But while Zuckerberg originally planned
to add this feature in June 2009, he still hadn't by February 2010.
By mid-2009, Twitter had 50 million members, and Facebook continued
running scared. "Every time I hang out with a Facebook emthe
facebook effect
ployee, they ask me what I think of Twitter," Moskovitz told me in May.
One thing even he worried about was that top engineers were starting
to choose to work at Twitter rather than Facebook (or his own new startup).
"At Facebook we feel like if we address this, we can definitely win,"
he said, "but we would certainly feel like shit if we just like weren't paying
attention and Twitter did something we didn't understand and got
past us." Facebook board member Marc Andreessen, who is also an investor
in Twitter, told me around the same time that the two companies
were "elephant bumping." "It's too late for somebody to compete with
Facebook on Facebook's turf," he said. "So when the threats come, they
will be disruptive in nature, right? Disruptive threats tend to come up
from below. They fly up your tailpipe, instead of coming straight at you.
So Twitter is the kind of thing that Facebook should be very aware of."
Sean Parker, who tries hard to stay involved in Facebook product
decisions from a distance, was a longtime advocate of turning News
Feed into a stream that looked more like Twitter. Zuckerberg in fact
resisted it for a long time, but the growing competitive pressure from
Twitter, along with relentless politicking by Parker and others like Adam
D'Angelo, finally convinced him. "Mark always told me he wasn't going
to do it," says Parker, "but in classic Mark style he listens and listens and
listens and then at some point comes to the conclusion on his own that
this is the way it has to go."
Facebook's longtime self-definition as a place to connect with
people you know in the real world is becoming slowly but steadily less
central. To be a "friend" requires a bidirectional interaction. Both you
and your friend must accede to it, as Parker explains. But now there are
other sorts of useful relationships in Facebook. Parker predicts Facebook
will, over time, formally separate the three components to becoming a
friend with someone on Facebook—declaring that you know them, giving
them permission to see your own information, and subscribing to
see all the information they produce.
Zuckerberg concedes that "the concept of a 'friend7 is definitely
getting overloaded." He says that word was useful to "get people over a
bunch of hurdles." Most importantly it got them used to sharing a lot of
information about themselves—after all, only friends would see it. But
Facebook has offered only a binary choice for your relationships with
others: friend or nonfriend. It will gradually offer more subtle ways to
tune interactions with people. Friending will become more nuanced to
more accurately reflect the various degrees of connection we have with
people. All of us who have agonized over whether to accept a friend
request from somebody we barely know will have more options.
But something else is going on as well —over time Facebook will
become about much more than friendship. The first indication of that
was when it added fan pages and sent page updates into your News Feed
alongside updates from individuals. Ethan Beard, a Google veteran who
is now marketing boss for Facebook's platform and a key member of
Zuckerberg's team, explains: "As weVe continued to evolve our thinking
weVe realized there is more to the graph than just people—the objects,
items, organizations, and ideas you are connected with. Anything.
By mapping out all these things we can come up with an extremely
robust sense of a person's identity/' In other words, the fact that you're
a fan of U2, a coffee shop in your neighborhood, and Ayn Rand says
more about you than the fact that you friended someone you met at a
conference last year.
The future of Facebook will involve giving people tools to uncover
relationships with other people that are manifested through common
interests and behavior. Such a new direction poses the risk that it could
make Facebook feel more like a place for marketing and less like a
place for friendship.
As Facebook maps out all these additional connections and monitors
every user's interactions with them, Zuckerberg predicts users will
be sharing an ever-increasing volume of data. "Think of it as just this
massive stream of information," he says. "It's almost the stream of all
human consciousness and communication, and the products we build
are just different views of that. The concept of the social graph has been
a very useful construct, but I think increasingly this concept of the social
stream—the aggregate stream for everyone—will be as important"
When he thinks about the evolution of this stream, Zuckerberg makes
a comparison to Moore's law, the prediction by Intel's Gordon Moore
back in the 1960s that the number of transistors that could fit on a comthe
facebook effect
puter chip would grow exponentially over time. He thinks there is a similar
exponential phenomenon at work in social networking. In a decade,
he believes, a thousand times more information about each individual
member may flow through Facebook. This hypothesis has corollaries he
finds intriguing. Says he: "People are going to have to have a device with
them at all times that's [automatically] sharing. You can predict that."
In urging Facebook's users to turn more of their updates and other
contributions into public broadcasts, and by attempting also to shuffle
in their commercial behavior as well as their interactions with friends,
Zuckerberg is gambling that people will over time care progressively less
and less about privacy and that they will actually want all the additional
information that will be coming their way. It's not just the increased volume
of information that's potentially problematic. Will people tolerate
so much information about themselves getting loose on the Net? With
a considerable portion of the world's population on board, Facebook
may become a giant experiment in personal disclosure. Zuckerberg says
he remains committed to giving people the privacy controls they want.
Whether he can resolve these contradictions as he changes the software
beneath more than 400 million users will be fascinating to watch.
In late April 2009, Facebook quietly made a change as radical as any it
had ever attempted. With the release of something called the Facebook
Open Stream API, the company laid groundwork that could transform
the way people use its service. The Stream API is a sort of companion to
Facebook Connect. If Connect is a way to extend Facebook's platform
across the Web, the Stream API represents a way to distribute the experience
of being on Facebook outside the service itself. That may sound
odd. Today we mostly take for granted that the way users consume Facebook
information is on their home page at Facebook.com.
The Stream API lets any site take that feed and publish it elsewhere—
even potentially to alter and add to it in a way that could not happen inside
Facebook. It will let other services build sites that look and feel much
like Facebook itself, even though the data flows will still be controlled
from Facebook's servers. If I want, I could build my own website where
The Evolution of .Ratebook ••
any Facebook user could see their entire News Feed. Users can act at
these external sites much as they can inside Facebook. Data can flow
back into friends' News Feeds, too. The software service called Tweet-
Deck enables this already, among others.
Just two days after the Stream API announcement, I had dinner
in New York with Sean Parker, who spent a good portion of our time
together that night denouncing it. "It's- the greatest strategic gamble the
company has ever made and will ever make/' he said in his intense
rapid cadence. "Opening the stream to the world has the possibility of
breaking the company's network effect. As a closed network the switching
costs are incredibly high and everybody's forced to play in Facebook's
sandbox. But when you open the stream to the world you open
the possibility of better Facebook clients that can process all the same
data that Facebook itself can."
These words were still ringing in my ears a week later when I sat
alone with Zuckerberg for a long interview in a corner conference
room near his desk in Palo Alto. He didn't dispute what Parker said, but
nonetheless remained unperturbed. He launched into a discussion of
the perils that come when companies "build walls around themselves."
"The best thing we can do is kind of move smoothly with the world
around us," he continued, "and to have constant competition, not build
walls. To the extent that we think most of the sharing is going to happen
outside of Facebook anyway, we really want to encourage it. I can't
guarantee we'll succeed. I just think that if we don't do this then eventually
we will fail."
I asked him if he didn't worry that such conceptual boldness could
jeopardize the company's finances. "It's only the right argument if you're
trying to build something that has value over decades," he said. "It's really
important for people to understand that what we're doing now is
just the beginning." Chamath Palihapitiya, whose job at Facebook is
to think about growth, says, "Mark has the most long-term perspective
I've ever seen. This guy is uber uber uber on the long-term view." Facebook's
ambitions for Connect and the Stream API remain vast. Says top
Facebook designer Aaron Sittig: "If we open things up slowly over time,
we could get to total ubiquity."
The company's senior managers are consistent in saying that Facebook
will evolve beyond being just a "site." Its services will be available
widely. It will become a storehouse for information, like a bank, but also
a clearinghouse and transit point, like the post office or the telephone
company. It could become nothing more than an identity registry and
a hub for conveying data between different people. But that could be a
very powerful position in the business ecosystem.
Some managers say Facebook on the Internet could ultimately become
like an Intel chip inside a PC—something you use but seldom
think about. And Matt Cohler, departed from Facebook but still deeply
involved, says, "In five years there won't be a distinction between being
on and off Facebook. It will be something that goes with you wherever
you are communicating with people."
Think of it like having a piece of software that in effect contains
your friends—or at least a persistent and potentially live connection to
any of them. That "software" will allow you to stay abreast of whatever
they do, and tell them whatever you want about yourself. Anytime we
are doing anything online and have a question we will be able to turn to
our friends. We may be able to converse with them in real time as well,
through chat, voice, or video.
This experience will increasingly go with us as we traverse the real
world as well, since most people will carry devices with an always-on
connection to the Internet. Facebook's iPhone, BlackBerry, and Google
Android applications as well as those on other mobile phones are already
used by more than 100 million users worldwide. In some countries
this is already the primary way people use Facebook. In the future,
the main way people will use Facebook will be on a mobile device.
Here's a possible scenario: Imagine you're at a football game and
your mobile device shows you which of your friends are also in the
stadium—perhaps even where they're sitting. Maybe it could tell you
who in your section of the stands has attended exactly the same games
as you in the past. Or who is a fan of the same teams as you. This may
seem cool to many users. To others it may feel Orwellian.
Shopping is another arena that could be transformed. Wouldn't you
want to know, whenever you were considering an expensive purchase
like a car or a refrigerator or a camera, exactly which of your friends had
purchased—or maybe just considered—the same purchase? Some developer
will probably figure out how to get Facebook to tell you that. It
will also have to ensure that all that information flies around only with
the user's consent.
Facebook might even begin to function as a sort of auxiliary memory.
As you walk down a street you could query your profile to learn
when you were last there, and with whom. Or a location-aware mobile
device could alert you to the proximity of people youVe interacted with
on Facebook, and remind you how. The software could even start to
make elementary decisions on your behalf. Platform marketer Ethan
Beard says you will probably be able to simply tell your TiVo to record
whatever shows your friends are recording. And here's a scenario he suggests:
"Imagine I can get in my car and just say, 'I want to go to David
Kirkpatrick's house/ It knows who I am and can go inside Facebook,
find out where David lives, and direct me there using GPS. Ideas like
that are so powerful, how could they not happen?"
In early August 2009, Facebook acquired FriendFeed for about $50
million, by far its largest acquisition. It really was the FriendFeedization
of Facebook. Bringing into Facebook both FriendFeed's technology as
well as its ex-Google founders, star coders that they are, was intended to
significantly bolster Facebook's ability to compete with Twitter.
In keeping with Facebook's more elastic conception of itself, in
September it launched Facebook Lite. It was the first true brand extension—
to Facebook as Diet Coke is to Coke. Lite is intended for people
who use a mobile phone or do not have broadband Internet access or
for some other reason need a smaller, less data-intensive window into
Facebook that does not consume much bandwidth. It is a stripped-down
version of the service without things like videos. As Facebook heads toward
500 million users, Zuckerberg is embracing user segmentation.
Facebook has implemented a daunting parade of changes, even as it
continues its headlong growth. Zuckerberg was becoming resigned to
protests from the relative few so long as more and more people found
value in his service. He started saying he couldn't wait for 2010 so he
could stop wearing that damned tie.