Facebook and the World

Mark Zuckerberg is in a large van on the campus of the prestigious
University of Navarra in Pamplona, Spain. It's October 2008 and he's
just finished speaking for an hour in the school's largest lecture hall.
The hall seats only about four hundred, but at least six hundred students
had crammed inside. Before the van can move, a crowd gathers,
all of them waving frantically and straining to catch Zuckerberg's eye.
As the van pulls away, a group of five or six girls runs ahead. When he
gets out at his next destination, the president's office—the girls are there
again. Zuckerberg amenably agrees to pose with them for a photo (to
be posted on Facebook, of course). Then the group dissolves into elated
giggles, still casting sidelong glances, not believing their good fortune.
"You're a rock star now," says Anikka Fragodt, Zuckerberg's trusted personal
assistant (since February 2006), who with three other Facebook
employees (and me) has joined him for a promotional swing through
Europe.
An epochal change on the Internet was announced in March 2009 by
the Nielsen Company research firm. Time spent on social networks by
Internet users worldwide had for the first time exceeded the amount of
time Internet users spent on email. A new form of communication had
gone mainstream. Total time spent on social networks grew a healthy 63
percent in 2008 around the world. Facebook, however, was in another
league. It outdistanced every other service Nielsen measured. Time
spent on Facebook had increased 566 percent in a year, to 20.5 billion
minutes.
The scale of Facebook's global growth in recent years is difficult to
grasp. From the moment it opened to nonstudent users in fall 2006,
English-speakers around the world began to stream on board. In early
2008, Facebook inaugurated a novel translation project, and by the
end of 2008 it could be used in thirty-five languages. But even then,
with the internationalization project still in its early phases, 70 percent
of Facebook's then 145 million active users were already outside the
United States. Nielsen calculated at that point that fully 30 percent of
the world's Internet users were on Facebook, up from 11.1 percent a
year earlier. The only service with more users is Google.
The company's own expectations continue to be surpassed. Its ambitious
confidential internal goal at the beginning of 2009 was to reach
275 million active users by the end of that year. Few at the company
thought it attainable. But it reached the goal by August and by the end
of the year had more than 350 million users and was growing about a
million new users per day in 180 countries.
Improbable statistics continue accumulating. In seventeen countries
around the world, more than 30 percent of all citizens —not Internet
users but citizens—are on Facebook, according to the Facebook
Global Monitor. They include Norway (46 percent), Canada (42 percent),
Hong Kong (40.5 percent), the United Kingdom (40 percent),
Chile (35 percent), Israel (32.5 percent), Qatar (32 percent), and the
Bahamas (30.5 percent). In tiny Iceland, 53 percent of people are on
the service. Facebook is the number-one social network in Brunei,
Cambodia, Malaysia, and Singapore, among other countries. It surpassed
MySpace in global visitors in May 2008, according to comScore.
And in mid-2008 the word Facebook passed sex in frequency as a search
term on Google worldwide.
It's been a joke around the Facebook offices for years that the company
seeks "total domination." But the reason it's funny is that it evokes
a surprising truth. Zuckerberg realized a long time ago that most users
are not going to take the time to create multiple profiles for themselves
on multiple social networks. He also knew from his endless bull sessions
at Harvard and in Palo Alto about "network effects" that once
consolidation begins on a communications platform it can accelerate
and become a winner-take-all market. People will join and use the communications
tool that the largest number of other people already use.
He therefore made it a goal to create a tool not for the United States but
for the world. The objective was to overwhelm all other social networks
wherever they are—-to win their users and become the de facto standard.
In his view it was either that or disappear.
Other social networks have more users than Facebook in a number
of key countries, including Brazil, China, Japan, Korea, Russia, and a
few other places. In most of those countries a local player commands
the market. For Zuckerberg it is a strategic imperative to whittle away at
the dominance of these services. As Zuckerberg told a Madrid audience
on his Spanish trip, "Making the world more open is not an overnight
thing. It's a ten-to-fifteen-year thing."
But how did Facebook get so big so fast? It wasn't long after he moved
to California that Zuckerberg began thinking about Facebook's potential
to be a global phenomenon. Influenced by the ambitious Sean Parker,
Zuckerberg began to think that if he managed his service well it could
grow into an international colossus. He did a lot of things right that set
the groundwork for the vast global growth that followed. For one thing,
Zuckerberg kept Facebook's interface simple, clean, and uncluttered.
Like Google, an elementary look successfully masked an enormously
complex set of technologies behind the curtain and made a wide variety
of people feel welcome. At one of his stops in Spain, Zuckerberg summarized
his international strategy: "It's just to build the best, simplest
product that lets people share information as easily as they can."
Facebook also has a fundamental characteristic that has proven key
to its appeal in country after country—you only see friends there. It
is Facebook's identity-based nature that differentiated it from the beginning
from most other social networks and enabled it to become a
unique global phenomenon. Around the world this is the least American-
feeling of American services. Italy's Facebook-using hordes, for example,
could grow to many millions without often seeing anyone who
wasn't Italian. The values, interests, tone, and behavior that users in
Turkey or Chile or the Philippines experience inside Facebook are the
same ones they are familiar with every day in the offline world.
And, critically, the language people speak on Facebook is increasingly
the one they speak offline as well. The translation tool Facebook
made available after early 2008 was among the company's greatest product
innovations and had huge impact on its global growth. By early
2010 Facebook operated in seventy-five languages, representing 98 percent
of the world's population.
Facebook's translation tool adopted a novel approach that took advantage
of the rabid enthusiasm of users around the world. Rather than
ask its own employees or contractors to spend precious years translating
the site's three hundred thousand words and phrases into numerous
other languages, Facebook turned the task over to the crowd and found
an enormous amount of wisdom there.
To create a version in each new language, Facebook's software presents
users with the list of words to be translated. Anyone, while using
the site, can tackle the Spanish or German or Swahili or Tagalog translation
for just one word or as many as they choose. Each word is translated
by many users. Then the software asks speakers of that language to
vote on the best word or phrase to fill each slot.
The tool was first used for Spanish in January 2008, since Facebook
at that point already had 2.8 million users in Spanish-speaking countries
using it in English. Within four weeks, 1,500 Spanish speakers
from around the world had created a full version. Facebook engineers
just plugged in their conclusions and the Spanish Facebook launched
on February 11. Next up was German. That took 2,000 people two
weeks and began operating on March 3. The French version was completed
by 4,000 users in less than two days. Adding new languages now
costs Facebook virtually nothing. Users decided the idiosyncratic Facebookism
poke should become dar un toque in Spanish, anklopfen in
German, and envoyer un poke in French.
This is one project Zuckerberg didn't oversee. "I'm proud that
I wasn't even involved," he said around the time the translator
launched. "This is what you hope for when you're building an organization,
right? That there will be people who will just build things that
fit so well with the values of the company without you even having to
say anything."
Facebook's platform strategy of letting outsiders build whatever applications
they want on its platform also substantially benefited its international
expansion. In July 2008 the company let developers start using
the translation software for Facebook applications, so those too could be
available in any language. By the fall of 2008, when Zuckerberg went
to Spain, there were already over six thousand applications available in
Spanish. Facebook in Spain —or Chile or Colombia—felt much like a
Spanish service to its users there. Eight months after the debut of the
translated version, Facebook's Spanish-speaking population had more
than quadrupled to 12 million. "We think we can get as much as thirtyto-
forty percent of the population using it," Zuckerberg told reporters in
Madrid. (Spain alone has 46 million people.)
There's almost a moral component to Zuckerberg's globalization quest.
In the packed, sweltering hall in Navarra he says Facebook is "for all people
of all ages around the world." Giving people more information about
people around them "should create more empathy." In this attribution
to Facebook of a power to help people better understand one another,
Zuckerberg has a surprising ally—his mentor and board member Peter
Thiel. The hedge fund manager and venture capitalist thinks Facebook
is a key tool for a world necessarily becoming much smaller. "People in
a globalized world are going to be in closer proximity to each other," he
explains. "The key value in my mind will be more tolerance. What I like
about the Facebook model is it's centered on real human beings and it
enables them to become friends with other people and build relationships
not only in the context they're already in, but in contexts outside of
that as well. Globalization doesn't necessarily mean you are friends with
everybody in the world. But it somehow means that you're open to a lot
more people in a lot more contexts than you would have been before."
At another session in Spain, Zuckerberg answered a reporter's question
about why Facebook succeeded by saying, "If you give people a better
way to share information it will change people's lives."
But Zuckerberg's Facebook is resolutely American, even if it may
not always seem so to its international users. Facebook's Americanness
is revealed not because some Azerbaijan teenager meets a kid from
Oklahoma, but by its intrinsic assumptions about how people ought to
behave. Zuckerberg's values reflect the liberties of American discourse.
Facebook carries those values around the world, and that's having both
positive and negative effects.
In the United States, people take a certain amount of transparency
and freedom of speech for granted, but it comes at great cost in some other
cultures. When a father in Saudi Arabia caught his daughter interacting
with men on Facebook, he killed her. Users in the United Arab Emirates
created protest groups with names like "Gulf Air Sucks," and "Boycott
Dubai's Dolphinariums." That was apparently within the bounds, but
when groups there grew to include "Lesbians in Dubai," with 138 members,
the government attempted to ban Facebook altogether.
Governments around the world are struggling to figure out how to
handle Facebook's users when they take advantage of its freedoms. After
Italian Facebook groups emerged praising imprisoned mafia bosses, a
senator there introduced a bill that would force websites to take down
content that "incites or justifies" criminal behavior. It did not pass.
(Facebook's own policies are more specific. It takes down content that
advocates hate, violence, or breaking the law.)
In the West Bank, protesters directed their wrath at Facebook itself
and drew it into delicate matters of international politics. Jewish settlers
in the occupied territory were outraged that Facebook required
them to say they lived in Palestine. A group called "It's not Palestine,
it's Israel" quickly acquired 13,800 members in March 2008. After a
few days Facebook agreed to let residents of certain large settlements
say they lived in Israel. Meanwhile, a group called "All Palestinians on
Facebook" grew to 8,800 by complaining, among other things, that Palestinians
living in East Jerusalem were forced by Facebook to say they
lived in Israel, even though that country's annexation of East Jerusalem
has not been internationally accepted. Now Facebook users in the West
Bank can say they live in either Israel or Palestine.
American values of transparency may not always translate well, but
people in many cultures are embracing fuller disclosure about themselves.
In the Philippines, it has become routine for middle-class people
to post photos of their April and May summer vacations to Facebook,
and to keep friends apprised about these trips with status updates. By
late 2008, interacting on Facebook was so popular in Italy that Poste
Italiane, the national postal service, started blocking access in its offices.
(Employees of the city of Naples, however, were officially allowed
to access Facebook for up to one hour per day.)
Cultural differences seem not to deter people in various countries
from finding compelling uses for the service. Danish prime minister
Anders Fogh Rasmussen had 12,000 supporters on his Facebook page
in April 2008 and responded personally to every comment. Then he
decided to set up a group jog with young people he met there. An aide
called it a great way to connect with ordinary voters. Obscure Colombian
rock bands like Koyi K Utho, which plays heavy-metal music inspired
by Japanese anime cartoons, found an audience on Facebook to
promote concerts and albums.
One aspect of Facebook's Americanness was an advantage, especially
in its early years among students outside the United States. Its
academic roots at Harvard and the Ivy League made it seem even more
appealing. "I've heard people at Facebook say they worried that it made
them seem elitist, but in fact many kids around the world put those
schools up on a pedestal," says Jared Cohen, author of Children of
Jihad, an account of how youth in the Middle East view culture and
technology. As early as mid-2007, Facebook was being used by 20,000
English-speaking Egyptians, for example, mostly privileged, Westernoriented
college students and recent graduates. "I log in three hours a
day, more or less, and usually at night, too," Sherry El-Maayirgy, a Cairo
marketing executive, told the English-language magazine Egypt Today
in May 2007. "It is really an amazing place to meet new people and
catch up with old friends who have drifted away." Much of the online
behavior was libertine. A local group called "If this group reaches 1,000
members, my girlfriend will sleep with me" garnered supportive comments,
according to the magazine. And beauty contests proliferated,
such as one for "The hottest girl at the American University of Cairo."
Facebook's growth around the world belies the frequent American
misperception that it is a site primarily for young people. While in the
United States many adults still spurn the service or quickly tire of it, in
most other countries it's used by people of all ages. Facebook's greatest
global increase in 2008 came from people ages thirty-five-to-forty-nine,
according to Nielsen. That group now constitutes about a third of Facebook's
users. "Internationally . . . Facebook is perceived as mainstream
and MySpace as being more focused around a younger demographic/'
says the Nielsen Company in a report on global social networking.
Facebook seems to mirror real-world conditions. Women account for
more than half of Facebook's ranks all over the world —except in certain
countries in the Middle East and Africa where their rights are severely
curtailed.
In some countries Facebook's empowerment of the individual may
feel even more important than elsewhere. Educated young people in
the Middle East are often passionate and active Facebook users. "Kids
there have some of the most intricate profiles/' says Cohen. "These are
repressive countries, with little outlet for expression, so people can feel
more real online than they are in real life." Facebook can become a way
to assert one's right to be oneself. In both Turkey and Chile, Facebook
is so ubiquitous in many educated circles that not to be on it is tantamount
to self-ostracism. One reason may be that in both countries not
long ago, to oppose the government could lead you to disappear forever.
Facebook continues to face potent rivals. MySpace is really not one
of them, having shifted its strategy under the leadership of Owen Van
Natta, Zuckerberg's former chief operating officer. MySpace now emphasizes
its role as a portal for music and entertainment. More worrisome
are social networks that dominate in one country or region. In
Japan, leading social network Mixi offers a sophisticated service that
works as well on cell phones as on PCs. It specializes in games.
Orkut still leads by a large margin in Brazil. It also led for a long
time in India, though Facebook surpassed it in popularity in late 2009,
according to the Alexa Internet data service. Orkut's peculiar success
in these two markets has led to a surprising new sort of Indian pilgrimage—
young Indian men trek by plane to Brazil to see women they met
on Orkut. In India, Facebook has now introduced versions not only
in Hindi, the largest language, but also Bengali, Malayalam, Punjabi,
Tamil, and Telugu.
Displacing Orkut in Brazil may turn out to be its ultimate popularity
contest, but in the meantime Facebook faces tough battles elsewhere.
In Germany, Spain, Russia, and China, local entrepreneurs created
student-focused networks modeled explicitly after Facebook once its
U.S. popularity became apparent in 2004 and 2005. While Facebook
has now surpassed its clone rival Tuenti in Spain, domestic imitators in
China, Germany, and Russia still command dramatically more users.
The hapless Friendster, essentially ignored in the United States,
was until recently Facebook's big obstacle in Southeast Asia, where 90
percent of Friendster's 105 million users were located as of mid-2009.
But by late 2009 Facebook had trounced it there and was the numberone
website of any type in Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines,
Friendster's three biggest countries.
China's largest domestic Facebook clone, Xiaonei (the name means
"in the school"), got a big boost in 2008 when Japan's Softbank Venture
Capital invested $430 million in its parent company. It then renamed itself
Renren, meaning "everyone," to broaden its appeal. Meanwhile, since
June 4, 2009, the twentieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre,
Facebook has been completely blocked in China by the government.
Part of Facebook's arsenal against Renren (and Friendster) is Facebook's
close partnership with Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing.
Among the many companies this mogul controls is Hutchison Whampoa,
a major provider of mobile telephone services across southern Asia.
Hutchison has already released a special "Facebook phone" for the region.
Social networks are used most commonly on mobile phones in
countries like India and Indonesia, so Facebook is creating partnerships
with local mobile operators. It has also released a so-called lite version
that gives users the basics (without video, chat, and some other features)
but requires little bandwidth. It can be used on mobile phones or where
Internet access would otherwise be inadequate.
Facebook is just beginning to model itself to suit the preferences of
users in one country. For example, in Germany, Facebook has a deal
with the dominant local email provider to make it easier to register and
connect with the friends in your email address book. In Japan the site
will soon make it easier to blog and to operate on mobile phones. Executives
are thinking of ways to accommodate the reluctance of Japanese
to operate openly online using their real names, even though that will
remain the way to use Facebook.
Facebook has exploded across Asia in the last year or so, but for different
reasons in each country. In Indonesia, Friendster had been the
dominant local social network, but as Internet usage shifted to mobile
phones, Friendster didn't have a good mobile app. Facebook did, and
burgeoned. In Taiwan, Facebook usage —mostly on PCs—soared in
2009 for one reason: the Farmville game from Zynga. Playing it became
almost a national obsession, and many joined Facebook simply to do
so. It grew from almost nothing to 5.6 million people, or 26 percent of
the population in the year ended February 2010. In Malaysia Facebook
took off among the influential Chinese minority, while those of Malay
ancestry tended to stay on Friendster. As of February 2010 Facebook
was growing 10 percent per month in Malaysia, according to the Facebook
Global Monitor. What makes this growth more impressive is that
it occurred without the investment spent by earlier American Internet
companies, says Hong Kong-based social media expert Tom Crampton
of Ogilvy Public Relations. "Facebook's romp across Asia is an amazing
story that breaks all the rules of internationalization," he says. "When
Yahoo entered Asia it sent huge teams to each country."
Scale itself is a growing advantage for Facebook. Sophisticated social
networking features cost money to develop. But every line of software
code on Facebook can be used by far more people than a comparable
line of code on any other service. It is no longer possible as it once was
for rivals simply to steal the Facebook software they want. So on a peruser
basis Facebook costs less to run, and less to improve. That could
prove over time to be a daunting advantage against its rivals.
The strength of regional competitors outside the United States is the biggest
reason why Zuckerberg says that near-term growth is more important
for Facebook than profit. He's not a worrier, but if he worries about one
thing it's that nationalism and insular local cultures will allow services
like Renren and Orkut to keep Facebook down. A couple of days before
I joined him in Madrid, he gave an interview in Germany in which he
said bluntly that "growth is primary, revenue is secondary." The statement
was immediately criticized online as naive, and everywhere I went
with Zuckerberg he was hounded about it by bloggers and press.
The only reason Zuckerberg is willing to endure the discomforts of
a multiweek European road show is that he feels so passionately about
the need for Facebook to grow internationally. He would prefer not to
stand up and talk to crowds. But if that's what it takes, he'll do it. As he
walks into a meeting in Madrid with a group of local entrepreneurs, his
host welcomes him saying, "There is great expectation for your visit!"
"That's unfortunate," Zuckerberg deadpans in a serious-sounding voice,
as his staff cringes.
He's on the road with a purpose, but he does it in his own way,
sometimes to his detriment. The trip wears on him. He was up doing
email and instant messaging the previous night until four. Back in the
van, his assistant Anikka Fragodt says he should take a nap. He doesn't
think that would help. Anyway, he hates to remove his contact lenses.
At the next stop, Madrid's University of Comillas, he is greeted by two
deans. One of them holds out a soccer jersey with the university's logo
on it. Zuckerberg refuses to put it on. "This is what I always wear," he
says of his black North Face fleece jacket, T-shirt, jeans, and running
shoes. At Navarra a few days later, the lecture hall gets oppressively hot.
He tells the crowd he is "burning up" and moves toward an onstage fan.
But he does not remove his fleece jacket. Later he confesses he almost
fainted shortly before going onstage.
In May 2009, Zuckerberg gained yet another powerful ally for internationalization
when the Moscow-based Digital Sky Technologies spent
$200 million for a small chunk of Facebook. Digital Sky, a holding
company that invests exclusively in Internet companies, is the primary
owner of Russian Facebook clone VKontakte ("In contact"). That, in
fact, is what emboldened Managing Director Yuri Milner to make the
investment. VKontakte is by far the largest social network in Russia,
with a penetration of domestic Internet users beyond 50 percent, and
is soundly profitable, according to Milner. Much of its sales come from
virtual goods. VKontakte yields revenue more than five times what
Facebook gets per user (which is less than $2 per year). "What we see,"
says Milner, "is that when the market is mature you can really make a
lot of money on a per-user basis. If Facebook can achieve what we're
seeing in Russia, that's really pretty good."
Milner's confidence that Facebook will eventually be profitable at
a gigantic scale is what emboldened him to invest at a price that valued
the company at $10 billion. Big as that is, it's considerably less than the
$15 billion valuation that Microsoft and Li Ka-shing accepted in October
2007. Doubts lingered about Facebook's ability to be a business,
and financial markets had cratered since the Microsoft deal. But Digital
Sky's enthusiasm was such that not only did it buy stock from Facebook,
Milner is also spending as much as $300 million more buying stock
from employees and outside investors. Milner says his commitment to
Facebook is long-term and that he may not sell his shares even at its
initial public offering of stock, when investors frequently cash out.
Facebook's burgeoning global expansion presents challenges both
technical and managerial for Zuckerberg. For one thing, Facebook's
only two data centers remain in the United States and everything users
around the world see on Facebook emanates from there. It can take a
long time for Facebook pages to load on distant screens. That makes it
even more amazing that Facebook has developed such a gigantic overseas
user base. The company will have to build several very expensive
additional server farms. Though it has begun opening offices, a substantial
business infrastructure has to follow as well. The company has
established an international headquarters in Dublin and sales offices
around the world, with more to come.
Then there's the complexity of ensuring that those hundreds of millions
of users and tens of thousands of application developers around
the world adhere to Facebook's rules, no matter their language. For example,
Facebook didn't notice that groups were talking freely in Arabic
about "pig Jews" until Israeli activists pointed it out. The groups were
shut down for violating Facebook's prohibition against hate speech. But
it's an open question how Facebook will monitor, for example, hate
groups in languages like Tamil (Tamil guerrillas waged civil war in Sri
Lanka for over thirty years). So far the company is content to let users do
the monitoring themselves, much as they did translation.
A provocative signal about Facebook's future arose in Indonesia
in mid-2009. With 8.5 million users at that time, it had become the
country's most popular Internet site. Facebook's popularity led seven
hundred of the Muslim nation's imams to rule on its acceptability at
a two-day meeting. "The clerics think it is necessary to set an edict on
virtual networking, because this online relationship could lead to lust,
which is forbidden in Islam," said a spokesman for the clerics as the
meeting got under way. In their nonbinding ruling the imams said,
"Facebook is forbidden" if it is used for gossiping, flirting, spreading
lies, asking intimate questions, or vulgar behavior. However, overall the
clerics came out surprisingly upbeat. Not only could Facebook "erase
time and space constraints," they noted approvingly, but it could make
it easier for couples to learn whether they are compatible before they
get married. By February 2010 more than 17 million Indonesians used
Facebook.