The Future

Mark Zuckerberg is sitting under the beams of an elegant old Swiss restaurant
in Davos during the January 2009 World Economic Forums the
celebrated annual gathering of government and industry leaders. To his
right is Sheryl Sandberg, and at the other end of the small table is Larry
Page, Google's co-founder. Accel Partners, Facebook's primary venture
capital investor, is hosting an annual Davos gathering for technologists
and scientists called the "Nerd's Dinner." This year Accel has flown in
not one but two American sommeliers to present several varieties of
$600-a-bottle California wine. Zuckerberg, who has drunk a couple of
glasses, leans forward.
"Larry, do you use Facebook?" he asks.
"No, not really," Page replies without affect in his high-pitched
nasal voice. Zuckerberg seems disappointed.
"Why not?" he persists.
"If s not really designed for me," Page answers. Zuckerberg starts to
ask him another question, but is deterred by Sandberg.
"Mark! Don't talk about that in front of David!" she scolds. (That is
me, sitting on Zuckerberg's left.) Sandberg is well-versed in managing
journalists.
But in asking such a question so openly of the co-founder of Google,
Silicon Valley's king and Facebook's rival in many ways, Zuckerberg
displays a few facets of his character. He may be a tad naive, but he
is simultaneously fearless, competitive, and supremely confident, even
cocky. He is not afraid of Google, though he remains a little obsessed
with it. He really wants Page to like Facebook, but he also wants to see
what will happen when he asks.
Zuckerberg will almost certainly continue to rule over Facebook with
absolute authority. He wants to rule not only Facebook, but in some
sense the evolving communications infrastructure of the planet. Yet he
believes that Facebook's continued success depends on its ability to retain
the confidence of its users. As he told users during the vote on the
terms of service, he wants to govern Facebook fairly, through an "open
and transparent" dialogue. It remains more important to the young
CEO to further the honest transparency he believes in and to facilitate
more sharing and communicating than to turn Facebook into a profitable
business, though he believes he can pursue both goals in tandem.
I once asked Zuckerberg if he ever worried that Facebook could get
into financial jeopardy. "Well, there are different levels of jeopardy," he
replied. "Is it sustainable? Will it go out of business? I don't spend any
time worrying about that. It's fine. Can it be a $10-billion company or
something like that? Okay, I think we have a really good chance of getting
there."
Some colleagues say Zuckerberg's desire to prioritize openness and
fairness over profit shows he is good at delaying gratification. Or maybe
he's just so driven that gratification is irrelevant. "He's always striving to
do the next thing," says an executive who has worked closely with him.
"For most people there are plateaus and milestones you hit and it allows
you to sit back and celebrate and feel a sense of accomplishment. That
doesn't really exist for Mark."
Zuckerberg's pursuit of growth over money does not seem to have
diminished Facebook's financial prospects. Board member Marc Andreessen
has as much perspective on these matters as anyone. "Mark
has never argued that Facebook will not make a lot of money," observes
Andreessen. "On the financial side really it's a timing thing. Focusing on
anything other than establishing a global franchise is a waste of time."
Andreessen is among the very small number of people Zuckerberg
regularly turns to for advice, so his views count. ("Marc is in a position
to say things and have Mark Z. believe it. I don't think any of the rest of
us are," says David Sze of Greylock Partners, a big Facebook investor.)
Andreessen's strong advice is to keep investing for growth. He explains
himself in a fall 2009 interview in a cushy Silicon Valley hotel
lobby, talking so fast it's lucky I have a recorder. "How much cash has
the company burned to date?" he asks. "A few hundred million, right?
So how many active users do they have? Three hundred million? So the
company has spent a dollar or so per active user and has built a global
franchise, a global brand, with real staying power, stickiness, network
effects, R&D, competitive advantage, and a whole future roadmap of
technology that's on its way out the door. For a dollar a user? Like, you
would do that over and over and over again.
"So, okay, let's ask the question—What if the potential here is to
get to 500 million active users, or a billion active users, or two billion,
right? Would you keep spending that dollar to get there? Of course! The
answer is—of course! You would. Compare that to the cost of building
anything of any similar scale and you'd say you have the bargain of
the century." Andreessen is very tall, and he leans his large, bulbous,
shaven head in toward me as his forceful words careen toward what is
in his view an irrefutable conclusion. He is difficult to argue with. If you
have him on your board he will carry a lot of sway. No matter. He and
Zuckerberg agree.
Zuckerberg's mentors and advisors have evolved as the company
has grown, from Eduardo Saverin, his friend who knew something
about business, to Sean Parker, who had started companies and knew
how to deal with financiers, to Don Graham, who ran one of the country's
largest media companies, and now to Andreessen and Steve Jobs,
widely considered the most influential businessman in the world. Zuckerberg
admires Jobs and has been spending an increasing amount of
time with him.
Facebook's board has always been small. Thanks to the machinations
of Sean Parker in 2004, Zuckerberg has always controlled it. He expects
it to support him in his long-term approach to managing the company.
When I ask Andreessen what he thinks about Zuckerberg's control of
the company, he blurts out, "Oh, that's a good thing." Only very strong
founder CEOs, he says, can build big enduring tech companies. He
compares Zuckerberg to Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Jobs himself.
Each board member works with Zuckerberg in his own way. Jim
Breyer, who joined when Accel invested in 2005, weighs in on organizaThe
Future
tional structure and hiring. ("Mark always wanted a hacker culture and
creative chaos/' says Breyer. "My point to him is you want that around
product innovation but not in areas like sales, human resources, or
legal.") Andreessen gets involved in management but also with product
design. He feels protective of Zuckerberg, and tries to keep him from
making the same mistakes he made as a young entrepreneur. On the
other hand, Peter Thiel, appointed when he invested $500,000 in 2004,
is less interested in management and talks to Zuckerberg more about
long-term corporate strategy and the overall economic environment.
Zuckerberg describes their ongoing discussions: "It's mostly like 'Raise
money now/ 'Don't raise money/ 'Keep this money in the bank/ 'You
should sell the company now/ 'You should not sell the company now/
I listen to him on that."
Zuckerberg talked about adding Don Graham of the Washington
Post Company to the board as far back as 2005, even after Accel outbid
Graham to invest in Thefacebook. But both agreed then that the company
was still too small. Zuckerberg landed Graham in 2009, finally
filling all five board seats (though both Graham and Andreessen serve
at his pleasure). Zuckerberg admires Graham's long-term view of his
business as well as the structure of the Washington Post Company that
enables it.
In November 2009, Zuckerberg implemented a shareholder arrangement
at Facebook similar to that of the Washington Post Company.
It assures that he and his allies—all existing shareholders were
converted to the new "Class B" stock with the change—will retain
control of Facebook after it goes public. Google had created such a
structure for its own IPO in August 2004. Afterward, management and
directors controlled 61 percent of Google's voting power through shares
that carried ten votes each, while common shares were allotted one
vote. Facebook's new share structure has identical voting provisions.
Facebook won't go public until it reaches at least $1 billion in annual
sales, a level it will almost certainly achieve in 2010. But board member
Jim Breyer said in January 2010 that the company would definitely
not go public this year. When the company goes public will depend
on whether Zuckerberg believes that an IPO will benefit the company
in other ways, for example by making it more prominent in the ranks
of business. He will never do it just because he wants to cash out his
own wealth. And once he does take it public, he will face inevitable
pressures from Wall Street. It will become considerably harder to maintain
his resolute emphasis on his vision of sharing and on growth above
short-term revenue.
Zuckerberg owns about 24 percent of Facebook's stock, worth about
$3 billion at the price the stock traded at privately as of early 2010. The
second largest block is Accel's at about 10 percent, plus about 1 percent
controlled by Jim Breyer personally (the result of that $1 million
he invested back in 2005). Dustin Moskovitz owns about 6 percent. In
may 2009 Russia's Digital Sky Technologies bought 2 percent from the
company, about 1.5 percent from miscellaneous employees, and later
another 1.5 percent from various holders to make it Facebook's secondlargest
outside investor, with about 5 percent. Eduardo Saverin owns 5
percent, Sean Parker about 4 percent, and Peter Thiel around 3 percent
(he sold about half his holdings in late 2009, mostly to Digital Sky).
Greylock Partners and Meritech Capital Partners each have between
1 percent and 2 percent. Microsoft owns about 1.3 percent, and Hong
Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing about .75 percent. Advertising giant The
Interpublic Group owns a little less than half a percent, the happy heritage
of an ad-and-equity deal in Facebook's early days. A amall group of
current and former employees own a substantial share but less than 1
percent. They include Matt Cohler, Jeff Rothschild, Adam D'Angelo,
Chris Hughes, and Owen Van Natta. Others with sizable holdings include
Reid Hoffman and Mark Pincus, who invested alongside Peter
Thiel in the company's very first financing round, as well as Western
Technology Investments (WTI) which loaned the company a total of
$3.6 million in its first two years, and invested $25,000 in that same
initial round. Employees and outside investors own the remaining 30
percent or so.
Though Digital Sky bought its shares from the company at a price
that valued it at $10 billion, it's hard to say what Facebook is really
worth. As recently as late 2008 the so-called fair market value placed
on its shares gave it a total value of only about $2.5 billion. This is the
price Accel, for instance, placed then on its own Facebook shares for
bookkeeping purposes. "I know it will end up a big number someday/'
Breyer told me around that time. "So I don't really care what it is now."
(His Accel VC firm purchased some of the employee shares along with
Digital Sky at a valuation of about $7.5 billion in mid-2009.) Breyer's
fellow board member Thiel, however, is not so certain. "The range of
what it may be worth from here is extremely big," he said in an early
2009 interview. "It may be worth a lot more. It may be worth nothing at
all." These guys must have pretty interesting conversations in the boardroom.
Thiel also talks about "the incredibly high anxiety levels people
have about—is this going to be the most successful thing ever, or is it
going to weirdly spiral out?" Even though the company remains private,
insiders have begun periodically selling Facebook's stock on specialty
exchanges like SecondMarket and SharesPost, at prices that put the
company's valuation as high as $14 billion by early 2010.
For all his conviction about the inevitability of ever-growing transparency,
Zuckerberg remains concerned about a corollary issue—who
controls your information. "The world moving towards more transparency
could be the trend driving the most change over the next ten or
twenty years," he says, "assuming there's no massive act of violence or
other political disruption. But there's still a big question about how that
happens. When you ask people what they think about transparency,
some get a negative picture in their mind—the vision of a surveillance
world. You can paint some really dystopian futures. Will the transparency
be used to centralize power or to decentralize it? I'm convinced
that the trend towards greater transparency is inevitable. But I honestly
don't know how this other piece [whether or not we'll be subject to
constant surveillance] plays out.
"Let me paint the two scenarios for you. They correspond to two
companies in the Valley. It's not completely this extreme, but they are
on different sides of the spectrum. On the one hand you have Google,
which primarily gets information by tracking stuff that's going on. They
call it crawling. They crawl the Web and get information and bring it
into their systems. They want to build maps, so they send around vans
which literally go and take pictures of your home for their Street View
system. And the way they collect and build profiles on people to do advertising
is by tracking where you go on the Web, through cookies with
DoubleClick and AdSense. That's how they build a profile about what
you're interested in. Google is a great company . . ." He hesitates. "But
you can see that taken to a logical extreme that is a little scary.
"On the other hand, we started the company saying there should be
another way. If you allow people to share what they want and give them
good tools to control what they're sharing, you can get even more information
shared. But think of all the things you share on Facebook that you
wouldn't want to share with everyone, right? You wouldn't want these
things to be crawled or indexed—like pictures from family vacations,
your phone number, anything that happens on an intranet inside a company,
or any kind of private message or email. So a lot of stuff is getting
more and more open, but there's a lot of stuff that's not open to everyone.
"This is one of the most important problems for the next ten or
twenty years. Given that the world is moving towards more sharing of
information, making sure that it happens in a bottom-up way, with people
inputting the information themselves and having control over how
their information interacts with the system, as opposed to a centralized
way, through it being tracked in some surveillance system. I think that's
critical for the world." He laughs a little nervous laugh, realizing he
sounds awfully passionate. "That's just a really important part of my
personality, and what I care about."
Facebook's position in all this is not entirely benign, despite
Zuckerberg's high-minded tone. Regardless of Google, Facebook has
not always protected personal information carefully. It initially made
wrong choices about such information in the News Feed, Beacon, and
terms-of-service incidents. It got enormous criticism in the late 2009 for
strongly encouraging members to select the "everyone" privacy settings
for their personal information.
For all the protections it can offer our data from the potential depradations
of others, Facebook the company will always be able to see
our data. It is itself a centralizer, gathering all this information about us
under one corporate umbrella. It is comforting that Zuckerberg is so
personally'passionate about the importance of protecting people from
information predators. But what guarantee could Facebook's users possibly
get that his good intentions will last indefinitely? In a worst-case
scenario, possibly in some future when Zuckerberg has lost control of
his creation, Facebook itself could become a giant surveillance system.
Zuckerberg's big-picture adviser and board member Thiel makes
a similar point about Google. It's clearly something they've spent time
talking about. "Google in many ways is an incredible company with an
incredible founding vision," says Thiel. "But a very profound difference
is, I think, at its core Google believes that at the end of this globalization
process the world will be centered on computers, and computers will
be doing everything. That is probably one of the reasons Google has
missed the boat on the social networking phenomenon. I don't want to
denigrate Google. The Google model is that information, organizing
the world's information, is the most important thing.
"The Facebook model is radically different. One of the things that
is critical about good globalization in my mind is that in some sense
humans maintain mastery over technology, rather than the other way
around. The value of the company economically, politically, culturally—
whatever—stems from the idea that people are the most important
thing. Helping the world's people self-organize is the most
important thing."
Some aspects of the contrast Zuckerberg and Thiel point to is already
evident. Facebook poses a concrete threat to Google's mandate to
index and organize the world's information. "What happens on Facebook's
servers stays on Facebook's servers," wrote Fred Vogelstein in an
insightful July 2009 article in Wired magazine titled "The Great Wall
of Facebook." "That represents a massive and fast-growing blind spot for
Google." Insiders at the search company confirm that this is a muchdiscussed
worry there. If data inside the largest and fastest-growing Web
service is off-limits to Google, its ability to serve as the definitive search
site could be in jeopardy. The quantity of information we're talking
about is considerable. Status updates alone on Facebook are estimated
by company insiders to amount to more than ten times more words
than on all blogs worldwide. The Compete research firm reports that in
January 2010, 11.6 percent of all online time in the United States was
spent on Facebook, vs. 4.1 for Google.
The problem for Google is compounded as personal information
begins to help us all search for information online. If a friend has previously
found benefit from some data source, or purchased an item you're
looking at, that's something you're going to want to know when you conduct
a search. In a rare public admission, a Google product manager
conceded to journalists at a May 2009 Tokyo meeting that for many
types of searches, users find information more trustworthy if it comes
from friends, and that Facebook can potentially help users achieve that
level of trustworthiness better. Then, in a public appearance in late
2009, Google CEO Eric Schmidt conceded that one of the top challenges
his company faces is figuring out how to search, index, and present
social media content like that created in Facebook. He called this
issue "the great challenge of the age."
Facebook itself continues to improve its own tools for searching
content on its site, but it isn't very good at it, either. Now it's possible
to search all Facebook commercial pages as well as data for which individuals
have removed privacy controls so "everyone" has access. The
company aims to further encourage use of the "everyone" setting even
as it improves its search tools. This not only tweaks Google, but also
helps fend off Twitter, whose success has been aided by the fact that
tweets can be searched easily. For standard Internet searching from inside
the service, Facebook adds insult to injury by using the Bing search
engine from Microsoft, Google's archrival.
The competition between Facebook and Google will remain
heated, though it could be resolved a number of ways. One cannot
rule out the possibility of a rapprochement—even possibly some sort
of deal or business combination that enabled the two companies' data
to somehow intermingle, despite Zuckerberg and Thiel's protestations.
Google probably would still like to buy Facebook, but as the search
giant encounters more and more regulatory and anti-trust resistance,
the chances that it would be allowed to make such a purchase diminish
rapidly. Alternatively, if Facebook got closer to Microsoft its rivalry
with Google could become more acrimonious. Most likely Facebook
will continue to play the two giants against one another, as it did when
Microsoft invested.
In the meantime, Facebook and Google battle for online market
share and mindshare as well as for executives and engineers. Facebook
has become the clear number two Internet company worldwide in
numbers of users, behind Google, even as it has surpassed Google and
all other sites in the total time its users spend there. As for employees,
Zuckerberg's hiring of Sheryl Sandberg, as well as top Google communications
executive Elliot Schrage, did not go over well at Google.
In January 2008, Zuckerberg rode to Davos on the Google jet, chatting
much of the way with Sandberg, just prior to hiring her. Neither
of them was offered a ride in 2009. Google got some revenge in 2008
when it lured back one of its other prominent defectors. The talented
programmer and manager Ben Ling had been in charge of Facebook's
platform for only ten months before he returned to Google. A large
number of Facebook's employees are former Googlers.
I tried to get Google CEO Eric Schmidt to respond to Zuckerberg's
comments about Google and surveillance. "My preference is not to
comment on things others say about Google," he replied diplomatically
in an email. "Mark has done a masterful job of navigating a tough set of
waters over the last few years, and he is obviously an exceptional leader
and strategist, especially given his relatively young age."
Facebook may soon begin to share something else with Google: the
perception that it has become too big. Regulators in Europe opened a
formal antitrust investigation into Google in early 2010. Microsoft became
so powerful that the Department of Justice moved to break it up.
Though that effort failed, Facebook's ambitions and potential to exert
control over both users and platform partners are at least as great. "Facebook
controls its platform more tightly than Microsoft ever did," says
one close observer. "Facebook can flip a switch and turn you off. Anybody.
Anytime." If Facebook keeps growing and Zuckerberg appears
not to abide by his intended path of user consultation and corporate
benevolence, such a development could begin to invite scrutiny from
the world's antitrust enforcers.
The closer Facebook gets to achieving its vision of providing a universal
identity system for everyone on the Internet, the more likely it is
to attract government attention. Facebook could have more data about
citizens than governments do. Canada's national privacy commissioner
spent a year examining Facebook privacy policies before negotiating a
number of changes announced in August 2009. It was telling that the
inquiry emerged from Canada. A larger percentage of Canada's online
population is on Facebook—42 percent—than in any other major developed
country, according to The Facebook Global Monitor.
In the extreme view, Facebook could take over key functions from
governments. Says Yuri Milner, the company's big Russian investor:
"Facebook Connect is basically your passport—your online passport.
The government issues passports. Now you have somebody else worldwide
who is issuing passports for people. That is competitive, there's no
doubt about it. But who says issuing passports is government's job? This
will be global citizenship."
Privacy and identity experts are certain such a transition cannot happen
smoothly. Says John Clippinger, an official at the Berkman Center
for Internet & Society at Harvard and author of A Crowd of One: The
Future of Individual Identity: "Facebook is coming up against a crucial
civic and legal and national security infrastructure. The identity system
is a building block of our civil liberties. Sure, creating social graphs can
be a new way of authenticating people. But should Facebook own it?
And have no restrictions over it? It is an Orwellian power play. Facebook
is trying to control a very fundamental resource and right."
Such views could suggest a rocky road ahead for Facebook. One
thing is clear: if Zuckerberg is going to play the role of statesman, he is
going to have to spend a lot of time in coming years explaining himself.
As Facebook approaches a membership number in the billions, the
need to successfully navigate the shoals of regulation will undoubtedly
become a more pressing concern. I asked Thiel about the risk of government
intervention. "Facebook will have the maximum amount of
legal and political leeway in a world where it's seen as friendly and
not threatening/7 he replied. "I think it isn't threatening, It's not really
displacing anybody. I see it as a very hopeful sign that the company has
made as much progress as it has, and has received as little resistance as
it has. We're at 175 million people [this was February 2009] and no lobbyists
in Congress are arguing for Facebook to be shut down."
True enough. But the scrutiny is certainly increasing. For instance,
John Borthwick, a prominent New York-based technology investor (he
owns a piece of Twitter, among other companies), thinks that in late
2008 Facebook deliberately reset controls that determine whether users
receive email notifications of new activity inside the service. Facebook
says the resetting was accidental, the result of a technical glitch. But in
the process, Borthwick notes, it was able to resume sending all users
email notifications about things like messages they'd received. Though
he has no proof, he thinks it was a deliberate effort to draw people back
into the service in order to increase activity and page views.
Some things Facebook plans will almost certainly create strong outside
reaction. For instance, Facebook "credits" could begin to function
as a virtual currency, and a transnational one at that. "The currency becomes
a way to monetize connections between users," says Facebook's
Dan Rose, responsible for monetization. People could use it to transfer
money between one another. Since this new mechanism for purchases
is identity-based, it might help reduce credit card fraud. And it could
enable new conveniences. For instance, you could buy a friend a present
online without knowing their address. Just select the present and tell
the retailer the name of the friend. The two companies' systems could
work out the rest for you, with payment drawn from your Facebook
credits. A universal online payment system for hundreds of millions
of consumers worldwide might be a huge convenience. It could also
trump national boundaries and enable Facebook to begin operating as
a truly global economy. But don't be surprised when banks and others
begin asking if that should be a role for Facebook.
Zuckerberg professes a deep desire to make sure that Facebook remains
a benign force on the Net and in society. "You need to be good in order
to get people's trust," he says. "In the past people just didn't expect goodness
from companies. I think that's changing now."
"I often say inside the company that my goal was never to just create
a company/' Zuckerberg explains, staring at me intently as we sit alone
in a conference room. "A lot of people misinterpret that, as if I don't
care about revenue or profit or any of those things. But what not being
just a company means to me is not being just that—building something
that actually makes a really big change in the world." His stare is a bit
unnerving, but he is concentrating. He continues.
"The question I ask myself like almost every day is 'Am I doing the
most important thing I could be doing?'" he says with uncharacteristic
expansiveness. "Because if not, we've built this company to a good
enough point that I don't have to be doing this, or anything else. That's
the argument a lot of people have given me for why we should have sold
the company in the past. Then we could just go hang out. So then you
face this question of what's important to you. Unless I feel like I'm working
on the most" — he lingers on these words for emphasis —"important
problem that I can help with, then I'm not going to feel good about how
I'm spending my time. And that's what this company is."
In the end Mark Zuckerberg's vision is to empower the individual.
For him, the most important thing that Facebook can do is to give people
tools that enable them to more efficiently communicate and thrive
in a world in which more and more information surrounds us all no
matter what we do. He wants to help keep individuals from being overwhelmed
as large institutions both in business and government gain
ever more vast computational and information resources.
His subordinates have mostly come to endorse this way of thinking.
"What is the key reason we are at this point, with all this success?" asks
Kevin Colleran, Facebook's longest-serving advertising sales executive
and a good friend of Zuckerberg. "The key reason is that Mark is not
motivated by money." Chris Cox, the vice president of product and who
works alongside Zuckerberg almost daily, says, "Mark would rather see
our business fail in an attempt to do what is right and to do something
great and meaningful, than be a big, lame company." A watchword over
the years at Facebook has been "Don't be lame." Cox says it means don't
do something just to make more money or because everybody is telling
you to. It is Facebook's counterpoint to Google's motto 'Don't be evil/"
Though Facebook is filling out with executives of all ages, people
in their twenties still constitute a critical mass. They understand how
Zuckerberg thinks because they are much like him. They take the
impact of their work with profound seriousness, even as they seem to
spend much of the day wiggling erratically around the vast office on
two-wheeled RipStick skateboards. Many naturally gravitated to Facebook
after developing deep convictions about the social implications
of a service they used daily. When I'm in their offices I often feel this
could be the smartest bunch of young people on the planet today. The
average age of the 1,400 employees is thirty-one.
The company moved in May 2009 from a hodge-podge of rented offices
scattered across downtown Palo Alto into a big 135,000-square-foot
former manufacturing plant a few miles across town. The office was deliberately
picked for its funky undecorated quality—Zuckerberg and Sandberg
didn't want to move into fancy digs like the ones occupied by Google
or Yahoo. They talked about the perils of the "y°u have arrived" corporate
office. Their view was that it could lead employees to become complacent.
But even the new office was quickly filled and the company rented
another even bigger industrial building nearby for further expansion.
Facebook has shown a peculiar durability. Ever since it began, critics
have predicted it was at risk of losing its "coolness" and would soon begin
to decline: "If it lets in Harvard s t a f f . . . If it goes beyond Harvard . . . If
it includes colleges outside the Ivy League . . . If high school kids can
join . . . If adults are allowed . . . everyone else will leave." The "end of
Facebook" article has become a cliche.
Meanwhile, the service has just kept growing and has not measurably
lost the collective allegiance of any class, age, or nationality of user.
This trend cannot last forever, but it has shown no signs of stopping
yet, as Facebook's relentless internationalization continues. "Even we
are still trying to comprehend the scale and power of what it is we've
built," marvels Chamath Palihapitiya, vice president for growth and inthe
facebook effect
ternationalization. "We think this is a company that will build value for
decades and decades and decades."
Facebook is changing our notion of community, both at the neighborhood
level and the planetary one. It may help us to move back toward
a kind of intimacy that the ever-quickening pace of modern life
has drawn us away from.
At the same time, Facebook's global scale, combined with the quantity
of personal information its users entrust to it, suggests a movement
toward a form of universal connectivity that is truly new in human society.
The social philosopher and media theorist Marshall McLuhan is a
favorite at the company. He coined the term "the global village." In his
influential 1964 book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man,
he predicted the development of a universal communications platform
that would unite the planet. "Rapidly, we approach the final phase of
the extensions of man—the technological simulation of consciousness,"
he wrote, "when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and
corporately extended to the whole of society." We are not there yet. Facebook
is not what he describes. The world remains fragmented. But no
previous tool has ever extended a "creative process of knowing" so widely.
The overall contributions of Facebook's users constitute a global
aggregation of ideas and feelings. Some have gone so far as to say it
could evolve toward a kind of crude global brain. The reason people
sometimes talk like that is that once all this personal data exists in one
place it can be examined by sophisticated software in order to learn new
things about aggregate sentiment or ideas. One company project announced
in late 2009 is the Gross National Happiness Index. Analytic
software measures the occurrence over time of words and phrases on
Facebook that suggest happiness or unhappiness. That produces a chart
that is intended to be "indicative of how we are collectively feeling," according
to a post on the Facebook Blog. Initially it will only plumb data
produced by English-speakers in the United States. But over time it will
likely be extended more broadly, creating an unprecedented gauge of
global sentiment. Such tools will become steadily more capable.
Facebook embodies stunningly efficient qualities of universal connectivity.
Go to its search box and type in the name of anyone you've
ever met. The chances are good you will be directed to a page with their
name and photo. If you want, from there you can send them a message.
Facebook aims to assemble a directory of the entire human race, or at
least those parts of it that are connected to the Internet. It creates a direct
pathway between any two individuals.
These capabilities might conceivably over time lead to more global
understanding. Or perhaps they won't. Maybe we will use Facebook
merely to connect more closely to those we already know. Maybe doing
that will reinforce our sense of tribal separation.
After all, Zuckerberg's original conception of Facebook, maintained
rigorously until recently, was of a service to communicate with people
you already are acquainted with in real life. As Facebook encountered
the need to build its revenues, it embraced commercial pages and a
marketing culture that has come to coexist alongside a culture of personal
interconnection. Then, as the Twitter challenge emerged, it
expanded its self-definition further to become a service where people
communicate with everyone as well as with their friends. In some ways
this was a natural consequence of another of Zuckerberg's founding
premises—that "sharing" and transparency were becoming irresistible
elements of modern experience.
But reciprocal personal connections packed with very private data
may not coexist well with unbridled sharing. Does it really make sense
to combine the original conception of Facebook with what Twitter and
MySpace and a host of other, less-restrictive services do? Can a system
based on trust ever evolve to become truly open?
The answer to such questions will depend on decisions that Facebook
makes as it refines and improves its service. Zuckerberg cares
deeply about Facebook's potential to serve as a bridge between people.
He will work to turn it ever more into a town square for the global village.
But as we have heard, he also has a conviction about the importance of
helping people protect their most sensitive personal data. Maintaining
the enthusiasm of hundreds of millions of people who joined originally
to communicate with their friends will remain his ongoing challenge.