Rating: 8/10
Summary
Best parts were the history of creating Facebook. Less interesting were sections about FB’s effect on culture. Interesting to read this after reading Chaos Monkeys and Lean In, e.g. the “public vote.” Would be curious to see a chapter 2 — what happens to Platform? Buying IG? Competing with Snap?
Notes
Page: 5
Now, three years after Morales’s stunning success, one can find Facebook-fueled activism and protest in every country and community where the service has caught on—and that is pretty much every country in the world. Facebook, along with Twitter, famously played a big role in the revolt against the outcome of the mid-2009 elections in Iran.
Note: Funny to compare this now to the elections of 2016
Page: 7
“For the first time, the moderates, who were always stranded between authoritarian regimes that had all the powers of the state and Islamists who had all the powers of the mosque, now have their own place to come together and project power: the network.”
Note: As well as the extremists
Page: 8
This all may be either a constructive or a destructive force. Facebook is giving individuals in societies across the world more power relative to social institutions, and that may well lead to very disruptive changes. In some societies it may destabilize institutions many of us would rather stay the same. But it also holds the promise—as
Page: 9
As Facebook grows and grows toward one billion members, one has to ask if there may not be a macro version of the Facebook Effect. Could it become a factor in helping bring together a world filled with political and religious strife and in the midst of environmental and economic breakdown? A communications system that includes people of all countries, all races, all religions, could not be a bad thing, could it?
Page: 10
“We’re trying to increase the efficiency through which people can understand their world. We’re not trying to maximize the time spent on our site. We’re trying to help people have a good experience and get the maximum amount out of that time.” He showed no inclination to joke around. He was very focused on commanding my attention for his company and his vision. And he succeeded.
Note: Their metric apparently is time, to 4 decimal places.
Page: 11
company. Buyers have repeatedly offered astounding sums of money—billions—if he would sell it. But Zuckerberg is more focused on “getting stuff done” and convincing more people to use his service than he is on getting rich from it. In keeping the company independent he has kept it imbued with his own ideals, personality, and values.
Note: Interesting to compare this to chaos monkeys who says FB is ad company
Page: 14
For some, Facebook may generate a false sense of companionship and over time increase a feeling of aloneness. So far there is little data to show how widespread this problem may be, though as our use of electronic media continues in coming years it will certainly remain a widespread concern.
Page: 15
It changes how people communicate and interact, how marketers sell products, how governments reach out to citizens, even how companies operate. It is altering the character of political activism, and in some countries it is starting to affect the processes of democracy itself. This is no longer just a plaything for college students.
Page: 25
Zuckerberg kept making little Web programs, like one he created quickly to help himself cram for his Art in the Time of Augustus course. He had barely attended the class all first semester. As the final loomed, he cobbled together a set of screens with art images from the class. He emailed the other class members an invitation to log in and use this study aid and add comments alongside each image. His classmates took his cue. After they all used it, he spent an evening scrutinizing what they’d said about the images. He passed the final. He also wrote a program he called “Six Degrees of Harry Lewis,” an homage to a favorite computer science professor. He used articles in the Harvard Crimson to try to identify relationships between people, and created a whimsical network of connections to Lewis based on these links. You could type in any Harvard student’s name and the software would tell you how they were connected to Professor Lewis. He also worked on other people’s projects. After the Facemash episode he mended fences with the Association of Harvard Black Women by helping them set up their own website. And he worked for a while with three seniors who aimed to build a dating and socializing site they called Harvard Connection.
Note: It’s about doing as many projects as possible
Page: 38
Zuckerberg now marvels with gratitude when he recalls Moskovitz’s dedication in those days. “Dustin took the competition so seriously,” he says. “I’d be like ‘Hey, I heard through the grapevine that this other service is thinking of launching at this college.’ He’d be ‘Really? No way!’ And that paper he was supposed to be doing he’d just like scrap it and go and launch at that school. He was just a workaholic and a machine.
Note: How you need to look at the competition
Page: 101
So they embarked on what they called a “surround strategy.” If another social network had begun to take root at a certain school, Thefacebook would open not only there but at as many other campuses as possible in the immediate vicinity. The idea was that students at nearby schools would create a cross-network pressure, leading students at the original school to prefer Thefacebook. For example, Baylor University in Waco, Texas, had one of the earliest homegrown college social networks. Thefacebook launched at the University of Texas at Arlington to the north, Southwestern University to the southwest, and Texas A&M University to the southeast. This pincer movement tended to work, since Thefacebook typically saw such a viral explosion when it launched at schools that didn’t already have a social network on campus. Zuckerberg was only twenty, but already he was strategically outmaneuvering his competitors.
Note: How to apply at Reforge
I finished reading the Facebook Effect yesterday, the David Kirkpatrick book where he talks about the history of FB from 2004-2010ish. Super interesting looking at FB from the context of 2011 say, versus where we are now, in (cusp of) 2018.
For example, lot of stories of other companies that straight up copied FB and FB features and how MZ dealt with it — obviously parallels to how he deals with threats today, e.g. Snap.
Though not directly related, I thought there’s an analogy there in the context of what subject matter topics we focus on next. We talked a lot about frontier topics first, going where the puck is moving sorta strategy (e.g. data science) and then later on circling back to topics that are well covered and trying to do a better job at it (e.g. content marketing).
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Page: 171
Though the company had begun expanding to select elite schools in English-speaking countries outside the United States, it had no presence in Asia and virtually none in Europe. A site called studiVZ (from the German for “student directory”) in Germany now borrowed Facebook’s design, making red the elements that on Facebook were blue. Otherwise it was a pretty shameless imitation. It launched at German universities in October 2005 and was an instant success. By January 2007 it had 1.5 million
Note: What they do to SC
Page: 173
Maybe adults didn’t need this kind of service, many Facebook executives worried. The mood around the office darkened. Even though growth was continuing strongly among college and high school kids, if adults didn’t want to join Facebook then perhaps something was wrong with Zuckerberg’s theories. He was disappointed and befuddled. This was a major setback. Maybe the world wasn’t becoming more transparent as quickly as he had thought. “It was the most wrong he’d ever been at Facebook,” says Cohler, “and the first time he’d ever been wrong in a big way.”
Page: 200
Zuckerberg, along with a key group of his colleagues, also believes that by openly acknowledging who we are and behaving consistently among all our friends, we will help create a healthier society. In a more “open and transparent” world, people will be held to the consequences of their actions and be more likely to behave responsibly. “To get people to this point where there’s more openness—that’s a big challenge,” says Zuckerberg. “But I think we’ll do it. I just think it will take time. The concept that the world will be better if you share more is something that’s pretty foreign to a lot of people and it runs into all these privacy concerns.”
Page: 202
Privacy activist Rotenberg certainly thinks so. “Who will control our digital identity over time?” he asks. “We still want control. We don’t want Facebook to control it.” Facebook will certainly face repeated backlash both from users and government regulators as its privacy policy evolves.
Note: Don’t use FB
Page: 203
In 2007, London-based technology exp’ert Leisa Reichelt coined the phrase “ambient intimacy” on her blog to describe the dynamics of Facebook and other new services that enable individuals to freely talk about themselves to groups of friends or followers. She defined it as “being able to keep in touch with people with a level of regularity and intimacy that you wouldn’t usually have access to, because time and space conspire to make it impossible.” The phrase struck a nerve globally with students of social networks.
Note: Really well put
Page: 214
Zuckerberg has acquired a surprising ally in his campaign for openness and transparency—Ben Parr, the student at Northwestern University who launched “Students Against Facebook news feed,” the protest group that catalyzed the big privacy crisis. In September 2008, Parr, now a technology writer, effectively recanted. “Here’s the major change in the last two years,” he wrote in an article. “We are more comfortable sharing our lives and thoughts instantly to thousands of people, close friends and strangers alike. The development of new technology and the rocking of the boat by Zuckerberg has led to this change. … News Feed truly launched a revolution that requires us to stand back to appreciate. Privacy has not disappeared, but become even easier to control—what I want to share, I can share with everyone. What I want to keep private stays in my head.”
Page: 215
“Kevin, I need to find someone to help me think through my platform strategy.” “Huh? Yeah, well maybe someday we can be a platform,” Efrusy replied, haltingly. “But we’re just a company with six people … I mean, I guess I know a guy over at BEA [a business software company] who has done some interesting platform work …” Zuckerberg cut him off. “BEA? I was thinking more like Bill Gates. Can you help me talk to Bill Gates?” “Ummm … I don’t know. Maybe Jim Breyer can help with that …” A week passed. Efrusy was again at Zuckerberg’s office. “Okay,” said Zuckerberg. “So I talked to him.” “Talked to who?” “Bill Gates!” Even in these early days, Zuckerberg was trying to imagine how his little service could be more than just an Internet destination where people went to communicate with each other.
Note: Always be punching above your weight
Page: 216
Yet somehow, this application became the most trafficked photo site on the Internet, by far.” And something similar was going on with the application Facebook engineers had quickly thrown together to allow users to invite friends to events. It was garnering more usage than Evite.com, which had been for years the leading website for invitations. “So why were photos and events so good?” he asked. “It was because despite all their shortcomings they had one thing no one else had. And that was integration with the social graph.” This was Facebook’s own conceptual breakthrough, and Zuckerberg was proud of the term he used to describe it.
Note: Platform building. build atop what you already have
Page: 223
It had been a marathon of programming. Adam D’Angelo and his team building the platform worked seven days a week for more than three months. The night before f8 they were almost—but not quite—ready. A core group crowded into a room at San Francisco’s W Hotel running through final fixes. Most hadn’t slept for days. But a key piece of the platform software still didn’t work properly. Some of the programmers took an alertness drug called Provisual so they could stay up yet another night. They were semidelirious. They joked they should mix Provisual with cocaine and call it Blow-visual. Luckily the quality of their coding was higher than that of their humor. But they made it through the night. Just hours before f8 was scheduled to begin, they flipped the switch. The software worked! Their brains barely did.
Page: 259
Very often it’s relevant to you and that process makes many billions of dollars for Google. But the ads you typically click on there are the ones that respond to what you already know you’re looking for. In advertising-speak, Google’s AdWords search advertising “fulfills demand.”
Page: 260
Says Rose: “There is an imbalance between where the dollars are spent and where the audience is spending its time. Those dollars are going to move online over the next ten years.” Rose was so effective in the sessions that afterward Sandberg gave him the new title of vice president for business development and monetization.
Note | Page: 266
Good notes on overview of how FB ads work
Page: 296
Sean Parker, who helped Zuckerberg develop his basic views about the service, is passionate about Facebook’s importance in altering the landscape of media. In his view, individuals now determine what their friends see as much as the editor at the local newspaper did in simpler times. Facebook permits your friends to, in effect, construct for you a personalized news portal that functions somewhat like the portals of Yahoo or AOL or Microsoft. If I see a friend post a link to something in a field I know they’re expert in or passionate about, I am more likely to click it than I am to click something that shows up on my MyYahoo home page. And
Page: 306
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 Facebook’s platform, 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 ad-targeting 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
Page: 309
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.
Page: 314
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 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
Page: 319
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.”