Large-scale broadcast of information was formerly the province of electronic media—radio and television. But the Facebook Effect—in cases like Colombia or Iran—means ordinary individuals are initiating the broadcast. You don’t have to know anything special or have any particular skills. Twitter is another service with a more limited range of functions that can also enable powerful broadcasting over the Internet by any individual. It too has had significant political impact.
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 is starting to be shown in Egypt, Indonesia, and elsewhere—of posing challenges to long-standing repressive state institutions and practices. Facebook makes it easier for people to organize themselves.
There’s no reason why the self-organizing component of the Facebook Effect only need apply to serious gatherings, of course. In mid-2008 a Facebook group organized a huge water fight in downtown Leeds, England. And in September 2008 more than a thousand people spent twenty minutes or so smashing each other with pillows in Grand Rapids, Michigan. They heard about the pillow fight on Facebook. Public pillow fights became something of a fad around the world as Facebook-empowered young people embraced a new way to blow off steam.
The Facebook Effect can be no less powerful as a tool for marketers, provided they can figure out how to invoke it, a topic we will explore in greater depth later. Similarly, the Facebook Effect has potentially profound implications for media. On Facebook, everyone can be an editor, a content creator, a producer, and a distributor. All the classic old-media hats are being worn by everyone. The Facebook Effect can create a sudden convergence of interest among people in a news story, a song, or a YouTube video. One day recently I had been working on this book and hadn’t paid any attention to the news. I happened to see that a friend’s News Feed read “Dow up 3.5%.” I would in the past have received that information from Yahoo News, or from radio or television.
The games business, one that is playing a big role in Facebook’s development, has already figured a lot of this out. The best games take advantage of the Facebook Effect, with the result that some games are played by as many as 30 million members per week. PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo Wii were the platform choices of the previous generation. Now, however, all the video-gaming consoles are starting to build in Facebook connectivity as well.
As Facebook grows and grows past 500 million 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?
There is no more fervent believer in Facebook’s potential to help bring the world together than Peter Thiel. Thiel is a master contrarian who has made billions in his hedge fund betting correctly on the direction of oil, currencies, and stocks. He is also an entrepreneur, the co-founder, and former CEO of the PayPal online payments service (which he sold to eBay). He was the very first professional investor to put money in Facebook, in the late summer of 2004, and he’s been on the company’s board of directors ever since.
“The most important investment theme for the first half of the twenty-first century will be the question of how globalization happens,” Thiel told me. “If globalization doesn’t happen, then there is no future for the world. The way it doesn’t happen is that you have escalating conflicts and wars, and given where technology is today, it blows up the world. There’s no way to invest in a world where globalization fails.” This is a bracing thought, coming as it does from one of the world’s great investors. “The question then becomes what are the best investments that are geared towards good globalization. Facebook is perhaps the purest expression of that I can think of.”
I had only been marginally aware of Facebook until a public relations person called me in the late summer of 2006 and asked if I would meet with Mark Zuckerberg. I knew that would be interesting, so I agreed. As Fortune magazine’s main tech writer in New York, I routinely met with leaders of all kinds of technology companies. But when this young man—then just twenty-two—joined me at the fancy Il Gattopardo Italian restaurant in midtown Manhattan, it was at first hard to accept that he was CEO of a tech company of growing importance. He wore jeans and a T-shirt with a line drawing of a little bird on a tree. He seemed so unbelievably young! Then he opened his mouth. “We’re a utility,” he said in serious tones, using serious language. “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.
The more I listened the more he sounded like one of the successful—and much older—CEOs and entrepreneurs I talked to regularly in my job. So I casually told him I thought he seemed like a natural CEO. In my mind it was a huge compliment, one I did not give lightly. But he acted insulted. His face scrunched up with a look of distaste. “I never wanted to run a company,” he said a few minutes later. “To me a business is a good vehicle for getting stuff done.” Then for the rest of the interview he continued to say the kinds of things that only focused and visionary business leaders are capable of saying. From that moment I was confident Facebook’s importance would grow. I wrote a column after the meeting called “Why Facebook Matters.” The following year my coverage of the company in Fortune deepened when Zuckerberg invited me inside the company to do an exclusive story about its groundbreaking transformation into a platform for software applications created by outside entities. That announcement began to change how the world perceived Facebook. By the end of 2007 I had begun to believe Facebook would become one of the world’s most important companies. If that was the case, shouldn’t somebody write a book about it?
Now a 1,400-person corporation based in Palo Alto, California, Facebook has revenues that could reach $1 billion in 2010. Zuckerberg, now twenty-six, remains CEO. As a result of his determination, strategic savvy, and a fair dollop of luck, he maintains absolute financial control of the company. If he didn’t, Facebook would almost certainly today be a subsidiary of some giant media or Internet company. Buyers have repeatedly offered astounding sums of money—billions—if he would agree to 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.
From its dorm-room days, Facebook has looked simple, clean, and uncluttered. Zuckerberg has long had an interest in elegant interface design. On his own Facebook profile he lists his interests: “openness, breaking things, revolutions, information flow, minimalism, making things, eliminating desire for all that really doesn’t matter.” Despite the founder’s interest in minimalism, however, there is much about Facebook that inclines toward excess. Facebook is all information all the time. Each month about 20 billion pieces of content are posted there by members—including Web links, news stories, photos, etc. It’s by far the largest photo-sharing site on the Internet, for instance, with about 3 billion photos added each month. Not to mention the innumerable trivial announcements, weighty pronouncements, political provocations, birthday greetings, flirtations, invitations, insults, wisecracks, bad jokes, deep thoughts, and of course, pokes. There’s still a lot of stuff on Facebook that probably really doesn’t matter.
Popular though it may be, Facebook was never intended as a substitute for face-to-face communication. Though many people do
not use it this way, it has always been explicitly conceived and engineered by Zuckerberg and colleagues as a tool to enhance your relationships with the people you know in the flesh—your real-world friends, acquaintances, classmates, or co-workers. As this book explains in detail, this is a core difference between Facebook and other similar services—and has introduced a particular set of challenges for the company at every turn.
The Facebook Effect most often is felt in the quotidian realm, at an intimate level among a small group. It can make communication more efficient, cultivate familiarity, and enhance intimacy. Several of your friends learn from your status update, for example, that you’ll be at the mall later. You don’t send that information to them. Facebook’s software does. They say they’ll meet you there, and they show up.
When Facebook is used as it was originally designed—to build better pathways for sharing between people who already know each other in the real world—it can have a potent emotional power. It is a new sort of communications tool based on real relationships between individuals, and it enables fundamentally new sorts of interactions. This can lead to pleasure or pain, but it undeniably affects the tenor of the lives of Facebook’s users. “Facebook is the first platform for people,” says Esther Dyson, the technology pundit, author, and investor.
Several other factors make Facebook unlike any Internet business that preceded it. First, it is both in principle and in practice based on real identity. On Facebook it is as important today to be your real self as it was when the service launched at Harvard in February 2004. Anonymity, role-playing, pseudonyms, and handles have always been routine on the Web—AOL screen name, anyone? But they have little role here. If you invent a persona or too greatly enhance the way you present yourself, you will get little benefit from Facebook. Unless you interact with others as yourself, your friends will either not recognize you or will not befriend you. A critical way other people on Facebook know you are who you say you are is by examining your list of friends. These friends, in effect, validate your identity. To get this circular validation process started you have to use your real name.
Closely connected to its commitment to genuine identity is an infrastructure intended to protect privacy and give the user control. It doesn’t always work, but Zuckerberg and other company officials say they care about it a lot. “Having the friend infrastructure and an identity base ultimately is the key to safety,” says Chris Kelly, Facebook’s longtime head of privacy, who recently took a leave to run for California state attorney general. “Trust on the Internet depends on having identity fixed and known.” If you have doubts about who you are communicating with online, your privacy is at risk. But if you know who is around you, you can authoritatively determine who you would and would not like to see your information.
Privacy, an issue we look at in greater detail in a later chapter, has been a major concern of Facebook’s users from the beginning. They often have not felt that it was sufficiently protected, and have periodically revolted in order to say so. Facebook has generally weathered these controversies well. But the issue is fraught—it is a central concern not only of Facebook’s users, but, as we will see, of Zuckerberg as well. He knows that Facebook’s long-term success will probably be defined by how well it protects its users’ privacy. Recently the company has set about simplifying and improving the controls that determine who sees what about you.
The social changes that will be brought about by the Facebook Effect will not all be positive. What does it mean that we are increasingly living our lives in public? Are we turning into a nation—and a world—of exhibitionists? Many see Facebook as merely a celebration of the minutiae of our lives. Such people view it as a platform for narcissism rather than a tool for communication. Others ask how it might affect an individual’s ability to grow and change if their actions and even their thoughts are constantly scrutinized by their friends. Could it lead to greater conformity? Are young people who spend their days on Facebook losing their ability to recognize and experience change and excitement in the real world? Are we relying too heavily on our friends for information? Does Facebook merely contribute to information overload? Could we thus become less informed?
What does being a “friend” on Facebook really mean? The average Facebook user has about 130. Can you really have 500 friends, as many do? (I have 1,028, but then I’ve been writing a book about the company.) What about 5,000, Facebook’s maximum? 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.
Once I was sitting with Zuckerberg in a modest French bistro a mile or two from Facebook’s headquarters, just before closing time. He told me he’d never eaten steak frites before, so I’d urged him to order it. As other tables emptied out, we moved on to coffee and the staff started mopping the floor. Zuckerberg was, as always, wearing a T-shirt, but since it was a little chilly he had on another of his staples—a fleece jacket. I asked him what he thought he was doing when he created Thefacebook (the company’s original name) and how his thinking about it had evolved since the early days. His answer was all about transparency. Appropriately enough, Zuckerberg himself is almost compulsively candid.
“I mean, picture yourself—you’re in college,” he began. “You spend all your time studying theories, right? And you think about things in this abstract way. Very idealistic. Very liberal at this institution. So a lot of these values are just around you: the world should be governed by people. A lot of that stuff has really shaped me. And this is a lot of what Facebook is pushing for.
“Dustin [Moskovitz] and Chris [Hughes] [his Harvard roommates] and I would sit around and talk with other people I was taking computer science classes with. And we’d talk about how we thought that the added transparency in the world, all the added access to information and sharing [enabled by the Internet] would inevitably change big-world things. But we had no idea we would play a part in it.…We were just a group of college kids.” Then he describes what happened once Thefacebook launched: “Little by little—‘Oh, more schools want this’; and ‘Okay, more types of people want this.’…And it just kept getting wider and wider, and we just went, ‘Wow.’
“Then one day it kind of hit us that we could play a leading role in making this happen and pushing it forward.…And what seemed obvious to my group of friends who were just armchair intellectuals talking about this in college—about how transparency coming from people would transform how the world works and how institutions were governed—it was like, ‘Hey, maybe other people aren’t actually pushing this, and maybe it takes this group of people who grew up thinking these things and having these values to push it forward. Maybe we shouldn’t give up.’” And he laughs.
Mark Zuckerberg was never one to defer to authority figures. Facebook started out as his own revolt against Harvard’s unwillingness to build an online facebook. But what he built turns individuals into the authority. The entire service revolves around the profile and the actions of people. Facebook empowers them at the expense of institutions. In building it, Zuckerberg transferred a little bit of his own power to all the service’s members.
Facebook is bringing the world together. It has become an overarching common cultural experience for people worldwide, especially young people. Despite its modest beginnings as the college project of a nineteen-year-old, it has become a technological powerhouse with unprecedented influence across modern life, both public and private. Its membership spans generations, geographies, languages, and class. It may in fact be the fastest-growing company of any type in history. Facebook is even bigger in countries like Chile and Norway than it is in the United States. 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.
If you use the Internet, you are increasingly likely to use Facebook. It is the second-most-visited site, after Google, and claims more than 400 million active users (as of February 2010). Well over 20 percent of the 1.7 billion people on the Internet worldwide now use Facebook regularly. Facebook added high school students in fall 2005 and opened to everyone in fall 2006. Now users around the world spend about 8 billion minutes there every day (the average user spends almost an hour each day on Facebook). And even despite all its growth, the number of people there is growing at a mind-bending rate—about 5 percent a month. Were the growth rates of both Facebook and the Internet to remain steady, by 2013 every single person online worldwide would be on Facebook.
Of course that will never happen. But Facebook already operates in seventy-five languages, and about 75 percent of its active users are outside the United States. About 108 million Americans are active on Facebook, or 35.3 percent of the entire population, according to the Facebook Global Monitor, published by InsideFacebook.com. That sounds impressive. But 42 percent of Canada’s population uses it. The largest number of Facebook users is still in the United States, but the next ten countries are a global mix. In order, they are the United Kingdom, Turkey, Indonesia, France, Canada, Italy, the Philippines, Spain, Australia, and Colombia. The ten countries in which it grew fastest in the year ending February 2010, according to the Facebook Global Monitor, were Taiwan, the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, Portugal, Thailand, Brazil, Romania, Lithuania, and the Czech Republic.
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