Unlike just about any other website or technology business, Facebook is profoundly, centrally, about people. It is a platform for people to get more out of their lives. It is a new form of communication, just as was instant messaging, email, the telephone, and the telegraph. During the early days of the World Wide Web, people sometimes said that everyone would eventually have their own home page. Now it’s happening, but as part of a social network. Facebook connects those pages to one another in ways that enable us to do entirely new things.
But this scale, rate of growth, and social penetration raise complicated social, political, regulatory, and policy questions. How will Facebook alter users’ real-world interactions? How will repressive governments respond to this new form of citizen empowerment? Should a service this large be regulated? How do we feel about an entirely new form of communication used by hundreds of millions of people that is completely controlled by one company? Are we risking our freedom by entrusting so much information about our identity to one commercial entity? Tensions around these questions will grow if Facebook keeps extending its influence across more and more of the globe.
This book aims to explore these questions. But you can only understand how Facebook became such an amazing company and where it might go if you understand how it all got started in a dormitory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as the brainchild of a restless and irreverent nineteen-year-old kid.
1
The Beginning
“We have opened up Thefacebook for popular consumption at Harvard University.”
Sophomore Mark Zuckerberg arrived at his dorm room in Harvard’s Kirkland House in September 2003 dragging an eight-foot-long whiteboard, the geek’s consummate brainstorming tool. It was big and unwieldy, like some of the ideas he would diagram there. There was only one wall of the four-person suite long enough to hold it—the one in the hallway on the way to the bedrooms. Zuckerberg, a computer science major, began scribbling away.
The wall became a tangle of formulas and symbols sprouting multicolored lines that wove this way and that. Zuckerberg would stand in the hall staring at it all, marker in hand, squeezing against the wall if someone needed to get by. Sometimes he would back into a bedroom doorway to get a better look. “He really loved that whiteboard,” recalls Dustin Moskovitz, one of Zuckerberg’s three suite-mates. “He always wanted to draw out his ideas, even when that didn’t necessarily make them clearer.” Lots of his ideas were for new services on the Internet. He spent endless hours writing software code, regardless of how much noncomputing classwork he might have. Sleep was never a priority. If he wasn’t at the whiteboard he was hunched over the PC at his desk in the common room, hypnotized by the screen. Beside it was a jumble of bottles and wadded-up food wrappers he hadn’t bothered to toss.
Right away that first week, Zuckerberg cobbled together Internet software he called Course Match, an innocent enough project. He did it just for fun. The idea was to help students pick classes based on who else was taking them. You could click on a course to see who was signed up, or click on a person to see the courses he or she was taking. If a cute girl sat next to you in Topology, you could look up next semester’s Differential Geometry course to see if she had enrolled in that as well, or you could just look under her name for the courses she had enrolled in. As Zuckerberg said later, with a bit of pride at his own prescience, “you could link to people through things.” Hundreds of students immediately began using Course Match. The status-conscious students of Harvard felt very differently about a class depending on who was in it. Zuckerberg had written a program they wanted to use.
Mark Zuckerberg was a short, slender, intense introvert with curly brown hair whose fresh freckled face made him look closer to fifteen than the nineteen he was. His uniform was baggy jeans, rubber sandals—even in winter—and a T-shirt that usually had some sort of clever picture or phrase. One he was partial to during this period portrayed a little monkey and read “Code Monkey.” He could be quiet around strangers, but that was deceiving. When he did speak, he was wry. His tendency was to say nothing until others fully had their say. He stared. He would stare at you while you were talking, and stay absolutely silent. If you said something stimulating, he’d finally fire up his own ideas and the words would come cascading out. But if you went on too long or said something obvious, he would start looking through you. When you finished, he’d quietly mutter “yeah,” then change the subject or turn away. Zuckerberg is a highly deliberate thinker and rational to the extreme. His handwriting is well ordered, meticulous, and tiny, and he sometimes uses it to fill notebooks with lengthy deliberations.
Girls were drawn to his mischievous smile. He was seldom without a girlfriend. They liked his confidence, his humor, and his irreverence. He typically wore a contented expression on his face that seemed to say “I know what I’m doing.” Zuck, as he was known, had an air about him that everything would turn out fine, no matter what he did. It certainly had so far.
On his application for admission to Harvard two years earlier, he could barely fit all the honors and awards he’d won in high school—prizes in math, astronomy, physics, and classical languages. It also noted he was captain and most valuable player on the fencing team and could read and write French, Hebrew, Latin, and ancient Greek. (His accent was awful, so he preferred ancient languages he didn’t have to speak, he told people with typical dry humor.) Harvard’s rarefied social status was neither intimidating nor unfamiliar. He’d attended the elite Phillips Exeter Academy, where you are expected to proceed to the Ivy League. He’d transferred there as a kind of lark. He’d gotten bored after two years at a public high school in Dobbs Ferry, New York, north of New York City.
Zuckerberg is the second-oldest of four children of a dentist father and a psychologist mother, and the only boy. The family home, though the largest in the neighborhood, remains modest. Its dental office in the basement is dominated by a giant aquarium. The elder Zuckerberg, something of a ham, is known as “painless Dr Z.” His website announces “We cater to cowards,” and a sign outside the home office shows a satirical scene of a wary dental patient. Mark’s sisters, like him, are academic stars. (His older sister Randi is now a senior marketer at Facebook.) From his early years Zuckerberg had a technical bent: the theme of his bar mitzvah was “Star Wars.”
The suite was one of the smallest in Kirkland House. Each of the two bedrooms came with bunk beds and a small desk. Zuckerberg’s roommate was Chris Hughes, a handsome, tow-headed, openly gay literature and history major with an interest in public policy. They dismantled the bunks—it was fairer, they decided, if nobody had to sleep on top. But now the two single beds took up almost all the space. There was hardly room to move. The desk was useless anyway—it was piled high with junk. In the other bedroom was Moskovitz, a hardworking, Brillo-haired economics major who was himself no intellectual slouch, and his roommate, Billy Olson, an amateur thespian with an impish streak.
Each boy had a desk in the common room. In between were a couple of easy chairs. It was, like the entire suite, a mess. Zuckerberg had a habit of accumulating detritus on his desk and nearby tables. He’d finish a beer or a Red Bull, put it down, and there it would stay for weeks. Occasionally Moskovitz’s girlfriend would get fed up and throw out some garbage. Once, when Zuckerberg’s mother visited, she looked around the room embarrassedly and apologized to Moskovitz for her son’s untidiness. “When he was growing up he had a nanny,” she explained.
This warren of tiny rooms on the third floor pushed the boys toward greater intimacy than they might have shared under less constrained conditions. Zuckerberg was by nature blunt, even sometimes brutally honest—a trait he may have acquired from his mother. Though he could be taciturn he was also the leader, simply because he so often started things. A habit of straight talk became the norm in this suite. There weren’t a lot of secrets here. The four got along in part because they knew where each stood. Rather than getting on one another’s nerves, they got into one another’s projects.<
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The Internet was a perennial theme. Moskovitz, who had little training in computing but a natural penchant for it, kept up a constant repartee with Zuckerberg about what did and did not make sense online, what would or would not make a good website, and what might or might not happen as the Internet continued its inroads into every sphere of modern life. At the beginning of the semester, Hughes had zero interest in computing. But by midyear he too had become fascinated by the constant discussion of programming and the Internet, and started chiming in with his own ideas, as did Moskovitz’s roommate, Olson. As Zuckerberg came up with each new programming project, the other three boys had plenty of opinions on how he should build it.
In the common room of Suite H33 in Kirkland House, Ivy League privilege and high geekdom converged. What happened there turns out not to have been common, but at the time it seemed pretty routine. Zuckerberg was hardly the only entrepreneur beavering away on a business in his dorm room. That wasn’t too noteworthy at Harvard. Down every hall were gifted and privileged children of the powerful.
It’s presumed at Harvard that these kids are the ones who will go on to rule the world. Zuckerberg, Moskovitz, and Hughes were just three eggheads who loved to talk about ideas. They didn’t think much about ruling the world. But from their funky, crowded dorm room would emerge an idea with the power to change it.
Emboldened by the unexpected success of Course Match, Zuckerberg decided to try out some other ideas. His next project, in October, he called Facemash. It gave the Harvard community its first look at his rebellious irreverent side. Its purpose: figure out who was the hottest person on campus. Using the kind of computer code otherwise used to rank chess players (perhaps it could also have been used for fencers), he invited users to compare two different faces of the same sex and say which one was hotter. As your rating got hotter, your picture would be compared to hotter and hotter people.
A journal he kept at the time, which for some reason he posted along with the software, suggests Zuckerberg got onto this jag while upset about a girl. “——— is a bitch. I need to think of something to make to take my mind off her,” he wrote, adding “I’m a little intoxicated, not gonna lie.” Perhaps that pique is what led him to the idea, mused about in the journal, of comparing students to farm animals. Instead, according to the journal, Billy Olson came up with the idea of comparing people to other people and only occasionally putting in a farm animal. By the time the program launched, the animals were gone completely. “Another Beck’s is in order,” Zuckerberg wrote as he continued his Facemash chronicles. The entire project was completed in an eight-hour stretch that ended at 4 A.M., said the journal.
The photos for the Facemash website came from the so-called “facebooks” maintained by each of the Harvard houses where undergraduates live. They were the pictures taken the day students arrived for orientation—the kind of clumsy, awkwardly posed shots almost everyone would prefer to disavow. Zuckerberg cleverly found ways to obtain digital versions from nine of Harvard’s twelve houses. Student newspaper the Harvard Crimson later called it “guerrilla computing.” In most cases he was able to simply hack in over the Web. At Lowell House a friend gave Zuckerberg temporary use of his log-in. (The friend later regretted it.) At another house, Zuckerberg snuck in, plugged an Ethernet cable into the wall, and downloaded names and photos from the house computer network.
The fact that he was doing something slightly illicit gave Zuckerberg little pause. He could be a touch headstrong and liked to stir things up. He didn’t ask permission before proceeding. It’s not that he sets out to break the rules; he just doesn’t pay much attention to them.
He started running the Facemash website on his Internet-connected laptop in mid-afternoon of Sunday, November 2. “Were we let in [to Harvard] for our looks?” the site asked on its home page. “No. Will we be judged by them? Yes.” Zuckerberg emailed links to a few friends, later claiming he had only intended them to test it out and make suggestions. But once people started using it, they apparently couldn’t stop. His “testers” alerted their own friends and Facemash became an instant underground hit.
The Crimson somewhat eloquently opined on the appeal of the software afterward, even as its editorial scolded Zuckerberg for “catering to the worst side of Harvard students”: “A peculiarly-squinting senior and that hottie from your Medieval manuscripts section—click! Your blockmate and the kid who always glared at you in Annenberg—click! Your two best friends’ respective significant others—pause…click, click, click!…We Harvard students could indulge our fondness for judging those around us on superficial criteria without ever having to face any of the judged in person.” Yes, it was fun.
One gay resident of a suite near Zuckerberg’s was elated when, in the first hour, his photo was rated most attractive among men. He of course alerted all his own friends, who then started using the site. When Zuckerberg returned to his room at 10 P.M. from a meeting, his laptop was so bogged down with Facemash users that it was freezing up. But neighbors were not the only ones suddenly paying attention to Facemash. Complaints of sexism and racism quickly started circulating among members of two women’s groups—Fuerza Latina and the Association of Harvard Black Women. Quickly the computer services department got involved and turned off Zuckerberg’s Web access. By the time that happened, around 10:30 P.M., the site had been visited by 450 students, who had voted on 22,000 pairs of photos.
Zuckerberg was later called before Harvard’s disciplinary Administrative Board, along with the student who’d given him the password at Lowell House, his suite-mate Billy Olson (who, as the online journal noted, had contributed ideas), and Joe Green, a junior who lived in the next suite through the fire door, who had helped out as well. Zuckerberg was accused of violations of the college’s code of conduct in the way the site handled security, copyright, and privacy. The board put him on probation and required him to see a counselor, but decided not to punish the others. If Zuckerberg hadn’t omitted the farm animal photos, he probably wouldn’t have gotten off so lightly. He apologized to the women’s groups, claiming he had mainly thought of the project as a computer science experiment and had no idea it might spread so quickly.
Green’s father, a college professor, happened to be visiting his son the night Zuckerberg was celebrating his comparatively light sentence for Facemash. The sophomore had gone out and bought a bottle of Dom Perignon, which he was exultantly sharing with his Kirkland neighbors. Says Green: “My dad was trying to drill it into Mark’s head that this was a really big deal, that he’d almost gotten suspended. But Mark didn’t want to hear it. My dad came away with the notion that I shouldn’t do any more Zuckerberg projects.” It would later prove to be a very expensive prohibition.
But to everyone else, the episode was a clear sign: Zuckerberg had a knack for making software people couldn’t stop using. That came as little surprise to his roommates. They knew he had even been talking to Microsoft and other companies about selling a program he’d written with a friend as his senior project at Exeter, called Synapse. The software watched what kind of music someone liked so it could suggest other songs. His friends called the program “The Brain” and were especially excited when they heard Zuckerberg might get as much as a million dollars for it. If that happened, they pleaded, could he please buy a large flat-screen TV for the common room?
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 ident
ify 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. They had an idea for a service that would tell you about parties and provide discounted admission to nightclubs, among other intended features. But they weren’t programmers. The three, athletic six-foot-five-inch identical twins Cameron and Tyler Winkelvoss, both champion rowers on the crew team, and their friend Divya Narendra sought out Zuckerberg in November after reading about Facemash in the Crimson. They offered to pay him to do the programming for their service.
“I had this hobby of just building these little projects,” says Zuckerberg now. “I had like twelve projects that year. Of course I wasn’t fully committed to any one of them.” Most of them, he says, were about “seeing how people were connected through mutual references.”
Zuckerberg’s interest in building websites with social components had arisen the previous summer. He was living in a dormitory at the Harvard Business School with two Exeter friends, including Adam D’Angelo, with whom he’d developed Synapse, the music suggestion software, and who was now studying computer science at the California Institute of Technology. Another close friend and Harvard computer science major named Kang-Xing Jin lived there, too. All three had lucrative programming jobs they found undemanding, and Zuckerberg had broken up with his girlfriend. There was a lot of time for bull sessions, which tended to center on what kind of software should happen next on the Internet.
The Facebook Effect Page 3
