The Facebook Effect

by David Kirkpatrick

  D’Angelo had launched a provocative project of his own the previous year from his dorm room at Caltech. Called Buddy Zoo, it invited users to upload their AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) buddy lists to a server and compare them to the lists belonging to people who had also uploaded theirs. You could see who shared which friends, thus illustrating your network of social connections. At the time AIM was the de facto communications tool of American youth (and many adults). Hundreds of thousands of AIM users tried out Buddy Zoo, and it had a brief online celebrity. D’Angelo made no effort to commercialize it, and eventually let it die. But it pointed in a promising direction.

  During the winter break, Zuckerberg got deep into coding yet another project. He was particularly eager to get this one done. His bemused friends didn’t pay much more attention to this new project than to all the other sites he had launched that year.

  On January 11, Zuckerberg went online and paid Register.com thirty-five dollars to register the web address Thefacebook.com for one year. This site borrowed ideas from Course Match and Facemash as well as from a service called Friendster that Zuckerberg belonged to. Friendster was a social network, a service that invited individuals to create a “profile” of themselves, complete with data about hobbies, tastes in music, and other personal information. On such services people linked their own profiles to those of their friends, thereby identifying their own “social network.”

  Friendster, like most social networks up to that time, was primarily intended to help you connect with people for dating. The idea was that you might find romantic material by scrutinizing the friends of your friends. Friendster had taken Harvard by storm the previous year but had fallen from favor after its almost overnight nationwide success led to millions of users. That created technical strains that made it slow and difficult to use. Another, more flashy social network called MySpace had launched the previous August in Los Angeles. It was growing quickly and already had about a million members, though it hadn’t made much of an impression at Harvard.

  Harvard had been claiming for many months that it was going to take all the “facebooks” maintained by each House—the ones Zuckerberg had cannibalized for Facemash—and unify them online in searchable form. Studying these photos was a common recreational activity. There was a college-wide printed facebook called the Freshman Register, issued each year, but it only included entering students. Copies were extensively annotated—boys, for instance, would circle photos of the best-looking girls.

  Now that students had seen what was possible with Friendster, they wanted an online facebook. It was obvious that it wasn’t that hard to create online directories. If an entrepreneur in San Francisco could do it, why couldn’t Harvard’s administration? This impulse was surprisingly widespread. At many colleges that year, students were pushing administrations to put student photo directories online. The Crimson included extensive references to the need to create an online facebook. The editors took the view that if a student could build Facemash, there was no reason a programmer couldn’t build a facebook. In a December 11 editorial titled “Put Online a Happy Face: Electronic facebook for the entire College should be both helpful and entertaining for all,” its editors practically described how to build one. The essay strongly emphasized the need for students to control their own information in such a system. That fall Zuckerberg took a math class on graph theory. At semester’s end everyone in the class went out to dinner and ended up talking about the need for a “universal facebook.” So Zuckerberg went home and built one.

  “There was definitely a little bit of a ‘fuck you’ to Harvard,” says one classmate and friend of Zuckerberg’s. “They always said they were going to do a centralized facebook, but they had all these worries about how it’s their information. They thought they had legal issues. Mark just figured you could get people to upload the information themselves.” In fact, Zuckerberg later said that it was the Crimson’s editorials about Facemash that gave him the initial idea for how to build Thefacebook. “Much of the trouble surrounding the facemash could have been eliminated,” wrote the Crimson, “if only the site had limited itself to students who voluntarily uploaded their own photos.”

  That simple insight, combined with Zuckerberg’s desire to create a reliable directory based on real information about students, became the core concept of Thefacebook. “Our project just started off as a way to help people share more at Harvard,” says Zuckerberg, “so people could see more of what’s going on at school. I wanted to make it so I could get access to information about anyone, and anyone could share anything that they wanted to.”

  His new service for Harvard students was not a dating site like Friendster. It was a very basic communications tool, aimed at solving the simple problem of keeping track of your schoolmates and what was going on with them. Some of Zuckerberg’s friends later speculated that it was also intended to help him deal with his own introverted personality. If you’re a geek who is a little uncomfortable relating to other people, why not create a website that makes it easier?

  Thefacebook also drew inspiration from another important source—the so-called away messages that users of AIM posted when they weren’t at their computers. These short, pithy phrases were often used by AIM users to show off their creativity. Though there was room for only a few words, users included political statements and humor as well as practical information about the account holder’s whereabouts. AIM away messages were so important to Zuckerberg that another one of his earlier software projects was a tool that alerted him when friends’ messages changed. Thefacebook was going to be a robust combination of the AIM away message and that alert tool—a place where you could host more information about yourself so friends could keep track of you. (Today’s Facebook status update traces its heritage directly back to those AIM away messages.)

  Both Course Match and Facemash had operated over Zuckerberg’s dorm-room Net connection from his laptop, but Course Match’s success had taken its toll on the hard drive. Zuckerberg lost quite a lot of data. And part of what got him in trouble with the administrative board over Facemash was that he used Harvard’s network to host it. So this time he took a more serious approach. He searched around online and found a hosting company called Manage.com, where he entered his credit card number and started paying eighty-five dollars a month for space on a computer server. That’s where Thefacebook’s software and data would reside. This would be Thefacebook.com, not part of the www.harvard.edu network. He wasn’t sure, but in the back of his mind, Zuckerberg had a notion that this could end up as more than just a brief entertainment.

  Here’s another sign he thought something unusual might happen: he made a deal with a business-savvy classmate, Eduardo Saverin, to give him one-third of Thefacebook in exchange for Saverin making a small investment and helping out with business matters. Zuckerberg knew Saverin from Alpha Epsilon Pi, a selective fraternity for Jewish students to which both had recently pledged. Saverin was supposed to figure out how Thefacebook, if it took off, could make some money. The polished and well-liked son of a wealthy Brazilian business magnate, Saverin was an officer in the college Investment Club and a superb chess player who was known by his friends as a math genius. The two nineteen-year-olds agreed to invest $1,000 each. (Joe Green says Zuckerberg also approached him to be a business partner, but when Professor Green heard about it, he got “kind of pissed,” so Joe declined. Later he took to calling it, always with a pained laugh, his “billion-dollar mistake.”)

  On the afternoon of Wednesday, February 4, 2004, Zuckerberg clicked a link on his account with Manage.com. Thefacebook.com went live. Its home screen read: “Thefacebook is an online directory that connects people through social networks at colleges. We have opened up Thefacebook for popular consumption at Harvard University. You can use Thefacebook to: Search for people at your school; Find out who are in your classes; Look up your friends’ friends; See a visualization of your social network.” Zuckerberg labeled himself user number four. (The first three account
s were for testing.) User number five was roommate Hughes; number six was Moskovitz; and number seven was Saverin. Zuckerberg’s friend and classmate Andrew McCollum designed a logo using an image of Al Pacino he’d found online that he covered with a fog of ones and zeroes—the elementary components of digital media.

  The software spread quickly from the very beginning. The first users—Zuckerberg’s Kirkland House neighbors—sent emails to other students asking them to join and become their friends. That begat other emails from those students inviting their own friends to join. Someone suggested sending an email to everyone on the Kirkland House mailing list—about three hundred people. Several dozen signed up almost immediately.

  Thus began a viral explosion. By Sunday—four days after launch—more than 650 students had registered. Three hundred more joined on Monday. Thefacebook almost instantly became a main topic of conversation in Harvard dining halls and between classes. People couldn’t stop using it.

  To sign up, you created a profile with a single picture of yourself, along with a bit of personal information. You could indicate your relationship status. Pick one from the drop-down menu: single, in a relationship, or in an open relationship. You could include your phone number, AIM username, and email address; indicate which courses you were taking (a feature inspired by Course Match); favorite books, movies, and music; clubs you belonged to; political affiliation: very liberal/liberal/moderate/conservative/very conservative/apathetic; and a favorite quote. Thefacebook had no content of its own. It was merely a piece of software—a platform for content created by its users.

  Privacy controls were part of the original design. And there were some big restrictions: you couldn’t join unless you had a Harvard.edu email address, and you had to use your real name. That made Thefacebook exclusive, but it also ensured that users were who they said they were. Zuckerberg later told the Crimson that he “hoped the privacy options would help to restore his reputation following student outrage over facemash.com.” Validating people’s identity in this way made Thefacebook fundamentally different from just about everything else that had come before on the Internet, including Friendster and MySpace. On Thefacebook you could set your privacy options to determine exactly who could see your information. You could limit it to current students, just people in your class, or only those in your residential house.

  Once you set up your own profile, the interaction began. It was pretty limited. After you invited others to be your friend, you could see a diagram of your social network, which showed all the people you were connected to. You could also direct something called a “poke” at other users by simply clicking on a link on their page. When you did, an indication would show up on their home page. What did that mean? Here’s the insouciant answer Zuckerberg posted on the site: “We thought it would be fun to make a feature that has no specific purpose.…So mess around with it, because you’re not getting an explanation from us.”

  Much activity on Thefacebook from the beginning was driven by the hormones of young adults. It asked you whether you were “interested in” men or women. In addition to giving you the option to list whether you were in a relationship, you were asked to fill in a section labeled “Looking for.” One frequently chosen option was “Random play.” When you poked someone, an indication of that simply showed up on their profile. That person could poke you back. For at least some, the interaction had a distinctly sexual meaning. This was college, after all.

  Many people, on the other hand, found practical and wholesome uses for Thefacebook—creating study groups for classes, arranging meetings for clubs, and posting notices about parties. Thefacebook was a tool for self-expression, and even at this primordial stage of its development people were starting to recognize that there were many facets of the self that could be projected on its screen.

  Another feature was timely for many students. You could click on a course and see who was taking it, just as in Course Match. At Thefacebook’s launch, students were in the middle of choosing courses for the following semester. It was what’s called “shopping week” at Harvard, when classes have begun but students can add or drop them at will. For any Harvard student who picked his or her courses partly based on who else was in class, this feature of Thefacebook was immediately useful. It helps explain the rapid spread of Thefacebook in its early days, and also why Zuckerberg launched it that week.

  The whiteboard by the bedrooms in Kirkland Suite H33 now took on a different, less abstract character. Zuckerberg began filling it with charts and graphs indicating Thefacebook’s growth—how many people were joining each day and what features they used. It also tracked which users had the most friends.

  On Monday the 9th the Crimson interviewed Zuckerberg, something its staff was becoming accustomed to. “The nature of the site,” he told the paper, “is that each user’s experience improves if they can get their friends to join it.” Still smarting from the rebuke he received for Facemash, he emphasized to the Crimson that he was “careful…to make sure that people don’t upload copyrighted material.” The Crimson did a little probing about his motives: “Zuckerberg…said he did not create the Website with the intention of generating revenue.…‘I’m not going to sell anybody’s e-mail address,’ he said. ‘At one point I thought about making the Website so that you could upload a resume too, and for a fee companies could search for Harvard job applicants. But I don’t want to touch that. It would make everything more serious and less fun.’”

  Making Thefacebook fun was more important than making it a business. It was a statement that would reverberate down through the short history of Facebook.

  Thefacebook may have been meant to replace the Harvard house facebooks, but from the beginning there was one obvious difference. Whereas photos taken by college photographers the first week of school were often awkwardly posed, poorly lit, and unflattering, the ones people posted of themselves on Thefacebook tended to cast them in a very positive light. These were the young superstars of tomorrow, as envisioned by themselves. In only the second article ever written about Thefacebook, on February 17 a prescient columnist for the Crimson pinpointed several characteristics that would forever after form a central part of Facebook’s appeal. Wrote junior Amelia Lester (who five years later would be named managing editor of the New Yorker): “While Thefacebook.com isn’t explicitly about bringing people together in romantic unions, there are plenty of other primal instincts evident at work here: an element of wanting to belong, a dash of vanity and more than a little voyeurism.”

  And competitiveness was immediately in evidence. From Thefacebook’s first day, some users thought of it more as a way to accumulate the largest possible number of friends than to communicate and gather useful information. Many users of Facebook still do.

  By the end of the first week, about half of all Harvard undergraduates had signed up, and by the end of February approximately three-fourths. But students were not the only ones showing their faces online. The only requirement for membership was that you have a Harvard email address, which meant Thefacebook was available not only to students—graduate as well as undergrad—but also to Harvard alumni and staff. Some students griped that the staff didn’t belong there. While only a few had joined so far, about a thousand alumni had, mostly recent ones. After three weeks Thefacebook had more than 6,000 users.

  Within days, Zuckerberg realized that he was going to need help to operate and maintain Thefacebook. So he turned to those closest at hand—his roommates. About a week after Thefacebook launched, Zuckerberg signed an employment contract with Dustin Moskovitz. A year later, in a talk, he told the story of Moskovitz joining this way: “One of my roommates was ‘Hey, I’ll help you!’ I said ‘Dude! You can’t program!’ So he went home for the weekend and bought the book PERL for Dummies and said ‘Now I’m ready.’ I said ‘Dude, the site’s not written in PERL.’” Regardless, Zuckerberg adjusted the ownership of Thefacebook to give the eager Moskovitz 5 percent. He reduced his own stake slightly to 65 percent and Save
rin’s to 30 percent. Moskovitz’s main job was to spearhead expansion to other campuses.

  From even the second week, students at schools other than Harvard were emailing Zuckerberg asking when they could have it, too. Moving beyond Harvard had been in Zuckerberg’s mind from the beginning. Even the home page implied it—“an online directory that connects people through social networks at colleges”—not “Harvard,” but “colleges.” And his ambition did not stop there. Moskovitz says that while he was hired to help add new schools, “in that same conversation it was like—‘Yeah, and then we’ll go beyond that.’”

  Moskovitz mimicked Zuckerberg’s code wherever he could, and set out to learn. He wasn’t always fast, but he immediately became known for his amazing capacity for hard work. “Mark would get kind of impatient,” says one friend. “But Dustin just trudged through and through and through.” Some in Kirkland House started calling the sophomore from Florida “the ox.”

  Zuckerberg now says Moskovitz’s role during this period was “critical” to Thefacebook’s success. To add a school, Moskovitz had to figure out how email was addressed for students, staff, and alumni so he could set up the registration procedure. Then he would obtain a list of courses and residential dorms. He also had to set up a link to the college newspaper, because Thefacebook then had a feature, later discontinued, that linked your profile to any article in the campus paper that mentioned you. It took about half a day to do all the legwork and coding to add each school, but Zuckerberg and Moskovitz started expanding to new ones quickly even though both were still taking a full course load. They opened to students at Columbia on February 25, to Stanford the next day, and to Yale on the 29th. Columbia started slowly, but Stanford is where the broad appeal of Thefacebook was first proven. After just a week, the Stanford Daily was writing that “Thefacebook.com craze has swept through campus.” It reported 2,981 Stanford students had already registered.