The Facebook Effect

by David Kirkpatrick

  Members of Facebook’s radical transparency camp, Zuckerberg included, believe more visibility makes us better people. Some claim, for example, that because of Facebook, young people today have a harder time cheating on their boyfriends or girlfriends. They also say that more transparency should make for a more tolerant society in which people eventually accept that everybody sometimes does bad or embarrassing things. The assumption that transparency is inevitable was reflected in the launch of the News Feed in September 2006. It treated all your behavior identically—in effect telescoping all your identities, from whatever context, into the same stream of information.

  Those who speak their minds and show themselves on Facebook sometimes do see themselves as waging small battles for openness and transparency. Some of the controversies that result shine a spotlight on closed-mindedness by adults. Kimberley Swann, a sixteen-year-old in Essex, England, got a new job as a marketing firm office administrator. She added some co-workers as Facebook friends. After a few weeks she wrote on Facebook that her job was boring. Someone showed her boss, who promptly fired her. “I didn’t even put the company’s name,” said Swann in an interview with the Daily Telegraph. “They were just being nosy, going through everything.” Added a union official quoted by the BBC about the widely covered incident, “Most employers wouldn’t dream of following their staff down to the pub to see if they were sounding off about work to their friends.”

  A few high school students have gone to court to defend their right to speak freely on Facebook. Katherine Evans, a student at Pembroke Pines Charter High School in Florida, created a Facebook group complaining that her Advanced Placement English teacher was “the worst teacher I’ve ever met.” The principal learned of the group and suspended her for three days. She then sued the principal in federal court, arguing he had violated her First Amendment right to freedom of speech.

  Some young people—inadvertently echoing Zuckerberg—say it’s not a problem to have libertine images of themselves on Facebook because as they get older, standards about such indiscretions will have relaxed. While they are clearly gambling with their own reputations, the inarguable wholesale movement toward self-disclosure on Facebook and even in broader society gives this view some credence. President Barack Obama openly admitted in his autobiography to having snorted cocaine. Almost nobody cared.

  It’s understandable that people would want to share information about themselves unreservedly and still feel protected from inadvertent disclosures that might embarrass them. But the reason they can’t is embedded in the very reason people use Facebook. James Grimmelmann, an associate professor at the New York Law School, explains this dilemma in a 2009 article titled “Saving Facebook”: “[Facebook] has severe privacy problems and an admirably comprehensive privacy-protection architecture… Most of Facebook’s privacy problems are…natural consequences of the ways that people enthusiastically use Facebook.” He also writes, “There’s a deep, probably irreconcilable tension between the desire for reliable control over one’s information and the desire for unplanned social interaction.”

  One of Grimmelmann’s central points is that the violations of privacy that occur on Facebook are frequently the result of the behavior not of the company but of people a user has accepted as a friend. To prevent photos from being taken and posted on Facebook, some college parties now ban cell phones and cameras. Some parties even have what kids call “shot rooms,” which are totally dark so nobody can take any pictures of drinking or drug use. Athletes and other students concerned about their image have also learned to quickly troll Facebook after incriminating parties, seeking tagged photos of themselves that they, of course, detag. But the only way those photos can be uploaded and the tags affixed in the first place is if it’s done by a user who is your “friend.” Grimmelmann calls this sort of thing “peer-to-peer privacy violations.”

  Because we use our real names on Facebook, we can be held responsible for what we say. Many on the Internet take shelter behind pseudonyms when they say something obnoxious, rude, or hateful, but that’s harder here. In Harrison, New York, a police detective was demoted and forced to retire early in 2009 after writing on Facebook that the election of President Obama meant “the rose garden will be turned into the watermelon garden.”

  Facebook’s culture of accurate identity is not foolproof. Many create fake profiles for fun. At any time there are scores of profiles under the name Haywood Jablomie, for instance. But such fakesters are usually obvious. We are validated in our identity by the friends we have on Facebook, and Haywood usually has few or none. Other fake profiles are harder to detect. The Symantec security software firm conducted an experiment in 2008 in which it created one for an attractive young woman who supposedly attended a high school in Silicon Valley. Within hours a number of boys at that school had sent her friend requests, presumably because they wanted to date her. Sad incidents have also emerged in which, for example, men have posed as attractive women in order to get boys to send them photos of themselves nude or having sex.

  Celebrities also break the Facebook model. Microsoft chairman Bill Gates shut down his personal profile on Facebook in early 2008 for two reasons. He was getting more friend requests per day—thousands—than even his staff could manage. But there were also five other “Bill Gates” profiles pretending to be him, each with numerous “friends.”

  People with unusual names have a different problem. Facebook often blocks their efforts to establish profiles in the first place. An Australian woman named Elmo Keep, twenty-seven, was ejected from Facebook until she sent the company copies of her passport and driver’s license. V Addeman, fifty-two, of Costa Mesa, California, tried to join Facebook but was rejected by its software. He had a lengthy argument with Facebook customer service to convince them that his legal first name is a single letter. Others who have had difficulties include Japanese author Hiroko Yoda, Rowena Gay of New Zealand, and people whose names included Beaver, Jelly, Beer, and Duck. Even Caterina Fake, the well-known co-founder of Internet photo site Flickr, couldn’t initially join Facebook. (Facebook’s procedures for remedying such misunderstandings were grossly inadequate until late 2009, when a more formal appeals policy was inaugurated.)

  The vast majority of users identify themselves accurately. That gives Facebook some unique and practical capabilities. A man in Cardiff, Wales, located a half brother he hadn’t seen in thirty-five years merely by searching for him by name in Facebook. Such family reconnections are becoming almost routine in the age of Facebook.

  Many people no longer exchange email addresses and cell-phone numbers; they just look each other up on Facebook. This simple directory capability is one of its most undeniable virtues. People who are not on Facebook are increasingly seen, among some groups, as unreachable by friends and acquaintances.

  Is there a risk that once a fact about us has been revealed on Facebook we may never be able to escape it? Will we always be remembered as the drunken guy wearing the funny hat in some “friend’s” photo gallery? Will it become harder to evolve as people because opinions about us have already hardened? From time immemorial, people have moved to new towns and started over to escape some fact or impression about themselves that made them uncomfortable. Will that no longer be possible?

  It makes sense to be cautious about how much of your data you expose on Facebook. I myself abide by the simple “front page” rule. I’m relatively comfortable exposing a large portion of my whole self to scrutiny, so I put up extensive and accurate information on my profile and actively participate in dialogue. But I try never to include anything I would be devastated to find published on the front page of my local newspaper.

  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.”

  11

  The Platform

  “Together, we’re starting a movement!”

  Mark Zuckerberg has had a particular obsession since Facebook’s early days. On the night that his early collaborator Sean Parker first met Zuckerberg at that trendy Tribeca Chinese restaurant in May 2004, the two got into a curious argument. Zuckerberg, in Parker’s opinion, kept derailing the discussion by repeatedly talking about how he wanted to turn Thefacebook into a platform. What he meant was that he wanted his nascent service to be a place where others could deploy software, much as Microsoft’s Windows or the Apple Macintosh were platforms for applications created by others. Parker argued that it was way too early to think about anything like that.

  Kevin Efrusy of Accel Partners has a similar recollection. At one of his very first meetings with Zuckerberg after Accel invested in the company in late spring 2005, the young CEO asked for a favor. “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.

  Every great technology company goes through one or two key transitional moments when its creators discover they have created something different—and bigger—than they initially realized. Early on it dawned on Bill Gates—then making bespoke software for little PC hardware companies with partner Paul Allen—that software should be its own industry. He later had a second epochal realization: that entire computers could be built around an operating system. Microsoft subsequently became the most profitable company in history. One night it hit Yahoo founders Jerry Yang and Jeff Filo that they didn’t have only a map to the Internet. Their service could also be an unprecedented way to collect detailed market research about Net users. Yahoo became the first big ad-supported Net media company. Google’s turnabout came when founders Sergei Brin and Larry Page discovered they could direct user searches not only toward websites but also toward a separate database of advertising. Thus was born the most powerful business model of the Internet era so far.

  Zuckerberg’s first eureka moment was when he and Moskovitz realized their service could go beyond college. But another struck while watching the stunning success of the photos application. It became apparent something special was happening. “Our photo site lacks features anyone else would build,” Zuckerberg told me in early May 2007. “We don’t store high-resolution photos. The printing function is downright bad. And until recently you couldn’t even change the order of photos in an album. 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. “We did some thinking and we decided that the core value of Facebook is in the set of friend connections,” he continued. “We call that the social graph, in the mathematical sense of a series of nodes and connections. The nodes are the individuals and the connections are the friendships.” Then his enthusiasm veered, it seemed at the time, toward overstatement: “We have the most powerful distribution mechanism that’s been created in a generation.” Zuckerberg immodestly explained that this same power could be applied to any sort of application—not just photos or events. His certitude was jarring.

  By “distribution” he meant that by connecting with your friends on Facebook you had assembled a network, this so-called social graph, and it could be employed to distribute any sort of information. If you added a photo, it told your friends. Ditto if you changed your relationship status, or announced that you were heading to Mexico for the weekend. But it could also tell your friends about any action you took using any software to which your social graph was connected. So far, though, the only applications that took advantage of this distribution capability were photos, events, and a few others created by Facebook itself.

  Most software companies, were they to conclude that they had such an ability to create uniquely powerful applications, would create more of them. They might make shopping applications on top of their social graph, or games, or applications for businesses. Instead, Facebook stopped building applications at all, at least for a while. In the fall of 2006 Zuckerberg set out to realize his long-held vision of a platform for others to build applications on top of Facebook. He wanted to do for the Web what Gates did for the personal computer: create a standard software infrastructure that made it easier to build applications—this time, applications that had a social component. “We want to make Facebook into something of an operating system, so you can run full applications,” he explained.

  COO Owen Van Natta, whom I also talked to in May 2007, had his own way of describing this potential: “Take anything today on the Internet and overlay a lens that is people you know and trust who have their own perspective. That’s what we will enable with platform. What wouldn’t potentially be more valuable when seen through that lens?”

  Zuckerberg had thought about platforms almost since he first touched a keyboard. He learned to program as an adolescent by coding functions that worked on top of AOL, then the dominant online service. A community of hackers—including Zuckerberg—turned AOL into a platform whether its leaders wanted it to be one or not. Then when he was a senior at Exeter, he teamed up with Adam D’Angelo and built his software for listening to MP3s (audio files) called Synapse. Synapse became popular in part because it allowed other programmers to build companion programs, called plug-ins, that supplied additional features. Synapse was, in effect, a mini-platform. And in his earlier, abandoned obsession with his cherished Wirehog, Zuckerberg was thinking of Facebook as a platform. Wirehog was in effect, if only briefly, the first independent application to operate on top of Facebook.

  Becoming a platform on which the applications of others can operate is one of the great holy grails of technology. Microsoft dominated the technology industry for almost two decades by positioning its Windows software as the monopoly operating system platform for the PC industry. Anyone who wanted to build a PC application had to use Windows. (It was Bill Gates in fact who popularized this use of the word “platform.”)

  Creating a platform enables a software company to become the nexus of an ecosystem of partners that are dependent on its product. And once a company is at the center of an entire ecosystem, it becomes maddeningly difficult for competitors to dislodge it. Not only did Apple succeed at this masterfully with its Macintosh operating system, but it succeeded again, first with
the iPod and then with its magnificent iPhone.

  By becoming a platform, Facebook also takes some of the burden off itself to excel in everything it does. Facebook will never be able to build the best application in every area its users are interested in. Companies that devote more resources to chat, for example, will continue to outpace Facebook. I recently asked my seventeen-year-old daughter, Clara, if she used Facebook’s chat application, an ambitious add-on the service launched in mid-2008. No, she said, she still preferred AIM and Apple’s iChat (an answer many American teenagers would give, despite their addiction to Facebook). “Facebook Chat feels like using Morse code,” she explained. It doesn’t have enough features and isn’t easy enough to use. Zuckerberg decided that what Facebook did uniquely well was maintain your personal profile and your network of friend connections. Ultimately, almost everything else will be done by other companies.

  Facebook made the first move to turn itself into a platform back in August 2006. The world barely noticed. The big news around then was the News Feed scandal. Programmer Dave Fetterman spearheaded something called the Facebook API, or application programming interface. It enabled users to log in to other sites on the Web with their Facebook username and password so the partner site could extract their data, including their list of friends. Some at Facebook—mostly older executives—objected to letting user data escape the confines of the service in this way. They said the company was giving away something valuable and getting nothing in return. But Zuckerberg pushed it through. To demonstrate the API, Facebook built its own external website application called Facebank, later renamed Moochspot, for keeping track of small debts between friends.

  While thousands of developers did fiddle around with the API, not many used it, and very few Facebook users did.

  The real problem with the API was that it didn’t help outside application partners very much, because it didn’t include that vaunted “distribution.” It didn’t take full advantage of the social graph. You could pull your list of friends out of Facebook but you couldn’t send information you produced back inside to them. You and your friends could keep track of debts on Moochspot, yet it didn’t send any information back to your profile.