March 20, 2024
Mark Elliot Zuckerberg was born in 1984. The Zuckerbergs lived in Dobbs Ferry, New York. In sixth grade, Zuckerberg got his first computer which was a Quantex 486DX.
Zuckerberg enrolled in the Phillips Exeter Academy in 2002. In Exeter, he was exposed to another student's project called Facebook. Its creator Kris Tillery had the idea of exporting a binder of student headshots and captions known as the Photo Address Book to the digital realm.
At Harvard, Zuckerberg created a program called 'Course Match'. Students would enter their name, email, and the courses they were taking. And by selecting a course, they could see who else had signed up for the course.
At Harvard, Zuckerberg also made his own version of a popular website called 'Hot or Not' which was formed in 2000. 'Hot or Not' asked people to rate the pictures individually, but in Zuckerberg's version, it pitted two people against each other.
On January 11, 2004, Zuckerberg registered the website 'thefacebook.com'.
And on February 4, 2004, Zuckerberg officially launched Thefacebook.
Eduardo Saverin kicked in $1000 which was matched by Zuckerberg himself. And Eduardo would later kick in another $15,000 to a joint bank account. The money helped Zuckerberg rent server space which cost $85 a month.
Thefacebook started with the students from Harvard, but then moved to Columbia, Stanford and Yale. And in a few months time, it had expanded to more than a hundred campuses.
Eduardo Saverin incorporated Thefacebook as a Florida corporation.
But Sean Parker later helped Zuckerberg incorporate it in Delaware which had a business-friendly regime.
While filling out documents, Sean Parker asked Zuckerberg how many vacation days employees should get. Three weeks, replied Zuckerberg, meaning fifteen business days. Sean Parker thought a week was a week, and wrote twenty-one days. To this day, Facebook employees get twenty-one days of paid vacation instead of fifteen.
Facebook needed money, so Sean Parker took charge of fundraising. And one of the first people he called was Reid Hoffman.
Reid Hoffman was eager to meet Zuckerberg but was worried about the criticism he might get from investing in Facebook. People were saying that it wasn't seemly for him to be funding a potential competitor.
In spite of all that he suggested that they all meet at the office of his former PayPal colleague Peter Thiel.
Peter Thiel's investment was $500,000 for 7 percent of the company, valuing the company at $5 million.
Reid Hoffman invested $37,500 in Facebook.
As Thefacebook was taking off, Zuckerberg was just as passionate about a second project called Wirehog.
Wirehog allowed people to share files across several devices with full access to them. It also allowed people to share selected files with their friends. But the music honchos fearing piracy had a directive for Zuckerberg to shut it down.
A few months after Zuckerberg's meeting with the music industry people, a company called Dropbox was founded and is now worth $10 billion.
In September 2004, Zuckerberg moved their servers from their East Coast company to a bigger co-location facility in California called Equinex.
In March 2005, Thefacebook moved to an office which was located on the second-floor space on Emerson Street in downtown Palo Alto.
Before the Wall was introduced, people could only input snippets of information about themselves on the profile page.
The Wall allowed people to add text-only remarks on someone's profile page. It appeared at the center of the page and the comments were organized in reverse chronology, like a blog. It allowed people to discuss what happened at the party last night, or just talk trash.
Groups followed the Wall. It allowed people to organize around a shared topic.
Aaron Sittig, re-designed the Thefacebook page and limited himself to a blue palette which had the advantage of registering clearly to Zuckerberg who is color-blind and can't see reds and greens.
The feature that was implemented next was Photos. Before its launch, Facebook users were allotted a single profile photo.
Sean Parker was on vacation in North Carolina when the police entered the house he was renting and found what they assumed was cocaine.
Zuckerberg responded by reorganizing the company in a way that demoted Sean Parker.
Even though Sean Parker lost his job, he wasn't banned from entering Facebook's offices and for the next few years he would be a mercurial presence.
What Zuckerberg discovered after observing Facebook logs was that after logging into Facebook, people would click on their friends' profile to check what they were up to.
This helped him envision News Feed as a personalized newspaper where people wouldn't have to click through their friends list to see what they were up to.
News Feed was designed to provide a continuous stream of news flowing up your screen in reverse chronology.
While the News Feed showed what others were up to, Zuckerberg came up with another idea for a second feed that would tell your friends what was going on with you.
The feature was called Mini-Feed, it would live on the user's profile page and present a log of what was going on in the person's life but not in a creepy way.
In the year 2006, when Facebook was in need of revenue, it made a deal with Microsoft which allowed Microsoft to sell Facebook ads to international clients.
The inefficiency of Facebook's flow where a user had to click on different profile pages to find out what their friends were up to had one built-in advantage which was that all that clicking resulted in more ad views. Some of the executives were worried that News Feed would diminish the company's revenues.
News Feed went live at 1:06 AM. It took the Facebook team more than six months to develop it.
The next day, when the Facebook employees returned to office, they found that there were riots because of News Feed.
Even as hundreds of thousands of users were expressing their disapproval, Facebook logs showed that users were spending more and more time on News Feed.
On September 5, at quarter to eleven at night, Zuckerberg posted his response, entitled, "Calm down. Breathe. We hear you."
After Facebook was opened to the public, Facebook's numbers began to rise. In the last few months of 2006, and into 2007, Facebook's numbers rose from thousands of people joining a day to tens of thousands of people.
A development platform serves as a technological gateway for software developers to create programs using Facebook data for social applications. The initial step involves creating an API, a software socket that enables programmers to access platform data.
But the idea of an API evolved from apps being hosted on someone else's website to being hosted on Facebook itself on something called canvases.
Platform would be the third great project after Open Reg and News Feed.
Seventy developers would be ready with apps when Platform was launched. Facebook's favored app at the time was a collaboration between Joe Green and Sean Parker called Causes (formerly called Project Agape). The two were planning on building a website to empower activists and decided to make it a part of Facebook instead.
However, mobile completely undermined the platform and relegated it to irrelevance.
The first Facebook ad product was called Campus Flyers. It was a self-service system that let advertisers take out banners that they would use to target audiences of specified campuses. It used a time-based pricing model called Cost Per Day.
Microsoft and Facebook formed a partnership where Microsoft would have the exclusive rights to sell Facebook's domestic ads.
A Facebook team which included Chris Cox (the person who helped create News Feed) created "sponsored stories" which worked like display ads but looked like actual posts on the Feed. Advertisers paid by the impressions.
Facebook's ad business was code named Panda. Later that name would change to Pandemic. The tag line to advertisers would be that they could inject themselves into conversations between individuals.
Facebook's ad system will target the right users for the ad to be displayed to them as opposed to how many people saw the ads. It would create its own auction-based system where advertisers would bid against one another to place ads in the sidebars alongside the News Feed or in the News Feed itself.
Google used keywords as the bidding criteria, but Facebook would use demographic information such as male college students who like football or married female foodies in a specific zip code.
Facebook released another package called Pages. It would allow companies and other entities, like rock bands, to have profiles of their own. It would act like storefronts, billboards, or even websites within Facebook. Pages would be like the Yellow Pages, while the Profiles would be like the White Pages.
Another package that Facebook announced with Pandemic was Beacons. Facebook struck deals with 44 partners to install invisible monitors, known as beacons, on their web pages. The pitch: reach millions of users by adding three lines of code. Beacons signaled activity to Facebook, enabling users to share good news on their friends' News Feed when they made a purchase on the site.
The engineers creating ad products reported up to Zuckerberg, while those in sales reported to Sandberg. People building the News Feed would report to Zuckerberg, while those responsible for policy decisions regarding News Feed would be working for Sandberg.
A start-up company called FriendFeed had a website that aggregated all the messages and posts from different social networks the FriendFeed user belonged to. And it had a 'like' button.
Initially, Facebook wanted to use an 'awesome' button. But it didn't strike the right tone for a feedback feature. And by the time it was renamed to 'like', Facebook had already purchased FriendFeed.
The decision to make the 'like' button a thumbs-up sprang from Facebook tradition - the Poke button was also a hand.
The 'like' button boosted Facebook's business and gave users an easy way to express themselves. The 'like' button also acted as a gateway drug for Facebook's data-gathering to extend beyond its border.
In recent years, the founders of the 'like' button, Rosenstein, Pearlman, and Morgenstern would recognize that their work has been a factor in degrading society and empowering their former employer to wantonly gather data on its users.
You can think of the 'like' button as the revenge for Beacon. While Beacon shared personal data it had received from other users on Facebook, the 'like' button allowed Facebook to use that data for its own purposes, mostly to build its profiles of users and power its advertising.
Officially launched in August 2008, PYMK (People You May Know) is a feature that identifies personally selected prospects for one's friend list. It wasn't a Facebook invention. LinkedIn did it first.
Although Facebook does not create profiles for non-Facebook users, it keeps certain data, such as the device type and operating system version, for things like "optimizing registration flow for the specific device" should someone decide to join.
In 2013, Zuckerberg wrote a white paper describing his vision, entitled, "Is Connectivity a Human Right?" In it he explained how everyone will benefit from the increased knowledge, experience and progress.
In order to provide Internet access to people who didn't have access to it, Facebook initially tried to use a satellite that would beam connectivity to sub-Saharan Africa. Unfortunately, that satellite blew up on Elon Musk's launchpad.
His next plan included beaming down the Internet from solar-powered, super-lightweight drones. The drone (called Aquila) crashed on landing and Zuckerberg gave up on the idea.
The drones and satellites were meant to provide Internet access to 15 percent of the world without a signal. The real foundation of the initiative was the Internet.org program that partnered with local telecoms to deliver services with no data charges.
Facebook launched it in India in 2014. However, the program faced some criticism because it put some competitors at a disadvantage. Even though Facebook announced that it would open Internet.org to all developers, the criticism persisted.
In 2009, Facebook expanded its operations to Dublin and the following year it opened an office in Hyderabad, India. Until 2012, most of the people who were vetting content were full-time Facebook employees. That year, Facebook decided to use contract employees. It hired Accenture to set up a huge moderation center in Manila, Philippines.
In 2009, when most firms had stopped hiring and focusing exclusively on revenue and their finances, Facebook kept its focus on growth even though it wasn't cash flow positive. And Facebook did indeed grow in 2009, it finally showed some profit and its revenues almost doubled.
In 2006, Facebook made deals with Cingular, Verizon, and Sprint which resulted in Facebook's first mobile product, allowing users to send text messages on those services.
When Zuckerberg started coding Facebook, he used the web-based programming language PHP. It was PHP which enabled the speed that had been the secret jet fuel powering Facebook's growth.
But when mobile phones started to get popular, Facebook didn't have many engineers who could develop a Facebook app for Android or iOS. When HTML5 appeared, Facebook used it to create its own mobile app and dubbed it Faceweb. It was a disaster.
So Facebook decided to build its own native app that would run on Android and iOS. In March 2012, Facebook had a prototype where News Feed was running smoothly.
Facebook also tried to build its own device. The idea was to build a device that would be so tied to one's social graph and interests that it would be inseparable from the person themselves. But Facebook became concerned about the investment it would take to build such a product.
So it reached a compromise. Instead of building its own device, Facebook would create an alternate version of the Android operating system and license it to other phone manufacturers. HTC manufactured the first Facebook Home handset in April 2013 with Samsung lined up to follow. But, Facebook Home turned out to be a dud.
Facebook's mobile crisis came at a time when it was seeking to float its value in the stock market. Zuckerberg had stalled it as long as he could. Since the 2007 Microsoft investment, it had raised big private fundings, notably a $200 million influx of cash in 2009 by Russian mogul Yuri Milner.
Facebook chose Morgan Stanley for the IPO. But other investment banks, including Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan, also joined in.
Zuckerberg created two levels of shareholders, with the top level where he belonged, given dominance in any vote. He held 56 percent of the voting shares, which would give him veto power over anything that other shareholders or the board of directors might order.
The stock opened at Facebook's optimistic $38 a share. After a week, the price was $32. By September, the share price had plummeted to around $20.
2012 was a good year for Facebook. The smartphone wave that was seen as a threat turned out to be its biggest boost since the News Feed. Facebook Home turned out to be a flop, but its native apps for Android and iOS were by far the most popular on each platform.
Kevin Systrom, in his spare time, would code for a special app that he would call Burbn. Its purpose was to let your friends know what you were up to and where you were. He got $500,000 in seed money and was joined by Mike Krieger, an engineer who had majored in Stanford's Symbolic Systems program.
The founders noted that photo sharing, initially planned as a slideshow in the app, was the most popular feature. Sites like Flickr and Facebook displayed photos as if they were objects in a gallery or scrapbook. In Burbn, it was used as a form of communication. So the founders decided to rewrite Burbn to concentrate on that aspect.
Instagram was launched on October 6, 2010. Twenty-five thousand people signed up the first day. They had to transfer to Amazon's cloud service to handle the load.
Six months after its launch, Instagram did its "A" funding round led by Benchmark Capital. People like Jack Dorsey and Adam D'Angelo invested at a valuation of $20 million.
The following year, it needed more funding as it was growing exponentially. Instagram's proposed valuation for the new funding was set at $500 million. They had no trouble finding investors.
Jack Dorsey was interested in buying Instagram for well over $500 million. However, Facebook ended up buying it for $1 billion.
After buying Instagram, Snapchat caught Zuckerberg's attention. Just like Instagram, Snapchat was largely based on photos. But unlike Instagram, the photos uploaded in Snapchat were ephemeral, they disappeared after a few seconds, unable to haunt the users in decades to come.
Facebook made an offer to buy Snapchat which the founders declined. The founders didn't feel that Snapchat would thrive in Facebook's culture because they thought that Facebook still had very much a desktop mentality.
In 2011, Facebook bought a small start-up called Beluga, created by three former Google engineers who were working on a group-chat application. Facebook asked them to develop a prototype for what would be a separate app for messaging. Zuckerberg directed the team to graft the new product onto Facebook's current infrastructure for messages.
The app's growth was linear, not exponential. And at Facebook, linear means flat. After a year, the line became more of a plateau, at about 100 million users. It was decided that Facebook and messenger need to be broken apart because that way Facebook will be able to control the growth much better.
Messenger started as a means of communication between two individuals. However, it expanded to something where people could also message with businesses, primarily through the use of automated "bots".
In 2013, Facebook acquired another "mobile analytics" company called Onavo. Facebook packaged it as part of its Internet.org effort to help connect the world.
Initially, Facebook used Onavo's business model, which was gathering data from deceptively "free" apps to inform its money-making business intelligence operations. When it stopped serving it purpose, Facebook created a different honey trap for user data.
The Onavo Protect was a VPN (Virtual Private Network) that provided more security than public Wi-Fi networks. It was a privacy tool whose purpose was to gain the users' data. Facebook now has a powerful tool to monitor the mobile activity of thousands of users.
WhatsApp started as an idea for an app that would attach a temporary status update to the names of the people in your address book. Others could use it to see if you were unavailable for a call or maybe your battery was low and you couldn't take the call. However, nobody was using WhatsApp as intended, they were using it as a messenger.
Zuckerberg offered to buy WhatsApp for $19 billion which was later raised to $22 billion because of a change in Facebook's valuation.
After getting his hands on Instagram and WhatsApp, Zuckerberg wanted to acquire Oculus which was a virtual reality company founded by Palmer Luckey in 2012. He offered to buy it for $2 billion and an additional $700 million for "earn-outs".
Facebook's Threat Intelligence team consisted of computer security experts who had experience in tracking espionage threats like malware and phishing. Facebook's concern was that skilled operatives working for a foreign power might use Facebook to find targets.
The security firm CrowdStrike had been tracking the activities of two teams that the firm had nicknamed Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear. These were two separate units of GRU (Russia's equivalent of CIA).
Facebook knew that some of the accounts on its platform belonged to GRU members. The Threat Intelligence team monitored their activities to keep track of any potential security threats.
In early 2016, they noticed these accounts searching for people in government posts, journalists, and Democrats involved with the Clinton campaign. Facebook alerted the FBI, but the FBI failed to follow up with Facebook.
Alex Stamos became Facebook's chief security officer in 2015 and his job included protecting the information of 2 billion people and an infrastructure that sprawled across the globe.
Two Facebook data scientists working with researchers from the University of California in San Diego (UCSD) decided to run an experiment to test whether the voter button on Facebook actually affected voter turnout.
The study, titled "A 61-Million-Person Experiment in Social Influence and Political Mobilization" was published in Nature in 2012.
It concluded, "The Facebook social message increased turnout directly by about 60,000 voters and indirectly through social contagion by another 280,000 voters, for a total of 340,000 additional votes."
What if Facebook decided to withhold the button in Republican districts and feature it prominently in Democratic districts? It put Facebook in a position where it could, in a small way, determine voter turnout by its geographic selections.
The idea that Facebook could manipulate people to get the results it wanted was disturbing.
In 2016, Facebook still wasn't thinking of the News Feed as a propaganda machine.
In order to avoid interfering with the election, Facebook gave a green light to misleading, sensationalistic posts that themselves arguably interfered with the election.
The Facebook team thought that Clinton was going to win the election anyway so why address the outrageous behavior on its platform.
The Obama campaign had been masters at Facebook during both campaigns. But the Clinton campaign didn't take it seriously enough. The Clinton team spent a fraction of the Trump team's Facebook budget, and their few ads were significantly underspent.
The Trump team contacted Facebook and said we want to spend $100 million on your platform. And Facebook responded by sending a Facebook employee to the Trump team.
The advantage of having a Facebook employee on your team is that if there is a problem then the employee can contact Facebook and fix the issue immediately. The Clinton campaign, on the other hand, had to call or write an email to Facebook which was time consuming.
Since News Feed was designed to promote sensational content, Trump's wild experimentation found that the most salacious ads would be generously shared by people.
And to people for whom nothing resonated, implying that they were Clinton voters, the Trump team ran anti-Hillary ads.
Sandberg and Zuckerberg would later admit that Facebook was too slow to tackle the fake news issue. Facebook's belief in free speech led to the persistence of misinformation, even when individuals didn't tell the truth.
IRA (Internet Research Agency) which is located in Saint Petersburg is considered a "troll farm".
The IRA had spent $100,000 on around 3,000 ads. It was used to promote 120 pages which had posted more than 80,000 pieces of content that reached 129 million Facebook users.
Many of these ads were stirring up racial resentments and playing on people's darkest fears.
Facebook removed the IRA pages based on who posted them, not what was in them. It was removed because the IRA had used dummy accounts, not real accounts. And instead of announcing their findings, they chose not to do anything.
Even though Mark Zuckerberg took only $1 annually as compensation from Facebook, the company paid for his security which came to $7.3 million in 2017, and would rise to double that figure the year after.
Though in theory scrolling could go on for thousands of posts, people only viewed a few posts at a time. So the race for the top ranking was determined by a scoring system beyond the grasp of a human being.
The drawback was that the traditional methods of maintaining attention had reached a new dimension of toxic addictiveness with the digital tools and AI breakthroughs of the twenty-first century.
The real threat to humans from AI is not the Terminator-style robots but algorithms that keep on overwhelming us with digital junk food.
Zuckerberg and Chan, with the Gateses as role models, began their own philanthropic organization which would focus on health, education, and social justice. The CZI (Chan Zuckerberg Initiative) has one big difference from the non-profit Gates Foundation. CZI is a for-profit LLC.
In September 2016, CZI made a promise that it would spend $3 billion to "cure all disease" during the life span of his two daughters, roughly by the end of the century.
Using Likes alone, a researcher could know someone better than the people who worked with, grew up with, or even married that person.
In December 2015, there was an article in The Guardian which reported that the Ted Cruz campaign was directing ads using personal data mishandled by a Facebook developer.
After Ted Cruz dropped out, Cambridge Analytica began working for the Trump campaign. Cambridge Analytica's VP was Steve Bannon who would later become a top adviser to Donald Trump.
Facebook failed to notify its users in 2016 and 2017 that their personal information had been used for political purposes.
According to the Trump campaign, Cambridge employees were used as staff for their talents, and not their data.
Zuckerberg ended up interrogated by two Senate subcommittees - Commerce and Justice - and a day later, to face the House Energy and Commerce Committee. The only concession that Zuckerberg got was that he didn't have to be sworn in.
Facebook was recognized as a force of freedom during the Arab Spring movement in the Middle East. It helped people gather and organize in Egypt and Tunisia.
As reported by journalistic accounts and UN human rights reports, Myanmar's president and his supporters have been accused of using Facebook to incite violence against the Rohingya Muslim minority group.
Facebook launched Live in August 2015, but by that time Twitter had already started a live-streaming product of its own called Periscope. But Facebook, unlike others, not only streamed video live, but let it remain on the page after it was done.
Facebook uses the most number of moderators compared to Google, Twitter, and Tinder. And it wants to replace tens of thousands of its workers who moderate content with AI.
FAIR (Facebook Artificial Intelligence Lab) is centered in New York City. It is a partner to the company's Applied Machine Learning team, which directs its AI work to products.
In 2018, Facebook announced that its AI teams had successfully learned to read the content of messages embedded in graphics.
In May 2018, Zuckerberg announced another product called Dating. It would create an entirely new dossier about Facebook's users.
Some major companies, like Netflix, Airbnb, and Lyft were allowed to access user information on Facebook while many other companies were blocked.
Then came the announcement from Facebook which stated that hackers had exploited flaws in its infrastructure to get access to the information of 50 million users, including that of Sandberg and Zuckerberg.
There was a time when Facebook was the top choice for employment. According to a computer science teacher, thirty percent of his students won't even consider working for Facebook for moral reasons.
The results of a poll taken by 29,000 Facebookers in late 2018 showed that only a little over half of the workforce had expressed optimism about the company.
Facebook indicated that its momentum from its current ad model had slowed (sponsored items on the News Feed might not be the future). Facebook is planning on placing ads among the strip of clips known as Stories, which started on Instagram, and has now moved to Facebook, WhatsApp, and Messenger.
When Zuckerberg and his team reported the second-quarter earnings in July 2018, and talked about the shift in its ad revenue momentum, Facebook's stock price had fallen 20 percent and Zuckerberg himself lost $17 billion.
According to Tim Cook, Apple's CEO, the Facebook business model provides a service that seems free but actually isn't, as you are paying with your personal information and constant ad exposure.
In 2018, Facebook saw a 37 percent increase in its revenue which amounted to $56 billion. It was the best year for Facebook in terms of revenue.
Brian Acton, cofounder of WhatsApp, felt that users should be able to communicate in a way where government eavesdroppers could never access their communication. And therefore, in the summer of 2013, he began working on an end-to-end encryption model for WhatsApp.
Acton informed Zuckerberg that messages in WhatsApp would be end-to-end encrypted before the purchase deal had been closed. And Zuckerberg agreed to it.
In mid-2016, Zuckerberg argued that Facebook should use some WhatsApp data and merge it with its other services. It involved integrating the phone numbers of WhatsApp customers into Facebook's databases.
This resulted in a $122 million fine imposed on Facebook by the European Union.
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