Facebook, Love It or Hate It, Changed the Game Forever

On Jan. 4, 2008, Colombian citizen Oscar Morales, tired of reading endless stories of kidnappings by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), began a group on Facebook as a sign of opposition to the militant organization. Just one month later, the group, Un Millon de Voces Contra Las FARC, held a massive demonstration to voice its anger. An estimated 10 million Colombians participated.

The Colombia demonstration was a shining example of what former senior editor at Fortune magazine David Kirkpatrick calls The Facebook Effect, the title of his new book. Kirkpatrick outlines the meteoric rise of both Facebook and of Zuckerberg himself. The Colombia event’s grandeur and spontaneity echoed 26-year-old Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s own outsized ambition.

Zuckerberg dreamed early on of turning Facebook into a global platform. In early conversations with Kevin Efrusy of Accel Partners, a Facebook investor, Zuckerberg ignored advice to take it slow on the platform idea. At the time, Facebook had six employees. He responded to Efrusy’s advice by holding a conversation with Microsoft CEO Bill Gates.

The history of Facebook is the stuff of Hollywood — so much so, in fact, that a big-studio movie written by West Wing and Studio 60 creator Aaron Sorkin based on the story is set for wide release this fall. Zuckerberg built the earliest versions of Facebook while a student at Harvard University, only to pack up and move to California with a small team of friends as the site began to expand beyond Cambridge, Mass. In the following years, the site underwent several big changes. First, the site moved beyond a focus on students and opened itself up opened to the broader public. Then, businesses. Then Facebook allowed web developers to create applications. Then Facebook introduced the News Feed.

At each step, Zuckerberg aggressively pushed for the changes, often against considerable opposition from Facebook users. When the site underwent a massive redesign in September 2006, there was Zuckerberg, guiding users through the new layout and new features. When applications were first introduced to Facebook in 2007, a then-23-year-old Zuckerberg was the one to take the stage in front of some of the most powerful moguls in the world to demonstrate the new features.

Almost every time, Zuckerberg emerged victorious. The most notable exception came recently, with the advent and implementation of new privacy settings and the controversial “opt-out” policy, where users were automatically assigned looser privacy settings and had to manually change them to limit what other users could see.

What stands out most in Kirkpatrick's account is the amateurish way Facebook came together. It wasn’t until 2008 that Facebook brought on board Sheryl Sandberg, a former executive at Google, as Chief Operating Officer to give the company the air of professionalism that perhaps many assumed Facebook had possessed after it expanded beyond a college audience.

Zuckerberg expedited the hiring of a COO thanks in part to what has become commonly referred to as the single biggest misstep to date by the company; the so-called Beacon feature, a fairly simple plugin that posted information about a user’s conduct elsewhere on the Internet. Users logged into their profiles to find their online purchases or other interactions displayed on their Walls without warning, for all to see. The damage done by the bad publicity that resulted from Beacon lingers to this day. It was the launch of Beacon that spurred anti-Facebook activism by individuals and groups like Move On.

Zuckerberg was on the front lines during the recent criticism over its new privacy policies, drafting blog posts and memos to users explaining why he felt they were necessary, and ultimately acquiescing to the mounting complaints of the site’s users. The press took notice as well and began hammering Zuckerberg and his company for breaching what they saw as Facebook’s compact: A commitment to privacy and user control of information.

Lawsuits, some still pending, have been filed against the company and its CEO at a steady pace. Much of media criticism remains cautious about the intentions and practices of the company; business transactions with the site now involve monetary figures in the tens of billions of dollars.

Still, just barely seven years after its initial launch, Facebook has about 500 million users, annual revenue topping $1 billion, and is the second most highly trafficked website in the world behind only Google. It is endlessly expanding its offerings and member rolls. And it shows no sign of slowing down on college campuses either.

At some point down the road, after Facebook has evolved further in tandem with our evolving understanding of privacy in the age of the Internet, or perhaps has been usurped entirely, students will look back at what was a revolutionary platform and a once-in-a-lifetime business and learn something valuable. If this book does nothing else, it serves as evidence to future generations that Facebook’s ideas — criticized in the present as overreaching, prying and even a bit creepy — may actually be ahead of the times.

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