[ed. I know, another Facebook post. But this is a fine essay and Facebook itself is becoming so pervasive that it's hard to keep up with all its implications.]
Wooooh! yeah! Hoots, hollers and dance music played on a full-volume boombox, assail the conference room where I am quizzing a data scientist at Facebook. It takes 20 seconds for the noise to die down enough for us to continue talking.
This is what Facebook’s offices are like, embracing at least the idea of “creative destruction”, violence to the establishment. Facebook will soon float its shares on the stock market, making several billionaires and many millionaires out of its staff and backers. But the sprawling new Menlo Park office complex is designed—perhaps a bit too designed—to look as if the kids just took over in a revolution. Walls are extensively, if rather meticulously, graffiti’d; the graffiti artist, who was paid in shares, will be among the new millionaires. Chalkboards line many of the remaining surfaces, so Facebook’s wandering young employees can doodle almost anywhere. There are blocks of conference rooms with whimsical names: one here based on Star Wars characters mixed with drinks (Darth Jager, The Empire Strikes Bacardi), one over there echoing Ben & Jerry’s ice-cream (Americone Dream, Half Baked). Signs abound reading “Move Fast and Break Things”.
But these kids are not really breaking things. They are relentlessly building things, one after the other after the other, and adding them to the vastly ambitious mega-thing called Facebook. With its initial public offering (IPO) approaching, the company is in a “quiet period” during which it must avoid making new public predictions, but it is expected that Facebook’s 850m users will grow to a clean billion by July.
So for all the capricious decor and talk of breaking things, Facebook is very well aware that the eyes of the world are on it as an incumbent giant, not an insurgent. Besides “Move Fast and Break Things” there are signs telling employees to “Stay Focused and Keep Shipping”. Visitors are greeted warmly, but also presented with the standard Silicon Valley non-disclosure agreement before they can proceed past security. A billion people connected as never before in history. But Facebook also engenders anxiety on levels from the personal to the political, worries about a world in which private lives are always on display. What is 24-hour social networking doing to our self-expression, our self-image, our sense of decorum? Have we finally landed in the “global village” coined by Marshall McLuhan in the 1960s? What if you don’t like it there? Is there anywhere else to live?
And what is Facebook, anyway? The most obvious point of historical comparison is the social networks that preceded it. First there was Friendster, the flirt-and-forget site of the first half of the 2000s. Then everyone dumped Friendster for MySpace, and MySpace was bought by News Corp for $580m. Its value soared to $12 billion, and the received wisdom was that MySpace would take over the world. Then it didn’t, and News Corp sold it for $35m, because someone else had finally got social networking right. Started by Mark Zuckerberg in 2004, Facebook went from a Harvard dorm room to the rest of teenage America’s bedrooms to hundreds of millions of people all around the world—even parents and grandparents. Along the way, Facebook has fuelled revolutions in the Middle East, and inspired an Oscar-winning movie. Other social networks can only try to build out from the few niches it hasn’t already filled. Facebook is the undisputed champion of the world.
But the real comparison is not with other social networks. To give real credit to its achievement today and its ambitions for the future, it can only be said that Facebook’s true competitor is the rest of the entire internet.
The internet allows three things, broadly speaking: access to content (video, music, things to read), self-expression (blogs, Twitter) and communication (e-mail, chat, Skype). Facebook competes with it on all these fronts. By one estimate, one minute in every seven spent online, anywhere in the world, is spent on Facebook. To express themselves, users have Status Updates. For content, they can find photos, videos, music, news stories, recipes, book reviews and much more. And for communication, of course, there are your friends and Friends. More and more, the point of Facebook is to do almost anything you would do anyway, but with your friends, online. Facebook is an internet within the internet, so dominant that both it and other technology companies are realising that it is far easier to join forces than to fight.
by Robert Lane Greene, Intelligent Life | Read more:
Wooooh! yeah! Hoots, hollers and dance music played on a full-volume boombox, assail the conference room where I am quizzing a data scientist at Facebook. It takes 20 seconds for the noise to die down enough for us to continue talking. This is what Facebook’s offices are like, embracing at least the idea of “creative destruction”, violence to the establishment. Facebook will soon float its shares on the stock market, making several billionaires and many millionaires out of its staff and backers. But the sprawling new Menlo Park office complex is designed—perhaps a bit too designed—to look as if the kids just took over in a revolution. Walls are extensively, if rather meticulously, graffiti’d; the graffiti artist, who was paid in shares, will be among the new millionaires. Chalkboards line many of the remaining surfaces, so Facebook’s wandering young employees can doodle almost anywhere. There are blocks of conference rooms with whimsical names: one here based on Star Wars characters mixed with drinks (Darth Jager, The Empire Strikes Bacardi), one over there echoing Ben & Jerry’s ice-cream (Americone Dream, Half Baked). Signs abound reading “Move Fast and Break Things”.
But these kids are not really breaking things. They are relentlessly building things, one after the other after the other, and adding them to the vastly ambitious mega-thing called Facebook. With its initial public offering (IPO) approaching, the company is in a “quiet period” during which it must avoid making new public predictions, but it is expected that Facebook’s 850m users will grow to a clean billion by July.
So for all the capricious decor and talk of breaking things, Facebook is very well aware that the eyes of the world are on it as an incumbent giant, not an insurgent. Besides “Move Fast and Break Things” there are signs telling employees to “Stay Focused and Keep Shipping”. Visitors are greeted warmly, but also presented with the standard Silicon Valley non-disclosure agreement before they can proceed past security. A billion people connected as never before in history. But Facebook also engenders anxiety on levels from the personal to the political, worries about a world in which private lives are always on display. What is 24-hour social networking doing to our self-expression, our self-image, our sense of decorum? Have we finally landed in the “global village” coined by Marshall McLuhan in the 1960s? What if you don’t like it there? Is there anywhere else to live?
And what is Facebook, anyway? The most obvious point of historical comparison is the social networks that preceded it. First there was Friendster, the flirt-and-forget site of the first half of the 2000s. Then everyone dumped Friendster for MySpace, and MySpace was bought by News Corp for $580m. Its value soared to $12 billion, and the received wisdom was that MySpace would take over the world. Then it didn’t, and News Corp sold it for $35m, because someone else had finally got social networking right. Started by Mark Zuckerberg in 2004, Facebook went from a Harvard dorm room to the rest of teenage America’s bedrooms to hundreds of millions of people all around the world—even parents and grandparents. Along the way, Facebook has fuelled revolutions in the Middle East, and inspired an Oscar-winning movie. Other social networks can only try to build out from the few niches it hasn’t already filled. Facebook is the undisputed champion of the world.
But the real comparison is not with other social networks. To give real credit to its achievement today and its ambitions for the future, it can only be said that Facebook’s true competitor is the rest of the entire internet.
The internet allows three things, broadly speaking: access to content (video, music, things to read), self-expression (blogs, Twitter) and communication (e-mail, chat, Skype). Facebook competes with it on all these fronts. By one estimate, one minute in every seven spent online, anywhere in the world, is spent on Facebook. To express themselves, users have Status Updates. For content, they can find photos, videos, music, news stories, recipes, book reviews and much more. And for communication, of course, there are your friends and Friends. More and more, the point of Facebook is to do almost anything you would do anyway, but with your friends, online. Facebook is an internet within the internet, so dominant that both it and other technology companies are realising that it is far easier to join forces than to fight.
by Robert Lane Greene, Intelligent Life | Read more:
