On the afternoon of Nov. 16. 2010. Mark Zuckerberg was taking a meeting in the Aquarium. one of Facebook’s conference suites. so named because it’s in the center of a immense work infinite and has glass walls on three sides so everybody can see in. Conference suites are a large trade at Facebook because they’re the lone topographic points anybody has any privateness at all. even the bare lower limit of privateness the Aquarium gets you. Otherwise the infinite is unfastened program: no cells. no offices. no walls. merely a turn overing tundra of office furniture. Sheryl Sandberg. Facebook’s COO. who used to be Lawrence Summers’ head of staff at the Treasury Department. doesn’t have an office. Zuckerberg. Facebook’s CEO and co-founder and presiding airy. doesn’t have an office. The squad was traveling over the launch of Facebook’s revamped Messages service. which had happened the twenty-four hours before and gone away without a enlistment or instead without more than the usual figure of enlistments. Zuckerberg kept the meeting on path. forcing briskly through his points — no notes or whiteboard. merely speaking with his custodies — but the tone was relaxed. Much has been made of Zuckerberg’s legendarily awkward societal mode. but in a room like this. he’s the Silicon Valley equivalent of George Plimpton.

He bantered with Andrew “Boz” Bosworth. a manager of technology who ran the undertaking. ( Boz was Zuckerberg’s teacher in a class on unreal intelligence when they were at Harvard. He says his hereafter foreman didn’t do really good. Though. in equity. Zuckerberg did invent Facebook that semester. ) Apart from a journalist sitting in the corner. no 1 in the room looked over 30. and apart from the journalist’s public dealingss bodyguard. it was boys merely. The door opened. and a distinguished-looking grey adult male explosion in — it’s the lone manner to depict his entryway — trailed by a twosome of deputies. He was both the oldest individual in the room by 20 old ages and the lone one have oning a suit. He was in the edifice. he explained with the delighted air of a adult male about to procure ironclad boasting rights everlastingly. and he merely had to halt in and present himself to Zuckerberg: Robert Mueller. manager of the FBI. pleased to run into you. They shook custodies and chatted about nil for a twosome of proceedingss. and so Mueller left. There was a dizzy silence while everybody merely looked at one another as if to state. What the snake pit merely happened? It’s a just inquiry. Almost seven old ages ago. in February 2004. when Zuckerberg was a 19-year-old sophomore at Harvard. he started a Web service from his residence hall.

It was called Thefacebook. com. and it was billed as “an on-line directory that connects people through societal webs at colleges. ” This twelvemonth. Facebook — now minus the the — added its 550 millionth member. One out of every twelve people on the planet has a Facebook history. They speak 75 linguistic communications and jointly lavish more than 700 billion proceedingss on Facebook every month. Last month the site accounted for 1 out of 4 American page positions. Its rank is presently turning at a rate of about 700. 000 people a twenty-four hours. What merely happened? In less than seven old ages. Zuckerberg wired together a twelfth of humanity into a individual web. thereby making a societal entity about twice every bit big as the U. S. If Facebook were a state it would be the 3rd largest. behind lone China and India. It started out as a lark. a recreation. but it has turned into something existent. something that has changed the manner human existences relate to one another on a species-wide graduated table. We are now running our societal lives through a for-profit web that. on paper at least. has made Zuckerberg a billionaire six times over.

Facebook has merged with the societal cloth of American life. and non merely American but human life: about half of all Americans have a Facebook history. but 70 % of Facebook users live outside the U. S. It’s a lasting fact of our planetary societal world. We have entered the Facebook age. and Mark Zuckerberg is the adult male who brought us here. Zuckerberg is portion of the last coevals of human existences who will retrieve life before the Internet. though merely merely. He was born in 1984 and grew up in Dobbs Ferry. N. Y. . the boy of a tooth doctor — Painless Dr. Z’s motto was. and is. “We cater to cowards. ” Mark has three sisters. the eldest of whom. Randi. is now Facebook’s caput of consumer selling and social-good enterprises. It was a supportive family that produced confident kids. The immature Mark was “strong-willed and relentless. ” harmonizing to his male parent Ed. “For some childs. their inquiries could be answered with a simple yes or no. ” he says. “For Mark. if he asked for something. yes by itself would work. but no needed much more. If you were traveling to state no to him. you had better be prepared with a strong statement backed by facts. experiences. logic. grounds. We envisioned him going a attorney one twenty-four hours. with a close 100 % success rate of converting juries. ”

The Zuckerberg kids were much given to buffooneries: on New Year’s Eve 1999 their parents were worried about the Y2K bug. so that dark Mark and Randi waited till the shot of midnight. so shut off the power. They were besides great morticians of undertakings. One twelvemonth. over winter holiday. they decided to movie a complete Star Wars lampoon called The Star Wars Sill-ogy. “We took our occupation really earnestly. ” Randi says. “Every forenoon we’d wake up and hold production meetings. Mark’s voice hadn’t changed yet. so he played Luke Skywalker with a truly high. screaky voice. and so my small sister. who I think was 2. we stuck her in a refuse can as R2D2 and had her walk around. ” It will non astonish you to larn that Mark had a Star Wars–themed saloon mitsvah. or that he was a precocious computing machine coder. get downing on a Quantex 486DX running Windows 3. 1. When he was 12. he created a web for the household place that he called ZuckNet ; this was at a clip when place webs didn’t come in a box. ( He clarifies. out of both modesty and a irresistible impulse for truth. that they brought in a professional to make the wiring. ) He besides wrote computing machine games: a version of Monopoly set at his in-between school and a version of Risk based on the Roman Empire.

Zuckerberg went to a local high school and so to Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. where he showed an aptitude for two incongruously antique chases: antediluvian linguistic communications and fence. He besides co-wrote with a schoolmate a music-recommendation plan called Synapse that both AOL and Microsoft tried to purchase for around a million dollars. But Zuckerberg would hold had to drop out of school to develop it. He decided to travel to Harvard alternatively. Zuckerberg’s life at Harvard and subsequently was the topic of a film released in October called The Social Network. written by Aaron Sorkin and directed by David Fincher. The Social Network is a rich. dramatic portrayal of a ferocious. socially disabled mastermind who spits corrosive soliloquies in a drone to conceal his inner hurting. This character bears about no resemblance to the existent Mark Zuckerberg. The world is much more complicated. He’s non a physically baronial presence: possibly 5 ft. 8 in. ( 173 centimeter ) . with a Roman olfactory organ. a bantam-rooster thorax and a snug cap of curly brown hair. He dresses like a frat male child. in T-shirts and denims. though his fingernails are painstakingly orderly.

His most noteworthy physical characteristic is his mentum. which he holds at a somewhat elevated angle. In the film. this played as him looking down his olfactory organ at you. but in existent life it’s more like he’s standing on his tiptoes. seeking to see over something. Zuckerberg has frequently — perchance ever — been described as distant and socially awkward. but that’s non rather right. True: keeping a conversation with him can be disputing. He approaches conversation as a manner of interchanging informations as quickly and expeditiously as possible. instead than as a recreational activity undertaken for its ain interest. He is formidably speedy and negotiations quickly and exactly. and if he has no information to convey. he suddenly falls soundless. ( “I normally don’t like things that are excessively much about me” was how he began our first interview. ) He can non be relied on to throw the ball back or give you promoting facial cues. His default look is a direct and somewhat childlike stare that makes you inquire if you’ve got a spider on your brow. Most alarmingly. if your signal/noise ratio ratio beads below a critical threshold. Zuckerberg will turn his caput and look off to one side as if he’s hearing noises wing. showing you with his Roman-emperor profile. “If you’re non doing obliging points. he sort of merely melodies out. ” Bosworth says. “He’s non seeking to be ill-mannered.

He’s merely like. ‘O. K. . you’re non the best usage of this clip any longer. ’ He’s traveling to happen a better usage of his clip. even if you’re sitting right at that place. ” In malice of all that — and this is what by and large gets left out — Zuckerberg is a warm presence. non a cold 1. He has a speedy smiling and doesn’t shy off from oculus contact. He thinks fast and negotiations fast. but he wants you to maintain up. He exudes non anger or societal anxiousness but a eldritch composure. When you talk to his colleagues. they’re so inexorable in their avouchments of fondness for him and in their insisting that you non misinterpret his oddness that you get the feeling it’s non merely because they want to maintain their occupations. Peoples truly like him. The Zuckerberg of the film is a simple animal of clear motives: he uses his oversize gifts as a coder to get misss. money and party invitations. This is a fiction. In world. Zuckerberg already had the miss: Priscilla Chan. who is now a junior med pupil at University of California. San Francisco. They met at Harvard seven old ages ago. before he started Facebook.

Now they live together in Palo Alto. As for money. his indifference to it is about pathological. His life style is modest by most criterions but cloistered for person whose personal luck was estimated by Forbes at $ 6. 9 billion. a figure that puts him in front of his Palo Alto neighbour ( and fellow college dropout ) Steve Jobs. Zuckerberg lives near his office in a house that he rents. He works invariably ; his lone current avocation is analyzing Chinese. He drives a black Acura TSX. which for a billionaire is the automotive equivalent of a hair shirt. For Thanksgiving interruption. he took his household to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter in Orlando.

He bought a wand at Ollivander’s. One of the involvements Zuckerberg lists on his Facebook page is “Eliminating Desire. ” “I merely want to concentrate on what we’re making. ” Zuckerberg says. “When I put it in my profile. that’s what I was focused on. I think it’s likely Buddhist? To me it’s merely — I don’t know. I think it would be really easy to acquire distracted and acquire caught up in short-run things or material things that don’t affair. The phrase is really ‘Eliminating desire for all that doesn’t truly matter. ’ ” This would all be so much dorm-room philosophizing if it weren’t for the fact that Zuckerberg is a billionaire at an age when most people are smartly maximising their desires. and besides for the fact that he appears to be doing good on it. In July. Zuckerberg went to a conference in Sun Valley. Idaho. where he was seated at a dinner with Cory Booker. the city manager of Newark. N. J. It must hold been an interesting dinner. because in September. Zuckerberg announced that he would set up $ 100 million of his personal Facebook equity to assist the Newark school system.

He isn’t even from Newark. Zuckerberg has a personal connexion to the learning profession — Chan taught grade school after Harvard — but more than that. he finds the province of instruction in the U. S. mathematically inelegant. “It merely work stoppages me as this immense issue that learning isn’t respected or compensated in our society for the economic value that it’s really likely bring forthing for society. ” he says. On Dec. 9. as portion of a run organized by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. he pledged to give away at least half his wealth over the class of his life-time. When The Social Network came out. Zuckerberg rented out a clump of film theatres and took the whole company to see it. Afterward they all went out for appletinis. his signature drink in the film. He’d ne’er had one before. “I found it funny what inside informations they focused on acquiring right. ” he says. “I think I owned every individual Jersey that they had me have oning. But the biggest thing that thematically they missed is the construct that you would hold to desire to make something — day of the month person or acquire into some concluding nine — in order to be motivated to make something like this.

It merely like wholly misses the existent motive for what we’re making. which is. we think it’s an amazing thing to make. ” The world is that Zuckerberg isn’t alienated. and he isn’t a lone wolf. He’s the antonym. He’s spent his whole life in tight. supportive. intensely connected societal environments: foremost in the bosom of the Zuckerberg household. so in the residence halls at Harvard and now at Facebook. where his best friends are his staff. there are no offices and work is amazing. Zuckerberg loves being around people. He didn’t build Facebook so he could hold a societal life like the remainder of us. He built it because he wanted the remainder of us to hold his. Facebook is the realisation of a dream. but it’s besides the decease of a dream. one that began in the late sixtiess. That’s when the architecture of the Internet was foremost laid out. and it’s a period piece. The Internet is designed the manner it is to suit any figure of practical considerations. but it’s besides an look of 1960s counterculture. No individual computing machine runs the web. No 1 is in charge. It’s a Eden of equality and namelessness. an electronic commune. In the 1970s the communes faded off. but the Internet merely grew. and that countercultural attitude lingered.

The presiding myth of the Internet through the 1980s and 1990s was that when you went online. you could cast your earthly luggage and be whoever you wanted. Your age. your gender. your race. your occupation. your matrimony. where you lived. where you went to school — all that fell off. In consequence. the societal experiments of the sixtiess were restaged online. Log on. melody in. bead out. We all know how that ended. When the Web arrived in the early 1990s. it went mainstream. The figure of people on the Internet exploded. from 2. 6 million in 1990 to 385 million in 2000. and we messed up the scene. The equality and namelessness that made the Internet so emancipating in its early yearss turned out to be disastrously disinhibiting. They made the Internet a oasis for porn merchants and hatemongers and a brawl for swindlers. hackers and virus authors. Zuckerberg is two coevalss removed from the sixtiess. He has no sentimental feelings about equality and namelessness. He started Facebook as a manner for people on college campuses to pass on with and maintain path of one another — and on occasion jab each other and sneer at each other’s pictures — but in a broader sense he was firing the first shooting in his generation’s coup d’etat of the Internet. Zuckerberg merely wanted people to be themselves.

On earlier societal webs like Friendster and Myspace. individuality was ductile and playful. but Facebook was and is different. “We’re seeking to map out what exists in the universe. ” he says. “In the universe. there’s trust. I think as worlds we basically parse the universe through the people and relationships we have around us. So at its nucleus. what we’re seeking to make is map out all of those trust relationships. which you can name. conversationally. most of the clip. friendly relationships. ” He calls this map the societal graph. and it’s a web of an wholly new sort. Facebook didn’t stay on campus. Zuckerberg and his spouses — including his roomie Dustin Moskovitz and Sean Parker. who had co-founded Napster — led Facebook on a Risk-style forced-march run to suppress the universe. By the terminal of 2004. Facebook was on several hundred U. S. college campuses. In 2005 it expanded to high schools and foreign schools. in 2006 to workplaces and finally to anybody over the age of 13. Its growing was amazing. In December 2006 it had 12 million users.

By December 2009 it had 350 million. It grew because it gave people something they wanted. All that material that the Internet enabled you to go forth buttocks. all the furnishings of ordinary businessperson being — your occupation. your household. your background? On Facebook. you take it with you. It’s who you are. Zuckerberg has retrofitted the Internet’s idealistic 1960s-era substructure with a more matter-of-fact millennian esthesia. Anonymity may let people to uncover their true egos. but possibly our true egos aren’t our best egos. Facebook makes internet more like the existent universe: dull but civilized. The masked-ball period of the Internet is stoping. Where people led dual lives. existent and practical. now they lead individual 1s once more. The fact that people yearned non to be liberated from their day-to-day lives but to be more deeply embedded in them is an extraordinary penetration. as basic and era-defining in its manner as Jobs’ realisation that people prefer a graphical desktop to a bid line or pretty computing machines to tiring beige 1s. This is another country in which the angry-robot theory of Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t truly pan out: he understands a singular sum about other people.

Sometimes it seems like the apprehension of an foreign anthropologist analyzing tellurians. but it’s existent. “In college I was a psychological science major at the same clip as being a computer-science major. ” he says. “I say that reasonably often. and people can’t understand it. It’s like. evidently I’m a CS individual! But I was ever interested in how those two things combined. For me. computing machines were ever merely a manner to construct good material. non like an terminal in itself. ” There are other people who can compose codification every bit good as Zuckerberg — non many. but some — but none of them get the human mind the manner he does. “He has great EQ. ” says Naomi Gleit. Facebook’s merchandise director for growing and internationalisation. “I’ll frequently ask him for advice approximately. like. a girl issue that I’m covering with. And he’ll really rationally give me his sentiment on the state of affairs. ” His female parent Karen. a head-shrinker who left the profession to pull off her husband’s office. attributes what she calls Mark’s “sensitivity” to the fact that he was raised with three sisters.

Wherever it comes from. this acute consciousness of how other people’s encephalons work characterizes all of Zuckerberg’s undertakings. even the undertakings he did before Facebook. Facemash — the underground press web site he made his second-year twelvemonth. where Harvard pupils could compare the comparative heat of their equals — was petroleum. some said violative. but it hooked people. They wanted it. ( You can travel even further back: one twenty-four hours in the ZuckNet epoch. Mark turned to Randi and said. “I bet I can do Donna come upstairs in five seconds. ” He’d rigged his sister’s computing machine to denote that it was self-destroying in 5. 4. 3. 2 … and up the stepss she came. ) Whereas earlier enterprisers looked at the Internet and saw a web of computing machines. Zuckerberg saw a web of people. This is non. on the face of it. a thunderously extremist vision. but it’s turning out to be an improbably powerful one. See: in 2005 one of the most competitory markets on the Internet was photo sharing. Into this infinite charged Facebook. and it can genuinely be said that the company brought a knife to a gunplay. “It was perchance the least functional exposures merchandise on the Internet. ” says Bret Taylor. Facebook’s main engineering officer.

“The declaration of the exposure was non good plenty to publish. There were no existent forming capablenesss. ” Facebook had merely one thing the others didn’t: people. If you put up a exposure of person. you could label that exposure with his or her name. As it turned out. that. more than anything else. was what people wanted. They didn’t want to form their exposures by booklet ; they wanted to form them by who was in them. As Zuckerberg would state. that’s how people parse the universe. Facebook launched its icky photo-sharing service in late October 2005. By 2007 it was acquiring more traffic than Photobucket. Flickr or Picasa. Now Facebook hosts over 15 billion exposures on its site. and people upload 100 million more every twenty-four hours. This is the modus operandi of Facebook and the ecosystem of developers who create applications for it: move into a market and take it over by doing it societal. as the in-house idiom has it. They have one large arm. the societal graph. and it’s a class slayer. Games are another good illustration. There’s a company called Zynga that makes games designed to be played on Facebook. They’re ridiculously simple by today’s big-budget. high-concept criterions. but they’re societal. In FarmVille. you can see your friends’ farms. In Mafia Wars you can take a hit out on your friends.

Mafia Wars presently has 19 million participants. FarmVille has 54 million. Investors value Zynga. which is merely four old ages old. at $ 5. 4 billion. That’s more than Electronic Humanistic disciplines. which is the 2nd largest games publishing house in the universe. But Facebook is in the procedure of taking over something even bigger than a market. Even if you’re non on Facebook. you may hold noticed hints of it here and at that place across the Web. as if seeds from inside its walled garden had scattered in the air current and taken root. Websites entreat you to log onto them utilizing your Facebook ID — the New York Times does. and so make Myspace and YouTube. Tiny cornflower-blue buttons invite you to Like things and Share them on Facebook. Your Facebook rank is going the Internet equivalent of a passport: a tool for verifying your individuality. Most people think of Facebook as a manner to covetously ogle their co-workers’ holiday images. but what Zuckerberg is making is basically altering the manner the Internet plants and. more significantly. the manner it feels — which means. as the Internet permeates more and more facets of our lives and hours of our twenty-four hours. how the universe feels.

Right now the Internet is like an empty barren: you wander from page to page. and no 1 is at that place but you. Except where you have the opposite job: topographic points like Amazon. com merchandise pages and YouTube picture. where everyone’s at that place at one time. reexamining and noticing at the top of their lungs. and it’s a ululating rabble of aliens. Zuckerberg’s vision is that after the Facebookization of the Web. you’ll acquire something in between: wherever you go on-line. you’ll see your friends. On Amazon. you might see your friends’ reappraisals. On YouTube. you might see what your friends watched or see their remarks foremost. Those reappraisals and remarks will be meaningful because you know who wrote them and what your relationship to those writers is. They have a societal context. Not that long ago. a post-Google Web was impossible. but if there is one. this is what it will look like: a Web reorganized around people. “It’s a displacement from the wisdom of crowds to the wisdom of friends. ” says Sandberg. “It doesn’t affair if 100. 000 people like x. If the three people closest to you like y. you want to see y. ” Now take it off the Web. Put it on Television. Imagine a slate of shows sorted by which of your friends likes them. alternatively of by web. Now put it on your phone.

Take it mobile. “We have this construct of serendipity — worlds do. ” Zuckerberg says. ( The elucidation is vintage Zuckerberg. ) “A lucky happenstance. It’s like you go to a eating house and you bump into a friend that you haven’t seen for a piece. That’s amazing. That’s serendipitous. And a batch of the ground why that seems so charming is because it doesn’t happen frequently. But I think the world is that those fortunes aren’t really rare. It’s merely that we likely miss like 99 % of it. How much of the clip do you believe you’re really at the same eating house as that individual but you’re at opposite sides so you don’t see them. or you missed each other by 10 proceedingss. or they’re in the following eating house over? When you have this sort of context of what’s traveling on. it’s merely traveling to do people’s lives richer. because alternatively of losing 99 % of them. possibly now you’ll start seeing a batch more of them. ”

Facebook wants to dwell the wilderness. chasten the ululation rabble and turn the lonely. antisocial universe of random opportunity into a friendly universe. a serendipitous universe. You’ll be working and populating inside a web of people. and you’ll ne’er have to be entirely once more. The Internet. and the whole universe. will experience more like a household. or a college residence hall. or an office where your colleagues are besides your best friends. Facebook occupies two Palo Alto office edifices that are a few proceedingss apart. On the exterior. they’re brutalist concrete sand traps. On the interior. they’re decorated in a quirky. postindustrial Silicon Valley manner you might name Booming Start-Up Chic — high ceilings. concrete floors. steel beams. tonss of Windowss. There’s a elephantine chess board. and the word drudge has been doodled and graffitied everyplace. The halls are littered with RipStiks. those two-wheeled skateboards that you move by jiggling. which Zuckerberg doesn’t drive. ( He tried one time and fell off ; that was enough. ) Silicon Valley companies squabble endlessly and brutally over forces. Employees change custodies like fire hook french friess. and right now Facebook has the best manus at the tabular array.

Everyone at Facebook was a star someplace else: Taylor. for illustration. led the squad that created — possibly you’ve heard of it? — Google Maps. You don’t acquire a batch of shy. retiring types at Facebook. These are the sorts of power swots to whom the films don’t do justness: fast-talking. user-friendly. laser-focused and radiating the sort of assurance that gives you a tan. Sorkin did a much better occupation of stand foring Facebook when he wrote The West Wing. Facebook employees get treated good — three free. good repasts a twenty-four hours ; limitless bites ; free dry cleansing — but do no error: the chief attractive force is Zuckerberg’s vision. All the cardinal applied scientists tell the same transition narrative. “I was like. I’m non interested. I’m working on a serious job. Facebook is a complete waste of clip. ” says Chris Cox. Facebook’s frailty president of merchandise. who was making a master’s in unreal intelligence at Stanford at the clip. “And the interview wholly changed my head. I saw the vision. I came in. and I saw it on a whiteboard. ”

The company is on its 7th central office in about as many old ages. It keeps outgrowing its offices. and reasonably shortly it will outgrow these. Zuckerberg is reconnoitering for a Microsoft-style campus for Facebook. This is because. in add-on to adding a batch of users. Facebook is get downing to do a batch of money. The users are Zuckerberg’s part. but the money is mostly attributable to Sheryl Sandberg. Coiffed. elegant and terrifyingly smart. Sandberg. 41. arrived at Facebook in early 2008. Before that. she ran Google’s ad concern. and before that. she was Lawrence Summers’ head of staff at the Treasury Department. She spent her clip speaking to Bono about bring arounding leprosy. Now she is the first meeting Zuckerberg takes on Monday forenoon and the last on Friday afternoon. “I ne’er thought I’d work in a private company. ” she says. “But from the exterior in D. C. . you watched what was traveling on out here. and it truly felt like it was altering the universe. And I ever wanted to work in topographic points that felt like they were traveling to hold an impact on the universe. ” For all its technological. societal and philosophical complexness. Facebook has merely one major beginning of gross: advertisement. Before Sandberg arrived. Zuckerberg grew that portion of the concern easy. He refused to sell banner ads. He felt that excessively noticeable ads would compromise the personal feel of the site. so he confined them to small rectangles on one side of the page. Facebook still doesn’t sell banner ads.

But Sandberg has been able to pull a roll of A-list advertizers. such as Nike. Vitaminwater and Louis Vuitton. by indicating out things they hadn’t noticed about Facebook. like how much it knows about its users. Google can function ads to you on the footing of educated conjectures about who you are and what you’re interested in. which are based in bend on your hunt history. Facebook doesn’t have to think. It knows precisely who you are and what you’re interested in. because you told it. So if Nike wants its ads shown merely to people ages 19 to 26 who live in Arizona and like Nickelback. Facebook can do that go on. In the universe of targeted advertisement. Facebook has a high-octane sniper rifle. It besides has societal. Facebook users have the option. should they take to exert it. to “like” certain advertizements. When you anoint an ad in this manner. it moves out of its assigned topographic point at the border of the page and into your News Feed and hence into the News Feeds of your friends. Suddenly the advertizement has a societal context. It is presented to your friends. by you. transporting your personal indorsement. For sellers. this is a holy grail. “What sellers have ever been looking for is seeking to acquire you to sell things to your friends. ” Sandberg says. “And that’s what you do on Facebook. ”

Facebook has a double individuality. as both a for-profit concern and a medium for our personal lives. and those two individualities don’t ever sit comfortably side by side. Looked at one manner. when a friend likes a merchandise. it’s merely more sharing. more informations altering custodies. Looked at another manner. it’s your personal relationships being monetized by a 3rd party. Peoples have to make up one’s mind for themselves which manner is their manner. If “liking” an ad the same manner you “like” a intelligence article or a exposure of your partner seems creepy to you — it’s more or less the definition of what Marx called trade good fetichism — you don’t hold to make it. Like everything on Facebook — like Facebook itself — it’s voluntary. But plentifulness of people are willing. even eager. to do their societal lives portion of an advertisement pageant staged by a major corporation. When Nike put up an ad last twelvemonth during the World Cup. 6 million people clicked on it. Facebook is a in private held company and doesn’t release fiscal statements. but Sandberg sounds confident. “I think it’s wholly just to state we are a really good concern. ” she says. “Not ‘we will be. ’ but ‘we are. ’ ” Zuckerberg confirms that Facebook is profitable. and non merely technically: it’s hard currency flow–positive. Analysts and journalists. who know less but can state more. estimation Facebook’s 2010 gross at anyplace from $ 1. 1 billion to $ 2 billion. Facebook is the manner it is because of who Zuckerberg is.

The colour strategy is bluish and white because Zuckerberg is red-green color-blind: there are a batch of colourss he can’t see. but blue he can see. Likewise. Zuckerberg has a metaphoric vision. a big-picture vision. for Facebook. And as with his actual vision. there are a few things he has problem seeing. Take. for illustration. privateness. There’s a school of idea that goes something like. Mark Zuckerberg is a intriguing profiteer who uses his control of Facebook to coerce people to portion more and more of their personal lives publically. sucking up their innermost ideas like some sort of privateness lamia so he can feed their informations to advertizers and increase traffic to his web. thereby adding to his monolithic personal luck. This is a ruddy herring. Cynicism and greed are non character traits that appear in Zuckerberg’s characteristic set. Facebook doesn’t sell your informations to advertizers. ( It uses the aggregative statistics of its 1000000s of users to more efficaciously aim the ads it serves. but that’s a long manner from the same thing. ) And he doesn’t force anybody to portion anything. The thought would truly. candidly horrify him. But he does hold a blind topographic point when it comes to personal privateness. which is why that issue keeps coming up. It came up in November 2007 when Facebook launched Beacon. an advertisement system that told your friends about your purchasing wonts. You could turn off the qui vives. but it was slippery. and as a consequence. people lost control of their information.

Girlfriends found out about surprise battle rings. Family members found out about Christmas nowadayss. You didn’t hold to be a computing machine mastermind to see that coming ; in fact you reasonably much had to be one to non see it coming. Users hated Beacon. A month after it launched. Zuckerberg apologized. and he finally scrapped it. Incredibly. the same thing happened all over once more in 2009. when Facebook rolled out a complicated new set of privateness controls. Again. users saw their information traveling topographic points they didn’t want it to travel. Again they revolted. Zuckerberg has a endowment for understanding how people work. but one impulse. the impulse to hide. seems to be foreign to him. Sometimes Facebook makes it harder than it should be. It is biased in favour of sharing. That is. after all. what Facebook is for. “The thing that I truly care about is doing the universe more unfastened and connected. ” Zuckerberg says. “What that stands for is something that I have believed in for a truly long clip. ” Pressed to specify it. Zuckerberg gamely expands. “Open means holding entree to more information. right? More transparence. being able to portion things and have a voice in the universe. And connected is assisting people stay in touch and maintain empathy for each other. and bandwidth. ” Empathy and bandwidth — you could scratch the words on Zuckerberg’s coat of weaponries. And they are without a uncertainty both good things.

But are they good for everybody all the clip? Sometimes Zuckerberg can sound like a cajoling spokesman for the secret constabulary of some future totalitarian province. Why wouldn’t you want to portion? Why wouldn’t you want to be unfastened — unless you’ve got something to conceal? “Having two individualities for yourself is an illustration of a deficiency of unity. ” Zuckerberg said in a 2009 interview with David Kirkpatrick. writer of The Facebook Effect. This is a popular attitude among the Silicon Valley elite. summed up by a comment Google CEO Eric Schmidt made last twelvemonth on CNBC: “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to cognize. possibly you shouldn’t be making it in the first topographic point. ” Zuckerberg will support privateness to the decease — and he relies on a just sum of it himself — but there’s still a degree on which. for him and for a batch of other people driving the Web’s development. it’s a proficient. economic and aesthetic incommodiousness. Exchanging information at less than full power is merely inefficient. ( “People are really sensitive about privateness. and I think they’re right to be. ” Zuckerberg says. “But we still merely come to work every twenty-four hours and do the determinations that we think are best for the merchandise. ” ) As a consequence. engineering has nudged us to the point where we’re shed blooding informations.

Expression at the flap over Google Maps Street View or the TSA scanners or WikiLeaks. Zuckerberg doesn’t registry on any peculiar political seismometer — hours after run intoing the manager of the FBI. he had to be reminded of Mueller’s name — but he does note about WikiLeaks that “technology normally wins with these things. ” And he’s right: the Internet was built to travel information about. non maintain it in one topographic point. and it tends to make what it was built to make. But what makes life complicated in the postmodern technocratic fish tank we’re jointly edifice is that there really are good grounds to desire to conceal things. Merely because you present a different face to your colleagues and your household doesn’t mean you’re taking a dual life. That’s merely normal societal operation. psychological science as usual. Identity isn’t a simple thing ; it’s complex and dynamic and fluid. It needs to flex a small. the manner a skyscraper does in a high air current. and your Facebook profile isn’t built to flex. For all of Zuckerberg’s EQ. Facebook runs on a really stiff. rough theoretical account of what people are like. It herds everybody — friends. colleagues. romantic spouses. that cat who lived on your block but moved off after 5th class — into the same large room. It smooshes together your work ego and your place ego. your past ego and your present ego. into a individual generic extruded merchandise. It suspends the natural procedure by which old friends fall off over clip. leting them to construct up infinitely. bring forthing the societal equivalent of liver failure.

On Facebook. there is one sort of relationship: friendly relationship. and you have it with everybody. You’re friends with your partner. and you’re friends with your pipe fitter. When it comes to privateness. it’s wholly possible that Zuckerberg will turn out non to be incorrect. merely prescient. Social norms change. Peoples hated Facebook’s News Feed when it was introduced in 2006. They thought it was creepy and intrusive. Zuckerberg stood his land. and now Facebook is impossible without it. He moved the ironss. and we went with him. puting up our defence that much farther toward the terminal zone. “The universe is altering. ” Cox says. “When company ID came out. people went psycho. You know. because. Oh my God. now people are traveling to cognize I’m naming them! This is awful! I’m traveling to stop up being tracked. and Big Brother and Orwell and all that! The world is now you won’t pick up a call unless you know who’s naming you. ” But there is another danger. which is that alternatively of experiencing forced to portion. we won’t be able to halt ourselves from sharing — that we will volitionally. obsessively violate our ain privateness.

Relationships on Facebook have a seductive. habit-forming quality that can gnaw and even replace real-world relationships. Friendships multiply with satisfying velocity. and the emotional bets stay soothingly low ; where there isn’t much privateness. there can’t be much familiarity either. It’s like an emotional Ponzi strategy. where you maintain seting energy in and acquiring it back tenfold. even though the dividends start to experience a small sham. An article published earlier this twelvemonth in European Psychiatry presented the instance of a adult female who lost her occupation to a Facebook dependence. and the writers suggested that it could go an existent diagnosable complaint. ( The adult female in inquiry couldn’t even do it through an scrutiny without look intoing Facebook on her phone. ) Facebook is supposed to construct empathy. but since 2000. Americans have scored higher and higher on psychological trials designed to observe self-love. and psychologists have suggested a nexus to societal networking. Harmonizing to the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers. 81 % of its members have seen a rise in the figure of divorce instances affecting societal networking ; 66 % cite Facebook as the primary beginning for on-line divorce grounds. Openness and connection are all good and good. but person should give two cheers at least for being closed and disconnected excessively.

For all its industrial efficiency and scalability. its transhemispheric range and its expansive civil unity. Facebook is still a distressingly blunt instrument for making the delicate work of conveying human relationships. It’s an first-class public-service corporation for directing and having informations. but we are non informations. and relationships can non be reduced to the exchange of information or doing binary determinations between wishing and non wishing. friending and unfriending. It’s as if Zuckerberg read E. M. Forster’s celebrated beat uping call in Howards End. “Only connect. ” and took it literally: merely connect. make nil else. ( There’s no opportunity that this really happened. I asked Zuckerberg if he’d read Forster and got the spider stare. He’d ne’er heard of him. ) However much more reliable the egos we present on Facebook are than they were in the anon. Internet wilderness that came before it. they still fall far short of our true egos. and confounding our Facebook profiles with who we truly are would be a awful error. We are running our societal lives over the Internet. an substructure that was non designed for that intent. and we must be cognizant of the deformations it creates or we will be distorted by them.

The standard cliche for depicting viral engineering like Facebook has ever been. “The jinni is out of the bottle. ” But Facebook inverts that. Now Facebook is the bottle. and we’re the jinni. How little are we willing to do ourselves to suit indoors? You don’t hear these sorts of inquiries asked much at Facebook central office. The topographic point busyness with a sense of high intent. a feeling that the universe is altering for the better. and this is where the alteration is coming from. “It dazes me that people still think this is like a fiddling thing. ” Bosworth says. “Like it’s a distraction or it’s a cunctation tool. I don’t acquire it. This is so basically human. to make out and link with people around us. ” Sam Lessin. Facebook’s undertaking director. has known Zuckerberg since college. He left his ain start-up to travel to work for him. “You get at most one — if you’re improbably lucky. two — shootings. possibly. in your life-time to really truly affect the class of a major piece of development. Which is what I see this as. ” How large could Facebook acquire? It’s large plenty that it’s get downing to knock up against authoritiess every bit good as other companies. Mueller’s visit wasn’t a one-off.

He was at that place because Zuckerberg has a better database than he does. Facebook has a richer. more intimate cache of information about its citizens than any state has of all time had. and the U. S. authorities sometimes comes strike harding. subpoena in manus. looking to borrow some. “We feel like it’s our duty to force back on that material. ” Zuckerberg says. “so oftentimes person will come with a subpoena. and we’ll travel to tribunal and state. ‘We don’t think this is adequate. ’ Ultimately I think this material gets used for good. ” Conversely. some authoritiess fear Facebook’s great database and the easiness with which Facebook can be used to organize webs and dispersed information. China has blocked the site since 2009. Iran. Pakistan and Saudi Arabia have all banned it at one point or another. Zuckerberg will be sing China over the vacations — his girlfriend has household at that place — and you can’t assist but inquire if he’ll be making some stealing market research. That’s about a fifth of the world’s population he’s non making. But even without China. there’s a distinguishable feeling of manifest fate about Facebook. Plot its current growing on a curve and it hits a billion members in 2012.

There are 6. 9 billion people in the universe. 2 billion of whom are on the Internet. Is at that place a point at which all of them are on Facebook? “That’s one world that I think is wholly possible. ” Cox says. “But Mark’s vision is non that it’s all go oning in this blue-and-white zone that we built. but that it’s go oning everyplace. Literally everything you use could be a conduit between you and people around you. The telecasting could. The GPS on your auto could. Your phone could. iTunes could. ” Zuckerberg is more cautious. He’s noncommittal about how far Facebook can travel. ( Far. evidently. but to him it hinges on the ultimate extent of Internet incursion in the universe. which in bend flexible joints on the acceptance of smart phones in countries where Internet-connected computing machines are scarce. ) Criticize Facebook and Zuck doesn’t duck. precisely. though his positiveness can be a spot relentless. For illustration: Isn’t it possible that Facebook creates more interpersonal connexions but that those connexions are of a lower. less hearty quality? “That’s been a unfavorable judgment that people have had for a piece. ” he says. “But this isn’t zero-sum. I think what we’re making is enabling you to remain in touch with people who you otherwise wouldn’t. When I’m at place and I want to speak to my girlfriend. I don’t IM her. I walk downstairs. and we talk. ” ( Truly? You don’t IM in the house?

“Only when you’re in bed at the same clip. ” he says. “Because so it’s merely dry. ” And so he laughs in the easy. natural manner he doesn’t do much in public. ) All technologies come with tradeoffs. but for now Zuckerberg merely doesn’t seem that interested in the other side of the trade. the downside. There are some eloquent. persuasive reviews of life on Facebook out at that place. including Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget and MIT psychologist Sherry Turkle’s forthcoming Entirely Together. But they don’t fuss him. peculiarly. “They’re merely looking at it through a wholly different lens. ” he says. “And I appreciate that. Because it would be impossible for me to disassociate myself to that extent. to acquire that position. I mean. people write all sorts of different things. from ‘It’s the greatest thing that’s of all time existed’ to ‘It’s the worst thing that’s of all time existed. ’ ” Zuckerberg tries to set himself in the caputs of people who don’t hold his weapons-grade mental hardware. his unsusceptibility to peer force per unit area. his absolute command of his privateness scenes and his gift for animating trueness. In other words. most of the people who use Facebook. But it’s a stretch. His EQ has its bounds.

He’ll drama at fallibility — “Almost any error you can do in running a company. I’ve likely made. ” he says — and he readily owns up to misreckonings like Beacon. But this is a cat so certain of himself that he walked off from a million-dollar payday when he was hardly out of high school. who turned down a billion-dollar offer for Facebook from Yahoo! when he was 22 and whose self-denial is so entire that he drives an Acura when he could afford a Bentley. No admiration he doesn’t see how ambitious Facebook can be for the remainder of us. He’s his ain perfect client. And he’s merely acquiring started. What looks like a meteorologic rise to the remainder of us. he sees as an gap act. Because now that Facebook has scaled up to a species-level event. the existent work can get down: taking a 550 million–person web out on the main road and seeing what it can make. Zuckerberg could take the company populace. but neither he nor Facebook needs the hard currency right now. so what’s the point? Why give up control to a clump of stockholders? This isn’t the go-go ’90s. when the end was to sell up and hard currency out. It isn’t. and ne’er has been. about the money. “I think the following five old ages are traveling to be about constructing out this societal platform. ” Zuckerberg says. on a long walk around Facebook’s vicinity in Palo Alto in December.

“It’s about the thought that most applications are traveling to go societal. and most industries are traveling to be rethought in a manner where societal design and making things with your friends is at the nucleus of how these things work. If the last five old ages was the raging up. I think that the following five old ages are traveling to be characterized by widespread recognition by other industries that this is the manner that material should be and will be better. ” This won’t make life any easier for people who aren’t on Facebook. The bigger societal webs get. the more force per unit area there is on everybody else to fall in them. which means that they tend to pick up velocity as they grow. and to turn until they saturate their markets. It’s traveling to acquire harder and harder to state no to Facebook and to the genuinely fantastic things it brings. and the genuinely atrocious things excessively. But while this happens. Zuckerberg is traveling to be turning excessively.

The Zuckerberg who built Facebook won’t be the same individual as the Zuckerberg who runs it. He’ll be acquiring older. going. possibly acquiring married. holding childs. and as his life outside Facebook gets more complicated. possibly Facebook. the universe he built in his ain image. will acquire more complicated excessively: more sensitive to the profusion that exists outside it. in the existent universe. and to the profusion that passes through it in such tremendous volumes every second of every twenty-four hours. But for all its defects. there was no other manner for Facebook to get down. Merely person like Zuckerberg. person as brilliant and blinkered and self-assured and resolved and societal as he is. could hold built it. “The brainsick thing to me in all this. ” he says. “is that I remember holding these conversations with my friends when I was in college. We would merely screen of return it as an premise that the universe would acquire to the province where it is now. But. we figured. we’re merely college childs. Why were we the people who were most qualified to make that? I mean. that’s brainsick! ” He shakes his caput. with the same perplexed look as when the manager of the FBI crashed his meeting. Then he decides. “I conjecture what it likely turns out is. other people didn’t attention every bit much as we did. ”