Myspace also had a laissez-faire attitude when it came to self-expression. Users could redesign their pages at will, hacking into the design code itself to create flashy, colorful, even garish profiles. This appealed especially to teenagers, who decorated their Myspace pages like they would decorate the walls of their adolescent bedrooms. Myspace also looked the other way when users posted racier content. Profiles featuring scantily clad women abounded. This side of Myspace was exemplified by Tila Tequila, a young Vietnamese-American model who was one of the many users fed up with Friendster. “I was getting too many friend requests, and the pictures were too hot,” Tequila said about Friendster’s habit of repeatedly banning her profile.31 So she took the tens of thousands in her digital audience to Myspace, where she could represent herself however she wanted. Soon her “friends” numbered in the hundreds of thousands and Tequila achieved that unique mid-2000s form of D-level fame. “There’s a million hot naked chicks on the Internet,” Tequila told Time. “There’s a difference between those girls and me: Those chicks don’t talk back to you.”32
Thanks to all of these factors, Myspace quickly rocketed past Friendster to become the king of the social networks, racking up 1 million users less than six months after launching and 3.3 million after a year of operation, with 23,000 new users signing up daily.33 By May of 2005, Myspace was attracting 15.6 million visitors every month.34 Myspace founders Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe became celebrities in their own right. In Anderson’s case, it was because he was the guy who interacted with the users; by default, Tom was every new user’s first friend. For his part, DeWolfe put himself forward as Myspace’s strategic visionary. “We want to be the MTV of the Internet,” Wolfe told investors.35 To the New Yorker, he proclaimed: “The Internet generation has grown up, and there are just a lot more people who are comfortable putting their lives online, conversing on the Internet, and writing blogs. This generation grew up with Napster and the iPod.”36 Myspace was just serving this new audience’s behavior and expectations.
But the story of Myspace is slightly different from that of the other companies in the Web 2.0 wave. For one thing, Myspace was Los Angeles–based, a key factor that may have contributed to the site’s focus on glam and glitter. And—uniquely—Myspace wasn’t a startup. Rather, it was a subsidiary of a parent company. Anderson and DeWolfe weren’t actually calling the shots at Myspace. That parent company, eUniverse, had rebranded itself as Intermix in order to escape the shadow of its seedy past, and as the excitement over Web 2.0 grew more frenzied, Intermix decided the time was right to cash in on Myspace. In July of 2005, Intermix announced that it (and therefore, Myspace) had been acquired for $580 million. The acquiring party was not a Google, or even a Yahoo, but News Corp, the company run by media mogul Rupert Murdoch.
Coming as it did among the slate of other Web 2.0 acquisitions, as soon as the deal was announced, many in the press and even some in the tech industry itself were quick to announce that another bubble had formed in Silicon Valley. But for a while, Myspace’s unbelievable growth made those fears seem far-fetched. By the end of 2005, a mere six months after the acquisition, Myspace could claim about 40 million registered users and more monthly pageviews than eBay, AOL or even Google.37 By the time Myspace inked a $900 million advertising partnership with Google in 2006, it looked like social networking was, indeed, the next big thing. MySpace was the new 800-pound gorilla on the web, and Rupert Murdoch had pulled off the steal of the new digital century.
But even when Myspace was at its zenith in terms of users and traffic and revenue, people couldn’t stop comparing it to another of the Friendster clones, particularly the clone that had chosen to focus exclusively on college students. In a November 2007 News Corp earnings conference call, Rupert Murdoch himself dismissed this competitor, Facebook, as merely a “Web utility similar to a phone book.” Myspace, by comparison, had “become so much more than a social network. It connects people, but it’s evolved into a place where people are living their lives. A social platform packed with search, video, music, telephony, games.”38 Little did Murdoch know that, even as he said those words, the battle for social networking was already over, and Myspace would join SixDegrees and Friendster as an also-ran in the history books.
15
THE SOCIAL NETWORK
Facebook
It’s something of a universal phenomenon that we can probably all recognize from our own lives. When you’re between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four, you’re plugged into the zeitgeist. During that intellectually fecund period, you tend just to “get” things: the latest fashions, the coolest new music and films, the trends and jokes and ideas that are au courant. It’s almost like young people see the future before everyone else.
Mark Zuckerberg was eleven when Netscape IPOed. As a middle-schooler and high-schooler, he came of age on AOL. In 1999, he had a personal homepage on Angelfire, a competitor to GeoCities where anyone could host a website for free. “Hi, my name is . . . Slim Shady,” the site’s About Me page said.
No, really, my name is Slim Shady. Just kidding, my name is Mark Zuckerberg (for those of you that don’t know me) and I live in a small town near the massive city of New York. I am currently 15 years old and I just finished freshman year in high school.
A subpage on young Mark’s website called “The Web” had a Java applet on it that plotted out a graph illustrating connections between people Mark knew. He asked his friends to link to each other on the applet, so he could plot out his teenage social circle.
It would be poetic to think that here, in 1999, was the germ of an idea that would later become Facebook. But the truth is, Mark Zuckerberg was just plugged in to the web’s zeitgeist. Sharing, connections, social media, these were all impulses bubbling to the surface and, at fifteen years old, as a web- and computer-obsessed kid, Mark Zuckerberg sensed these trends intuitively. Zuckerberg, like almost everyone he knew, was a heavy AIM user. He was also a member of Friendster when it debuted. He blogged. He voted on HotorNot.com. Napster had been the biggest cultural and technological event of his young life. And so, Zuckerberg’s youthful hacks all featured elements that, in one way or another, we might call “social.”
As a senior in high school, Mark and fellow student Adam D’Angelo developed Synapse, a clever plugin to Justin Frankel’s Winamp that sampled the MP3s a person listened to and then algorithmically generated playlists based on that user’s taste.1 D’Angelo had previously created Buddy Zoo, a program that, much like Zuckerberg’s “The Web” applet, made a graph of your personal connections—but in this case, using AIM. The boys received buyout offers from Microsoft and AOL. The pair opted for college instead.
Zuckerberg enrolled in Harvard, to major in psychology. But even matriculation at one of the world’s most prestigious schools didn’t hamper Mark’s penchant for hacking. During his sophomore year, Zuckerberg created an online app called Course Match that helped his fellow Harvard students choose what classes to sign up for, based on who else was signed up for that class already. That way you could rub shoulders with your friends, or maybe that cute girl you wanted to meet. Later that same year, when Zuckerberg got behind on coursework for a class called “Art in the Time of Augustus,” he put up a website encouraging his classmates to contribute to a collective analysis of the artworks in question, Wikipedia-style. This clever gambit allowed Mark to quickly cram and pass the exam.2
Zuckerberg also created a HotorNot for Harvard students called Facemash that let users vote on the looks of their fellow classmates. “Were we let in [to Harvard] for our looks?” the site asked. “No. Will we be judged by them? Yes.”3 Facemash was an instant hit on campus, but was quickly shut down because Zuckerberg had stolen the student profile pictures used on the website from Harvard’s internal networks. Also, student groups objected to the blatant misogyny and privacy violations inherent in the project. Zuckerberg was put on probation by Harvard’s administration for the stunt.
“I had this hobby of just buildi
ng these little projects,” Zuckerberg would later say of his early programming endeavors.4 Again, Zuckerberg was not unique in this—not some lone genius churning out social apps because he had some singular or unprecedented insight. Rather, he was part of the web’s collective unconscious, groping blindly toward what would soon be known as Web 2.0. Zuckerberg wasn’t even unique in pursuing social apps at Harvard! After the controversy surrounding Facemash gave him a brief bout of campus celebrity, Zuckerberg was contacted by a trio of Harvard students, Divya Narendra and identical twin brothers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, who were working on a college-based social network they wanted to call HarvardConnection.
Sharing. Social networks. Mapping relationships online. It was just in the air at the moment. In the zeitgeist.
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ZUCKERBERG AGREED TO HELP program HarvardConnection shortly before the winter break of the 2003–4 academic year. Sometime over that hiatus, it seems that he decided to abandon this project and instead take a crack at coding up a fully formed social network himself. Harvard had a decades-long tradition of publishing “facebooks,” or directories of student portraits that helped people look each other up and make connections. The university had made some noises about bringing these directories online, and just that December of 2003, Harvard’s student newspaper, the Crimson, had published an editorial titled “Put Online a Happy Face: Electronic Facebook for the Entire College Should Be Both Helpful and Entertaining for All.”5 Mark had already had experience with an online facebook. In high school, his classmate Kristopher Tillery had created a website that basically replaced the printed directory the school previously used.6 It seemed silly that a high school could do an online facebook and Harvard couldn’t.
Zuckerberg decided not to wait for the university to get its act together. On January 11, 2004, he registered the domain Thefacebook.com for $35. Using the examples of Friendster, Course Match, Facemash—even drawing from AIM, Buddy Zoo and Zuckerberg’s own “The Web” app—Zuckerberg coded up a website that would bring college facebooks into the web era. He paid $85 a month for hosting to a company called Manage.com, and on Wednesday, February 4, 2004, he put the website live, along with the following message:
Thefacebook is an online directory that connects people through social networks at colleges. We have opened up Thefacebook for popular consumption at Harvard University. You can use Thefacebook to: Search for people at your school; Find out who are in your classes; Look up your friends’ friends; see a visualization of your social network.7
After putting the site live, Zuckerberg went out for pizza with his roommates. They discussed the Thefacebook project and how someday somebody was going to build a community site just like it—but for the whole world. Whoever pulled that off would create one amazing company. They wondered who would eventually do it. “But it clearly wasn’t going to be us,” Zuckerberg would recall later. “I mean, it wasn’t even an option that we considered it might be us.”8
Four days later, more than 650 students had registered as users of Thefacebook. By the end of the month, three-fourths of Harvard’s student body was using the site daily.9
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WHEN MARC ANDREESSEN STARTED Mosaic, he turned to his fellow students to help; when Shawn Fanning started Napster, he turned to his fellow hackers. Right away, as Thefacebook took off at Harvard, Mark turned to his fellow dorm mates in Suite H33 of Kirkland, the undergraduate residential house he lived in, to keep the project afloat. Roommate Dustin Moskovitz was enlisted to help code the site and expand it. Suitemate Chris Hughes was recruited to help with promotion and serve as the site’s spokesperson. A fraternity brother of Mark’s from Alpha Epsilon Pi, Eduardo Saverin, was brought on board as a full business partner and to run the finances. Later, Zuckerberg would even turn to his old friend Adam D’Angelo (then at Caltech) to help Moskovitz with the coding.
Thefacebook was founded by a bunch of kids who had lived through the dot-com era as well as the Napster supernova. To them, starting a website—or even a web company—was not some crazy notion. On the contrary, it was aspirational, but also feasible. It was like starting a band or a student group, or maybe opening an off-campus bar. The Mosaic kids had been academic researchers who didn’t know the first thing about startups. The Napster kids had been naïve hackers who didn’t know the first thing about business or the law. But Thefacebook was started at Harvard, by the scions of America’s elite families. These were the kids who were supposed to conquer the world in some way or another. So, when they got an idea for a cool website, they knew what to do: see how big it could get. And they had the resources to make that happen.
This is where the myth of Facebook’s founding is colored by the artistic license taken by the movie The Social Network (and the book that inspired it, The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook). Sure, Mark Zuckerberg was a bit socially awkward, but according to friends at the time, he didn’t have much trouble getting girlfriends. He was confident. He was a leader. Zuckerberg and Saverin weren’t old enough to drink, but they were familiar with money since they both came from privileged backgrounds. Zuckerberg had gone to the exclusive boarding school Phillips Exeter Academy. Saverin came from a long line of international businessmen. So, this wasn’t a case of dorky social outcasts coding up a website in order to meet girls. Thefacebook was just a cool thing they could make together. If it ended up being a real company in the end (or, actually help them meet girls), well, even better.
Zuckerberg and Saverin both invested $1,000 of their own money into the project, and Saverin created an LLC and opened a bank account. Within weeks of launching at Harvard, Moskovitz and Zuckerberg began cloning the site and seeding it to other campuses. First came Columbia and Yale, and then Stanford. Dartmouth and Cornell followed the next month. After that: MIT, University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, Brown and Boston University. The uptake at each new school was just as instantaneous as it had been at Harvard. By the end of March 2004, Thefacebook had 30,000 users.10
This was viral growth, but, crucially, it was managed viral growth. By expanding to colleges one at a time, the five founders could grow the site without the rate of growth outpacing them. The boys had learned by watching Napster, and especially by watching as the Friendster fiasco unfolded before their eyes. They only released Thefacebook to a new college when they knew they had the infrastructure in place to handle the additional traffic. They studiously avoided site crashes and service outages. They made sure the pages loaded quickly by assigning each school to a unique database, thereby avoiding the complicated networking calculations that slowed down Friendster.11
This staggered growth also allowed the company to expand within its financial means. In true Web 2.0 fashion, Thefacebook was run frugally, using free open-source software like MySQL for the database and Apache for the web servers. Even by the time users were in the tens of thousands and Thefacebook was live on dozens of campuses, it was only costing $450 a month to run the site off of five Manage.com servers.12
Thefacebook focused on colleges because that is what its founders knew. As Sean Parker would later say of the embryonic company, Zuckerberg wanted Facebook to get big. “But he didn’t know what that meant. He was a college student. Taking over the world meant taking over college.”13 Whether by accident or design, the self-enforced exclusivity of focusing on colleges was key to Thefacebook’s early success. We are never more social than we are in college; our network of friends and connections is never more vibrant and vital than in those years. From day one, Zuckerberg’s vision for Thefacebook mimicked the original instincts of SixDegrees and the best intentions of Friendster. You could only register on Thefacebook with your college-supplied .edu email address. You could only interact with other students at your actual school. You had to be your authentic self, just as you would on campus. There would be no fakesters or parody accounts on Thefacebook. But then, no one would want those anyway. Being inauthentically yourself was to miss the point of Thefacebook entirely.
&n
bsp; Thefacebook attempted not merely to re-create your offline social circles, or to build new types of social connections online. No, Thefacebook wanted to mirror your exact social circle. The friends you took classes with, the friends you roomed with, the friends you sat in the dining hall with—those were your friends on Thefacebook. Mapping your social network accurately on Thefacebook provided a new, frictionless way to map your social world—to curate it, to live it. Thefacebook understood that you didn’t need any bells and whistles to make a social network compelling. If users were willing to port their actual social lives onto the Thefacebook’s network, then the network could be as compelling and vital as offline life was.
As an early user (who would go on to be an early Facebook employee), Katherine Losse would write, describing her first encounter with Facebook as a student at Johns Hopkins University in 2004:
It was the first Internet site I had ever used that mirrored a real-life community. The cliques on Facebook were the same ones I ran into at the library and campus bar, and the things people said to each other on their walls—water polo team slang, hints at the past weekend’s conquests, jabs at Hopkins’ lacrosse archrival Duke—were similar to what you heard them saying at study tables or around pitchers of beer. The virtual space mapped the human space.14
By targeting the narrow field of your actual college social circle, Thefacebook was able to construct a digital social web that directly paralleled reality. It was a living online Rolodex, just like Andrew Weinreich had tried to achieve in theory; it was your true self, projected virtually, as Jonathan Abrams had aspired to, and failed. Thefacebook actually achieved true digital identity.
Choosing to launch only at elite colleges also helped. Thefacebook had an air of exclusivity. It was the social network (at least at first) of the elite, the 1%. It further helped that Thefacebook felt classier than Myspace, which was exploding in popularity at the same time. The aesthetic of Thefacebook was almost the antithesis of Myspace; it was less flashy, more functional; presentational where Myspace was promotional. You didn’t go to Thefacebook to show off, but you did go there to present your best self.
How the Internet Happened Page 30