Zuckerberg and his co-founder Moskovitz, for their part, saw Facebook on a slow march toward ubiquity. To them, high school was just an obvious next step. This could be a huge leap in Facebook’s audience. And it was important to counter MySpace, which was making rapid inroads in high schools. Once you knew how Zuckerberg felt, you knew how the board was going to vote.
So Facebook had that summer started planning to include high school students. Investor Breyer and Matt Cohler—the older people—both argued that the Facebook brand was irrevocably associated with college and that college students didn’t want high schoolers in there with them. They argued that a high school Facebook should operate separately and under a different name. Facebook High was considered promising, but “FacebookHigh.com” was owned by a speculator who wanted too much money for it.
If high school students joined Facebook, how would the service validate users? Protecting the culture of real names and genuine identity was critical. The college-issued .edu email addresses had ensured that people were who they said they were. That was the foundation that enabled Facebook to protect its users’ information—you only shared stuff with people you knew. More than half of all users had so much faith in the security of their information that they included their cell-phone number in their profile.
However, only a small number of high schools, mostly private ones, gave students email addresses. New general counsel Chris Kelly, who had recently been hired, briefly launched a campaign to convince high schools to issue email addresses to students as an online safety measure. Then Facebook considered instituting its own national high school email service. Finally it came up with a compromise. Part of what authenticated you on Facebook was the people who, in effect, vouched for you by being your online friends. So college freshmen and sophomores were encouraged to invite their friends who were still in high school. Then those users could invite their own friends. It meant a slower start for the high school version of Facebook. The service created separate “networks,” or membership groups, for every one of the country’s 37,000 public and private secondary schools.
Initially, the high school site operated as a separate “Facebook.” Though high school users also logged in at Facebook.com, they couldn’t see college users’ profiles. Membership grew painfully slowly at first, but by late October thousands of high school students were joining the service each day. (Overall at that point, about 20,000 new users were joining daily.)
Facebook was no longer just a college phenomenon. Zuckerberg, with the strong support of Moskovitz, soon insisted that the two services should be merged. By February 2006 they were ready to abandon that distinction, so users could freely establish friendships or send messages with anyone regardless of age or grade (the minimum age was set at thirteen). Cohler and Breyer and many of the older employees remained extremely worried that Facebook’s appeal to college kids would plummet when they saw high schoolers in there with them.
So it was a very dramatic day for them when they merged the two systems. But it turned out college kids—the ones who noticed—were generally pleased to be able to communicate with a larger universe of potential friends. There was some griping as there always was when Facebook expanded beyond what was seen as a formerly exclusive cohort. One new group was called “You’re Still in High School and You’re Friending Me? That’s Awkward…Now Go Away.” But the data told Zuckerberg and his crew what they wanted to know. It showed that lots of communication was developing between high school and college kids and that overall activity was going up as a result of the change. By April 2006, Facebook had over a million high school users.
Facebook had outgrown its cramped warren of rooms above the China Delight restaurant on Emerson Street in Palo Alto. The company decamped for larger quarters one block away on University Avenue, not far from Stanford and across the street from Google’s original headquarters. Facebook relocated to a modern glass office building, indicative of a new gravitas for the company. Moving, however, involved improvisation of the classic Facebook variety. Everybody carried their stuff themselves. A short procession ensued as a row of T-shirted, unkempt young engineers pushed their desk chairs, each one loaded with an extra-large monitor, along the sidewalk for the one-block trip.
When Facebook reached 5 million users in October 2005, it held another party at board member Peter Thiel’s San Francisco club Frisson to celebrate—only ten months after the one-million-user party there. Every day brought more evidence that users were infatuated with the service. At the beginning of the school year, Facebook had nearly doubled the number of colleges where it operated—to over 1,800. At almost every one, its penetration among students quickly surpassed 50 percent. More than half of users were signing in at least once a day—an extraordinary statistic for any Internet business. And in the office, the staff was being bombarded with emailed pictures of quails.
Users had noticed the quote from Wedding Crashers at the bottom of the search page that said, “I don’t even know what a quail looks like,” and they were trying to be helpful. Or else they were in on the joke. Or both. It didn’t matter. They cared.
Users were viewing 230 million pages daily on Facebook, and revenue had climbed to about $1 million per month. Mostly it was coming from ad networks that were placing low-priced display ads. Sponsored groups like the ones run by Apple and Victoria’s Secret were bringing in thousands, and announcements at individual schools generated some money as well. But since the company’s costs each month were about $1.5 million, Facebook was burning through its capital at the rate of about $6 million per year. The money was mostly coming out of the Accel investment, and Zuckerberg wasn’t very concerned. Neither was Moskovitz. Moskovitz kept working like a dog, but when he wasn’t at his desk he was driving proudly around in a new BMW 6-series sedan he’d bought in September.
There was a sense among many at the company that they were participating in something historic. Cohler, who unlike most of this crew had actually received a degree, from Yale in music, saw analogies. “It was one of those moments with a unique creative zeitgeist,” he says, “like jazz in New York in the 1940s or punk in the 1970s, or the first Viennese school of the late eighteenth century.” The conviction that this was history in the making led people to work even harder.
The history was not being made by Facebook alone. The company was surrounded by other companies also creating a more social Internet. Just around the corner was Ning, funded by Marc Andreessen and building software that enabled anyone to create their own private little social network. Up in San Francisco, forty-five minutes to the north, Digg was inventing a new tool that allowed people to share articles and other media they found on the Web. Other social networks like Bebo and Hi5 were emerging there, too, some targeting the same users as Facebook but in any case building clever products that were resonating with users all over the world.
Moskovitz was more interested in user numbers than historical analogies. Ever vigilant about competitors, he was worried that MySpace had grown from about 6 million members in January to 24 million by now. “How are they doing it?” Moskovitz asked one day. “Fuck MySpace,” Zuckerberg replied.
He had a chance to express a similar disparaging view in slightly more polite language directly to MySpace’s leaders shortly thereafter. Zuckerberg and Cohler flew down to Los Angeles, where they sat at a restaurant with Ross Levinsohn, head of Fox’s interactive group for Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. He oversaw MySpace. Their competitor was being solicitous again. Levinsohn was cultivating Zuckerberg because he wanted to buy Facebook to add to his digital portfolio. But Zuckerberg was, as usual, just stringing him along. In her book Stealing MySpace, Julia Angwin recounts how Levinsohn seemed dubious Facebook could handle its rapid growth. Zuckerberg was dismissive, both of the comment and of Levinsohn’s business. “That’s the difference between a Los Angeles company and a Silicon Valley company,” he said. “We built this to last, and these guys [at MySpace] don’t have a clue.”
A few weeks afte
r it hit 5 million users, Facebook added a new feature that would transform its service. It had succeeded up to that point by being what one employee called “brain-dead simple”—all you were able to do was fill in your own profile and scan the information others had put into theirs. But there was one way to customize and modify your profile that had become very popular. Though you were allowed only one profile photo, students were frequently changing that photo, sometimes more than once a day. They clearly wanted to be able to post more photos.
Photo hosting was exploding on the Internet. Earlier that year Yahoo had acquired Flickr, a pioneering service that allowed users to upload photos for free, and was very creative with something called “tagging.” A tag was inserted by the photographer when he or she uploaded the photo, to label it based upon its content. A single photo might be tagged “landscape,” “Venice,” and “gondola.” Users could search for photos based on their tags.
A lengthy debate ensued about the wisdom of Facebook getting into the photo-hosting and storage business. The earlier add-on Wirehog application, which was intended partly to enable users to see photos on one another’s PCs, had fallen flat. During the brief period when the Wirehog application was active, few users tried it. And Zuckerberg worried that to tinker with Facebook’s simplicity was risky when the service was growing so rapidly just as it was. But finally Parker and others convinced him it was worth a try to build a Facebook photos feature. “The theory behind photos,” says Parker, “was that it was an application that would work better on top of Facebook than as a free-standing application.”
Some of the company’s best new arrivals took on the project. Aaron Sittig oversaw the user interface and design. Engineer Scott Marlette wrote the software. Managing the process was newly hired vice president of product Doug Hirsch—the fruit of Robin Reed’s recruiting labors. At thirty-four, Hirsch was an online veteran who had been one of the first thirty employees of Yahoo.
After a few weeks, Sittig, Marlette, and Hirsch quickly came up with a well-designed if conventional photo-hosting service. Like many on the Internet, it allowed users to upload photos and include them in online albums, and enabled others to comment on them. But they knew it wasn’t exactly right. Hirsch, who had years of experience in Internet product design, suggested they take a different approach, something uniquely Facebook. “I wish there was just one really social feature we could add to this,” he said in a meeting. Sittig, a very serious young man with blond bangs whose impeccable beach-boy good looks are seldom graced by more than a fleeting and wry half-smile, considered what that might mean. “I went back and thought a bit,” he recalls, “and I was thinking, ‘You know, the thing I most care about in photos is, like, who’s in them.’”
It was a breakthrough. They decided that Facebook photos would be tagged in just one way—with the names of the people in them. It sounds elementary but it had never been done before. You would only be able to tag people who had confirmed they were your friends. People who were tagged received a message alerting them about it, and an icon appeared next to their name on the lists of friends that appeared on each user’s page.
The photos team made two other important decisions. To see the next photo, all you had to do was click anywhere on the photo you were looking at. You didn’t need to hit a little “next” button. They were attempting to encourage that “Facebook trance” that kept people clicking through pages on the service. It made looking at photos simple and addictive. They also took a gamble and decided to compress photos into much smaller digital files, so that when they appeared on Facebook they were significantly lower in resolution than the originals. That meant they would upload faster, so users could select a number of photos on their PC and see them online within minutes.
Would people accept low-resolution photos? Would they use the tags? On the day in late October when the team turned the Photos application on, they nervously watched a big monitor that displayed every picture as it was uploaded. The first image was a cartoon of a cat. They looked at each other worriedly. Then in a minute or so they started seeing photos of girls—girls in groups, girls at parties, girls shooting photos of other girls. And these photos were being tagged! The girls just kept coming. For every screenful of shots of girls there were only a few photos of guys. Girls were celebrating their friendships. There was no limit to how many photos people could upload, and girls were putting up tons of them.
Ordinary photos had become, in effect, more articulate. They conveyed a casual message. When it was tagged, a photo on Facebook expressed and elaborated on your friend relationships. “Pretty quickly we learned people were sharing these photos to basically say, ‘I consider these people part of my life, and I want to show everyone I’m close to them,’” says Sittig. Now there were two ways on Facebook to demonstrate how popular you were: how many friends you had, and how many times you had been tagged in photos.
Sittig, Marlette, and Hirsch had also stumbled onto a perfect new use for photographs in the age of digital photography. More and more people were starting to carry cell phones with built-in cameras, using the cameras for quick snaps of daily activities. If you always had a camera with you, you could take a picture simply to record something that happened, then put it on Facebook to tell friends about it. The tags on a photo automatically linked it to people throughout the site. This was very different from the way photos were generally used on MySpace. MySpace was a world of carefully posed glamour shots, uploaded by subjects to make them look attractive. In Facebook, photos were no longer little amateur works of art, but rather a basic form of communication.
In short order the photos feature became the most popular photo site on the Internet and the most popular feature of Facebook. A month after it launched, 85 percent of the service’s users had been tagged in at least one photo. Everyone was being pulled in whether or not they wanted to be. Most users had their profile set up so that if someone tagged them in a photo they received an alert by email. Who wouldn’t go look at each new picture of themselves once they got that email? After the photos feature launched people began to come back to Facebook more often, since there was more often something new to see. This thrilled Zuckerberg, whose primary measure of the service’s success was how often users returned. A full 70 percent of students were now coming back every day, and 85 percent at least once a week. This is astonishing customer loyalty for any Internet service, or any business of any kind, for that matter.
Immediately the question shifted to whether Facebook could handle all the new data and traffic. It put a massive burden on the storage and servers. Within six weeks the photos application had consumed all the storage that Facebook had planned to use for the coming six months. Having data center software veteran Jeff Rothschild on hand proved fortuitous. He stayed late night after night, trying to keep the company’s servers from “redlining”—exceeding their capacity and potentially crashing. People from across the company were drafted to trek to the data center and help plug in new servers. Marlette, considered by most of his colleagues a programming genius, focused on rewriting the photo software code to make it more robust and efficient. By late 2009 Facebook was hosting 30 billion photos, making it the world’s largest photo site by far.
The success of photos led to an epiphany for everyone at Facebook, from Zuckerberg on down. The team had built what was otherwise a plain-vanilla photo-hosting application. But the way they integrated it with Facebook showed the magic of overlaying an ordinary online activity with a set of social relationships.
Facebook executives were seeing the Facebook Effect in action themselves for the first time. Zuckerberg was beginning to talk about what he would come to label the “social graph,” meaning the web of relationships articulated inside Facebook as the result of users connecting with their friends. With Facebook photos, your friends—your social graph—provided more information, context, and a sense of companionship. But it only worked because the photos were tagged with people’s names and Facebook alerted people when t
hey were tagged. The tags determined how the photos were distributed through the service. “Watching the growth of tagging,” says Cohler, “was the first ‘aha’ for us about how the social graph could be used as a distribution system. The mechanism of distribution was the relationships between people.”
Perhaps applying the social graph to other online activities would make them more interesting and useful, too. But how could Facebook help make that happen? If photos were a new application on top of the Facebook platform, what would some other applications be? Zuckerberg found these to be enormously exciting questions, and they dovetailed with thoughts he had discussed with Adam D’Angelo since even before Thefacebook launched about how the entire Internet needed to become more “social.” It was the Wirehog dream finally coming to fruition. “Watching what happened with photos,” says Parker, “was a key part of what led Mark’s vision to crystallize. He was formulating a broader and broader theory about what Facebook really was.”
Harvard continued to figure in Facebook’s story. Following the success of photos, Zuckerberg began scheming to make more dramatic changes in the service, but to implement them he would need a bunch of new top-quality programmers. He had been frustrated by the people who were applying in Silicon Valley. They just didn’t fit in with Facebook’s culture. They were too corporate, not iconoclastic enough, and not in his view sufficiently creative. So he combed through Facebook looking up old teaching assistants and other computer science majors who had impressed him at Harvard. He wrote out a list and gave it to Robin Reed, who started calling them. It turned out that a bunch were living in Seattle.
The Facebook Effect Page 18