If Facebook was not going to jump beyond colleges and high schools into the broader population, then its growth had almost certainly topped out. To Cohler that meant the Yahoo offer might be the best they’d ever see. “Mark, I’m open to having my mind changed,” said Cohler. “Explain it to me.”
“I can’t really explain it,” answered Zuckerberg. “I just know.’”
In the opinion of many of the company’s more veteran employees and investors, Facebook had a golden opportunity to capitalize on its uniquely thorough penetration of the college market. Some said Facebook looked like MTV in its early years, when its rock-video network created a new form of media that young people simply couldn’t stop watching. Those who held this view argued Facebook risked undermining its standing among high school and college kids by inviting a bunch of uncool adults into the service with them.
Zuckerberg disagreed. His view was consistent and clear—Facebook needed to go beyond college and become a site everybody could use to connect with their friends. He and Parker and Moskovitz had been saying since mid-2005 that Facebook was not meant to be cool, just useful. If younger people were turned off as the site broadened demographically, so be it. Zuckerberg knew that people on Facebook weren’t very aware of anyone outside their own social circle anyway. Older people might join in droves without the average college kid even noticing.
The tension with Breyer and his executives and the gravity of the question of whether or not to sell to Yahoo gnawed at Zuckerberg. Some nights, unable to sleep, he would get into his car and just drive, with his Green Day and Weezer CDs cranked up loud. He spent hours pacing around the pool at the company house, trying to think things through. His girlfriend, Priscilla, lying on a nearby chaise one day, said to a friend, “I hope he doesn’t sell it. I don’t know what he’d do with himself.” Zuckerberg had a talk around this time with his older sister Randi, who worked in marketing at Facebook. “He felt really conflicted,” she recalls. “He said, ‘This is a lot of money. This could be really life-changing for a lot of people who work for me. But we have so much more opportunity to change the world than this. I don’t think I’d be doing right by anyone to take this money.’”
The negotiations at Van Natta’s house continued for the first two weeks of July. Yahoo’s lawyers conducted due diligence on the company’s financials. Finally the two sides reached an agreement in principle for Yahoo to buy Facebook for $1 billion cash. But for all that, some on the Yahoo side could tell that Zuckerberg remained unconvinced. He seemed to be taking his sweet time at every phase of the talks. They weren’t sure he was really willing, despite what might have been hammered out with Van Natta. They were right. And some of Zuckerberg’s other attitudes frustrated the Yahoo team as well. For instance, one Yahoo negotiator recalls, “Mark had no interest at all in accommodating advertising in Facebook’s product.”
Then all the tension was relieved with unexpected suddenness. In mid-July, Yahoo announced second-quarter financial results. Wall Street viewed them as disappointing and knocked Yahoo’s stock down 22 percent in a single day. Shortly thereafter, CEO Semel got cold feet, much as had Viacom’s CFO earlier in the year. How would Wall Street react if Yahoo spent a huge amount on a company with so little revenue? Semel reduced his bid to $850 million, recognizing it could end the deal. It did. His deputy Rosensweig called and told Zuckerberg that Yahoo was reducing its $1 billion offer. As soon as he got off the phone, a grinning Zuckerberg strode over to Moskovitz’s desk a few feet away and gave a big high-five. In a ten-minute conference call, Facebook’s board rejected the offer. Even Breyer was comfortable with the decision.
As all this was under way, executives at other media and technology companies were starting to ask if they ought to buy Facebook. Rumors of Yahoo’s billion-dollar bid were circulating.
At Time Warner, discussions about Facebook briefly turned serious. AOL CEO Jonathan Miller wanted to buy it. He saw community as the core of AOL, manifested in its chat rooms, forums, and AIM. Facebook would fit in perfectly, he thought. But AOL was just a division of Time Warner. Miller couldn’t proceed without the concurrence of the parent company’s leaders, who had turned down previous proposals he’d made for acquisitions. Miller also knew Zuckerberg would not want to take Time Warner’s stock, much derided at the time for performing so poorly. Any deal would have to be for cash.
So Miller got creative. A partnership with another Time Warner division, he concluded, might help overcome corporate resistance. He succeeded in recruiting Ann Moore, CEO of Time Inc., the magazine division, for a possible joint bid for Facebook. The two concocted a plan by which each would sell assets to assemble cash for a Facebook purchase. AOL would sell MapQuest as well as its Tegic software, used on cell phones to predict words you’re trying to key in. Miller hoped to get as much as $600 million altogether. For her part, Moore would sell Time Inc.’s British magazine publisher IPC for around $500 million. Then they’d have enough for a cash bid for Facebook.
But when they brought their proposal to Jeff Bewkes, Time Warner’s president, he shot them down. He said if they could live without those properties they should go ahead and sell them, then turn the cash over to the parent company. If they wanted to do a Facebook acquisition later they should come to him and he would consider it. That was the end of that. Zuckerberg never even heard about the plan.
As the summer continued, excitement built inside the company about the twin launches planned for the first weeks of school. Facebook’s News Feed team was putting on the finishing touches. And the people overseeing open registration had decided to also inaugurate a new way of getting friends to join you on the service. You would be able to download your email address book from any of the major email providers—Hotmail, Yahoo mail, Gmail, or AOL—and with a few clicks find out who in your address book was already on Facebook. You would also be able to send emails to anyone who wasn’t on Facebook, inviting them to join. So central was this element that some began referring to open registration as “Address Book Importer.”
Developing the News Feed was by far the most complex and lengthy project Facebook had ever tackled. But by midsummer a version was working. One night, sitting in his living room, Chris Cox saw the first News Feed “story.” On his home page was one brief line: “Mark has added a photo.” “It was like the Frankenstein moment when the finger moves,” Cox marvels. The News Feed would eventually be comprised of a long list of such alerts customized for each user. The conceptual model for the News Feed was a newspaper that was custom-crafted and delivered to each user. Facebook called each little alert item a “story.” The software that calculated which stories should go to each user was deemed “the publisher.”
There was extraordinary anticipation at the company as News Feed’s debut neared. Dave Morin, an employee at Apple, was being recruited by Parker and Moskovitz to join the company at that exact anxious moment. (Parker may have stopped getting a salary, but his passion for Facebook’s success was unabated.) Morin recalls a conversation with Parker the night before News Feed launched. “Morin, tomorrow will be the day that decides whether or not Facebook becomes irrelevant or becomes bigger than Google,” Parker intoned. Moskovitz had a less portentous thought for Morin. “Tomorrow you’re going to love the new home page so much,” he said, “you’re going to want to work here for free!”
Facebook turned on News Feed in the wee hours of the morning of Tuesday, September 5. Everybody had been working so hard that the office was a wreck—wires and papers strewn everywhere. The corporate refrigerator was packed with cheap Korbel champagne for a big celebration. People pulled it out and began swigging directly from the bottles. Some people even brought in New Year’s noisemakers. This was something to celebrate. As they pushed the button to officially turn the feed on, a crowd gathered around a monitor. Zuckerberg was there, barefoot, wearing a red T-shirt from New York’s CBGB’s nightclub and black baggy basketball shorts.
Ruchi Sanghvi, the News Feed product manager, posted an
upbeat note on the Facebook blog, “Facebook Gets a Facelift.” “We’ve added two cool features,” she wrote guilelessly, “news feed, which appears on your homepage, and Mini-Feed, which appears in each person’s profile. News feed highlights what’s happening in your social circles on Facebook. It updates a personalized list of news stories throughout the day, so you’ll know when Mark adds Britney Spears to his Favorites or when your crush is single again.…Mini-Feed is similar, except that it centers around one person. Each person’s Mini-Feed shows what has changed recently in their profile and what content (notes, photos, etc.) they’ve added.”
Now a user’s home page was entirely composed of algorithmically selected snippets telling them what their friends were up to. Here are some examples that appeared in users’ News Feeds: David Walt added new photos; Monica Setzer is now single; Amanda Valerio changed her profile picture; Alex Stedman left the group UCSB Students Against Beer Pong; Dan Stalman and Alex Rule are now friends; Lauren Chow is attending The Gods Must Be Crazy; Garrett Tubman is better cause zackie just cheered him up; and Updated: 14 of your friends joined the group Students Against Facebook news feed (Official Petition to Facebook).
Yes, there was a problem. Apparently Facebook’s users hated News Feed. After the engineering team pushed the code live, they sat and watched as reactions from Facebook’s 9.4 million users started coming in. The very first one read, “Turn this shit off!” Photos of the evening show a celebration suddenly turned sour, as slightly inebriated staffers stopped gleefully brandishing their Korbel and began glaring at screens suddenly filled with cascading complaints.
Thus began the biggest crisis Facebook has ever faced. Only one in one hundred messages to Facebook about News Feed was positive. At Northwestern University in Illinois, a junior named Ben Parr woke up Tuesday morning, logged into Facebook, and did not like what he saw. He quickly created the anti–News Feed group “Students Against Facebook news feed.” “You went a bit too far this time, Facebook,” he wrote. “Very few of us want everyone automatically knowing what we update…news feed is just too creepy, too stalker-esque, and a feature that has to go.” Within about three hours the group’s membership reached 13,000. At 2 A.M. that night, it had 100,000. By midday Wednesday 280,000 had joined, and Friday it hit 700,000.
And there were about five hundred other protest groups. Their names included “THIS NEW FACEBOOK SET-UP SUCKS!!!”, “Chuck Norris come save us from the Facebook news feed!,” “news feed is a chump dick wuss douchbag asshole prick cheater bitch,” and “Ruchi is the Devil.” At least 10 percent of the site’s users were actively protesting the change.
The primary objection to News Feed was that it sent too much information about you to too many people. A headline in the Arizona Daily Wildcat at the University of Arizona summarized: STUDENT USERS SAY NEW FACEBOOK FEED BORDERS ON STALKING. It quoted a freshman saying “You shouldn’t be forced to have a Web log of your activities on your own page.” And at the University of Michigan, the Michigan Daily quoted a junior who found it problematic on the viewer’s side. “I’m really creeped out by the new Facebook,” she said. “It makes me feel like a stalker.” Many began referring to the service as Stalkerbook. You were stalked, and you were turned into a stalker. Who wanted that?
The company’s first official reaction emerged late Tuesday night. Zuckerberg wrote a blog post with the condescending headline “Calm down. Breathe. We hear you.” He took a rational line: “We’re not oblivious of the Facebook groups popping up about this (by the way, Ruchi is not the devil). And we agree, stalking isn’t cool; but being able to know what’s going on in your friends’ lives is. This is information people used to dig for on a daily basis, nicely reorganized and summarized so people can learn about the people they care about.” He also noted a point that to him and his colleagues at Facebook was fundamental to News Feed: “None of your information is visible to anyone who couldn’t see it before the changes.”
The next day television news crews began to gather in front of Facebook’s Palo Alto headquarters building. The company had to hire security guards to escort employees to and from the office. Students from several schools were calling for a massive in-person protest there. Employees were scared. “We had all these conversations,” remembers Sanghvi. “‘Should we shut off the News Feed?’ ‘Is it going to kill the company?’” There were earnest debates in Facebook’s conference rooms about whether they should simply block messages about the protest groups from showing up in people’s News Feeds. But Zuckerberg, in New York on a promotional trip, argued firmly with his colleagues by email and phone that this was a matter of “journalistic integrity”—to cut off debate would be contrary to the spirit of openness that led him to create the company in the first place.
But despite the hubbub, Zuckerberg and everybody else at Facebook saw one central irony about the episode: that the protest groups had grown so fast. In itself that was testimony to the News Feed’s effectiveness, they believed. People were joining the groups to protest News Feed because they were learning about them in their News Feeds. As Zuckerberg explained it to me at the time, “The point of the News Feed is to surface trends going on around you. One thing it surfaced was the existence of these anti-feed groups. We really enabled these memes to grow on our system.” To him it was the ultimate evidence that News Feed worked as it was intended.
However, such calm and clever logic would not quell the uprising. So Zuckerberg agreed to compromise. Cox, Sanghvi, senior engineer Adam Bosworth, and several other engineers spent a frantic forty-eight hours writing new privacy features that gave users some control over what information about them was being broadcast by the News Feed. You could now instruct the software not to publish stories about specific sorts of actions. For instance, you were able to silence it when you commented on a photo, or—and this was an important one—when you changed your relationship status.
Zuckerberg stayed up all Thursday night in his hotel room in New York writing a new blog post announcing the new privacy controls. It had a markedly different tone than his first one. “We really messed this one up,” it began. “We did a bad job of explaining what the new features were and an even worse job of giving you control of them… We didn’t build in the proper privacy controls right away. This was a big mistake on our part, and I’m sorry for it.” He also announced that in a few hours he would be participating in a live public discussion about the News Feed on a group called “Free Flow of Information on the Internet.”
The “Students Against Facebook news feed” group peaked that day at 750,000 members. The demonstrations were canceled. The privacy controls tamped down the protest quickly.
The News Feed enabled very large groups to form on Facebook almost instantly. That had never been possible before. And the anti–News Feed groups were not the only ones that burgeoned that first week. Even as “Students Against Facebook news feed” was gathering steam, another one with a more juvenile tone was taking off. It was called “If this group reaches 100,000 my girlfriend will have a threesome.” It reached its target in less than three days, as awareness spread via the virality of the News Feed. (The message turned out to be a hoax.) Meanwhile yet another new group was collecting tens of thousands of new members and reassuring Facebook employees that there was in fact some redeeming value to News Feed. It was called “Save Darfur.”
Zuckerberg was entirely willing to tweak News Feed, but he never for a moment considered turning it off. Explains Cox: “If it didn’t work, it confounded his whole theory about why people were interested in Facebook. If News Feed wasn’t right, he felt we shouldn’t even be doing this” (“this” being Facebook itself). But Zuckerberg in fact knew that people liked the News Feed, no matter what they were saying in the groups. He had the data to prove it. People were spending more time on Facebook, on average, than before News Feed launched. And they were doing more there—dramatically more. In August, users viewed 12 billion pages on the service. But by October, with News Feed under way, they
viewed 22 billion.
The first time I ever met Zuckerberg was at lunch on Friday, September 8, the day Facebook unveiled the News Feed privacy changes. Only hours earlier he’d posted his contrite letter to users after staying up all night, and he was shortly to participate in the live question-and-answer session to help placate protesters.
He was completely unfazed. He arrived at the restaurant wearing a short-sleeved T-shirt decorated with a whimsical image of a bird on a branch. He immediately launched into a confident peroration about social networking and how Facebook fit into it; he almost disregarded the fracas he’d spent the preceding days trying to tamp down. His rhetoric was big-picture and visionary. Almost offhandedly, he shared his dispassionate analysis of why Facebook’s users were so mad about News Feed. He said that he hadn’t anticipated the uproar because he had thought users would realize that nothing on News Feed hadn’t already been visible on Facebook in the past; it was just better organized and presented. But he now realized, he said, that this argument was only hypothetical. It was apparent that people felt that normal obstacles to intrusiveness had been improperly removed. He was starting to realize that users take time to get used to changes, no matter how inevitable or necessary they might seem to him.
News Feed was more than just a change to Facebook. It was the harbinger of an important shift in the way that information is exchanged between people. It turned “normal” ways of communicating upside down. Up until now, when you desired to get information about yourself to someone, you had to initiate a process or “send” them something, as you do when you make a phone call, send a letter or an email, or even conduct a dialogue by instant message.
But News Feed reversed this process. Instead of sending someone an alert about yourself, now you simply had to indicate something about yourself on Facebook and Facebook would push the information out to your friends who, according to Facebook’s calculations of what was likely to interest them, might be interested in the activity you were recording. And for the recipients of all this information, looking at their Facebook home pages, this new form of automated communications made it possible to stay in touch with many people simultaneously with a minimum of effort. It was making a big world smaller.
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