The line between Facebook and old media is blurring. Verizon has incorporated Facebook along with Twitter and a few other social media websites into its FIOS broadband television rollout. You can log in to Facebook on your TV using your remote, and on a split screen use it to update your status and share information with friends about shows you’re watching. Some media companies, like the Huffington Post, have deeply integrated Facebook into their websites so users can use their Facebook identity to share and comment on stories and videos with friends.
The next phase is likely to be a more thorough marriage between Facebook and conventional media, especially television. As the FIOS integration suggests, Facebook gives viewers a platform to in effect watch TV with their friends. There are other ways to do the same thing. Facebook has also made it quite easy for any video broadcast on the Web to be accompanied by live commentary by Facebook users through their status messages, which can be seen on any site’s page that chooses to integrate them. One of the first examples of such integration was when CNN enabled users to comment online during the inauguration of President Obama. You could watch the updates of all the other viewers (which reached 8,500 per minute) or just those posted by people on your own friend list. ABC.com did something similar during the 2009 Academy Awards.
A world in which each individual has a clear window into the contributions of everyone else, potlatch-style, does not dovetail well with how most companies are run. While employees of just about every company in America are on Facebook in force, its intersection with the classically structured corporation has been awkward and clumsy so far. Gary Hamel, one of the great theorists of modern management, considers that inevitable. “The social transformation now happening on the Web,” he explains, “will totally transform how we think about organizations large and small.” Hamel says historically there have been only two basic ways to, as he puts it, “aggregate and amplify human capabilities.” They were bureaucracy and markets. “Then in the last ten years we have added a third—networks. That helps us work together on complex tasks, but it also destroys the power of the elite to determine who gets heard.”
Few companies have wrestled effectively with this contradiction. Elites—such as the managers of the typical corporation—seldom willingly surrender power and authority. Says author and strategy consultant John Hagel: “Companies are facing the same issues that individuals are facing, which is the degree of transparency and openness that’s appropriate,” he says. “But in general individuals are moving more rapidly and developing more appropriate social practices than institutions are.” This is one of several reasons why many companies now restrict the use of Facebook in the office. The spread of Facebook as a communications medium so far has been too rapid for most managements to have understood what it means.
Some executives, however, have embraced Facebook in the enterprise. When they do they almost universally encounter social dynamics that unsettle the corporate power equilibrium. At Serena Software, a Silicon Valley company that was running out of gas as a provider of software for mainframe computers, new CEO Jeremy Burton turned to Facebook in late 2007 as a tool to shake up a hidebound, old-school corporate culture. Serena even set aside a couple of hours weekly on what it called “Facebook Fridays” for employees to establish Facebook connections with co-workers, suppliers, customers, and anyone else.
Burton became Facebook friends with hundreds of Serena’s nine hundred employees. As a result, Burton gained useful insights into how Serena functioned day to day. Employees casually posted details about their jobs and sent him surprisingly candid Facebook messages. “People feel more comfortable telling the CEO things on Facebook than they ever would in person or with email,” he says. “They feel it’s more informal.” But informality comes with other costs. Burton’s much younger brother in England sometimes bluntly disagreed with what Burton said on Facebook, in full view of employees and other friends.
Then came 2008’s precipitous economic downturn. Serena, like every other company, saw revenue plummet. Burton had to lay off about 10 percent of the company’s workers. Accordingly he had to decide whether once an employee was laid off he ought to “unfriend” the person on Facebook. He found the layoff process deeply unsettling, and shared some of his feelings about it on Facebook. A couple of people who were laid off sent him sympathetic notes there, acknowledging the challenges he faced or proclaiming their time at Serena to have been valuable no matter how unhappily it ended. He remained Facebook friends with several people he fired.
At a completely different kind of company, global journalism and financial information powerhouse Thomson Reuters, Editor in Chief David Schlesinger found a similarly informal dynamic. He’s a rabid Facebook partisan who checks the service “easily two dozen times a day,” and who, as manager of one of the world’s biggest news services, concedes, “I actually think the Facebook News Feed is real news. It tells me news I’m interested in.” He mostly uses Facebook to connect with colleagues and employees but says the way he relates to people there does not depend on where they work. “There are some journalists six levels below me in the hierarchy with whom I have a very intimate relationship on Facebook,” he says. “A junior reporter who is my friend may ask me for advice on a story when they would never dare do it by email or telephone or in person. It’s wonderful. I love it. The HR jargon for it would be level-jumping.” Schlesinger, like Burton, is a secure manager who wants to empower people in his organization. Executives more eager to exercise power themselves will not find it so comfortable. Most of them—and we all know how many there are—stay off Facebook.
Companies are often eager to get marketers and sales executives onto Facebook as its importance in that world grows. Sony Pictures, an early Facebook advertiser, decreed back in 2006 that executives should have Facebook profiles. At computer-chip maker Intel, the sales and marketing departments conducted a sort of treasure hunt with an iPod as the prize. To participate you had to start with clues at a fictitious Facebook profile. But in order to see that profile you had to create one for yourself.
From early on, companies have been approaching Facebook asking for special features for enterprise use, but Zuckerberg has never been particularly interested. Companies want, for example, to be able to sequester employee conversations so absolutely no outside “friends” could ever see their internal discussions. That remains impossible. Executives at Facebook say such capability will eventually get built, it’s just not a high priority now as the company is growing so quickly among consumers. But co-founder Moskovitz feels strongly about building features that help companies collaborate internally in the way that Facebook has made it so easy to “collaborate” with your friends. The presumption at Asana, Moskovitz’s San Francisco–based start-up, is that electronically facilitated collaboration will increasingly be built into the fabric of every successful enterprise. At Facebook, Moskovitz consistently advocated giving employees tools that empowered them inside the enterprise, and many of his innovations remain in use there today.
Microsoft, the world’s leading business software company and a big Facebook investor and partner, has periodically campaigned to get Facebook to enable a version of its service to work in conjunction with Microsoft Office. That idea has consistently been met with yawns, to the consternation of some at Microsoft. Now Salesforce.com, a smaller but agile competitor of Microsoft, has launched a social network for businesses called Chatter. Companies of many types are beginning to experiment with that and similar products.
Facebook itself is both a beneficiary and a victim of the dynamics of the gift economy its CEO is so partial to. The more users want to contribute, the more activity they generate and the more page views Facebook can use to display advertising. But because Zuckerberg has given Facebook’s users such powerful tools to express their views, the company itself has regularly borne the brunt of user dissatisfaction when it took actions people disapproved of. Digital democracy affects life inside Facebook even more than outside it.
Zuckerberg accepts this as inevitable. “We’re a vehicle that gives people the power to share information, so we are driving that trend. We also have to live by it,” he says. That was tough enough to deal with in the quaint days of the News Feed controversy, when Facebook had fewer than 10 million users. Now, with the burden of more than 400 million empowered and contributing users, Zuckerberg’s life is becoming considerably more complicated thanks to the extraordinary tools he has made available to all these people.
16
The Evolution of Facebook
“What we’re doing now is just the beginning.”
On the first workday of 2009, Mark Zuckerberg—he of the rubber sandals, T-shirts, and fleece jackets—arrived at work wearing a conservative tie and a collared white dress shirt. “It’s a serious year,” he told everyone who asked. He was going to wear a tie all year, he explained, to underscore the issues Facebook faced as growth reached stratospheric levels.
But it wasn’t growth per se that made Zuckerberg feel he needed to signal a new seriousness to his peers. It wasn’t the need for “monetization,” either. Rather, it was the challenges that come with being a rapidly evolving communications platform that has already been embraced by a mass audience.
Zuckerberg still sees Facebook as a work in progress. Toward the end of 2008 I asked him what he considered its biggest challenge. “The biggest thing is going to be leading the user base through the changes that need to continue to happen,” he answered without any hesitation. “Whenever we roll out any major product there’s some sort of backlash. We need to be sure we can still aggressively build products that are on the edge and manage this big user base. I’d like us to keep pushing the envelope.”
Facebook was still less than five years old, but it had already brought its users through a series of major changes. The inclusion of photos, the introduction of the News Feed, and the expansion of Facebook through the applications platform and the translation tools had each, in its own way, fundamentally altered the product and transformed the user experience. Now Zuckerberg and his engineers were planning further dramatic changes. He wouldn’t think of abandoning them. It was going to be a serious year.
• • •
Even in late 2008, when Zuckerberg confessed these concerns about keeping Facebook moving forward, he had already initiated a series of changes intended to get users exchanging even more information with one another. In September 2008, only two weeks after briefly celebrating 100 million active users, with a toga party, Facebook reorganized profile pages in a way many found jarring. As always it led to loud user protests. Inside the company the initiative was nicknamed “FB 95” in an ironic and admiring wink to Windows 95—the Microsoft operating system that finally and indisputably made Windows a mass-market product and turned Windows-based PCs into a resilient worldwide monopoly. This change to profile pages was supposed to similarly help Facebook blanket the world.
The primary aim of the redesign was to increase the velocity of information flowing between users—or “sharing,” in the lexicon of Facebook—and to simplify the site’s design to make it easier to digest an ever-increasing volume of information. In the most significant change, two separate components of your profile were combined—the “wall,” where friends sent you direct public messages, and the “mini-feed,” the personalized News Feed that displayed information about you. Now everything that was about you was in one place. A central aim was to create more launchpads for discussion. At the top of your profile was now a box called the “publisher”—an enhanced version of the old slot where you merely posted status updates. But the box was now for content of all types, everything from quotidian updates of the classic sort—“I’m getting into the shower now”—to photos, videos, and links to articles and sites of interest around the Web. Whereas Facebook’s old status update box had prompted you with something like this “David Kirkpatrick is…,” now the publisher box included a much more open-ended question: “What’s on your mind?”
In order to ease Facebook’s increasingly skittish users into the new design, the company gave users a trial version almost two months before requiring them all to shift over. It maintained old and new versions in parallel. As Zuckerberg said, “The technology is the least difficult part.” Managing Facebook was becoming an exercise in crowd psychology.
But careful user relations only went so far. Many users hated the redesign. Thousands again joined groups protesting it, though not nearly as many as had protested against News Feed. A few days after the redesign, even computer executive Michael Dell joined a group called Petition Against the “New Facebook.” Young people especially were attached to their old wall, which had been in place in one version or another since late 2004.
On the day in July 2008 when Facebook first showcased its redesign, influential tech journalist Michael Arrington wrote a prophetic item on his widely read TechCrunch news site. It was titled “The Friendfeedization of Facebook.” FriendFeed was a small website started in October 2007 by several former top Google engineers. As Arrington pointed out, it “expertly combined the idea of an activity stream that was first popularized by Facebook with the microblogging trend introduced by Twitter.” Now, with its redesign, Arrington saw Facebook mimicking FriendFeed by taking its own traditional News Feed content and blending it with beefed-up status updates that resembled the so-called tweets on Twitter.
For the first time since it emerged, Facebook was now being forced to react, at least in part, to the innovations of others. And while it may have begun to look a bit like still-tiny FriendFeed, the major new force in the equation was Twitter. Created in 2006, Twitter gives users a forum to post updates of no more than 140 characters. To many, especially people who don’t use both, Twitter seems much like Facebook, because both put great emphasis on rapid sharing of information between individuals. But on Twitter people do not become “friends.” Instead you can sign up to “follow” anyone’s tweets—the name users give its telegraphic updates. Twitterers are not necessarily even people. A large percentage of Twitter accounts use aliases or company names. And unlike those on Facebook, Twitter connections are one-way. Facebook’s heritage is as an identity-based platform to communicate with people you know offline, but Twitter is a broadcast platform—a medium perfect for companies, brands, bloggers, celebrities, and anyone who has something they want lots of people to know about.
There are undeniable parallels between the two products. The status update is a central feature of both. Twitter, like Facebook, opened itself up early as a platform for other applications. Indeed, many users tweet and view the tweets of others on independent sites like Tweet-Deck. Twitter one-upped Facebook as well in its blasé approach to revenue—in 2009, three years after it was founded, it still had virtually none. Growth was its mantra, and it was getting plenty of it.
Twitter’s momentum with users continued to build over the subsequent months. Facebook was now large, established, and from the press’s point of view, a bit old hat. Twitter was the next thing. It quickly became the “it” tech company, a status Facebook had occupied for most of 2007 and 2008. Predictions that Twitter would supplant Facebook were rife. Zuckerberg and his team were following Twitter closely. They were extremely focused on the degree to which the enthusiasm of the press and Silicon Valley cognoscenti had migrated to Twitter.
At an onstage interview at the Web 2.0 conference in early November, two months after instituting Facebook’s redesign, Zuckerberg said he was “really impressed” by Twitter and called its service “an elegant model.” Around that same time Facebook got deep into secret talks to buy Twitter—reportedly for $500 million in stock. The deal didn’t happen, among other reasons because Twitter’s executives were not confident in the potential value of Facebook’s stock.
Facebook made yet another huge transition in late 2008. Zuckerberg aimed to start embedding Facebook into the very fabric of the Internet. In a fundamental change to its platform, the company launched Facebook Connect. Th
e launch was an appeal to developers to start building on top of Facebook in a new way.
Connect makes it possible for any site on the Web to allow you to log in using your Facebook account. That accomplishes several things. It lets you bring your identity with you wherever you go online. Because you can tell Connect to send information back into your Facebook feed, it’s a way to project information about the actions you take on those sites back to your Facebook friends just as if they were actions inside Facebook. It also enables Facebook to lend its virality—the way it so efficiently transmits information from one user to many friends—to any website that wants to take advantage of it.
For users, Facebook Connect offers what could turn into a universal Internet log-in. Over 80,000 websites use it in some fashion, as of February 2010, and 60 million Facebook members are actively employing it. Connect partners include about half of all the top 100 websites in the world, as measured by the comSource research firm, Facebook executive Ethan Beard told a conference audience. They range from Yahoo, the world’s largest content website, to big media sites like CNN, the Huffington Post, Gawker, and TechCrunch, hot start-ups like Fanbase and Foursquare, and devices like the iPhone and the Xbox gaming console. “We aspire to be a technology that people use to connect to things they care about no matter where they are,” Beard told the conference. (Remember how proud Zuckerberg was, way back in the fall of 2003, when he said that with CourseMatch “you could link to people through things”?)
When readers log in to comment or interact on one of these sites or devices using Facebook Connect they are identified by their Facebook photo and real name. This addresses a huge problem that has afflicted blogs and news sites—the significant percentage of posts by readers that have been extreme, insulting, and anonymous. When discussants log in under their real names with Connect, the dialogue becomes more civilized.
The Facebook Effect Page 35