[ FACEBOOK’S VIRAL CLUSTERS ]
Then there is Facebook, which has sustained a major global push, overtaking MySpace in the United States, Canada, Austria, Italy, and Libya and, after AOL ran Bebo into the ground, wresting control of the UK, Australia, and New Zealand. From the beginning Facebook targeted college campuses, and because students are friends with other students across national boundaries, a viral spurt at, say, an American university led to one in India, France, or Japan. Wherever there are students, there is the potential for Facebook to grow. If you find the global map reminiscent of the classic board game Risk, with social networks acting the part of conquering armies, then perhaps you wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Facebook’s founder was such an avid player that he coded an online version of it when he was in the ninth grade.
The tale of Mark Zuckerberg has been told so often it’s become part of geek folklore. Raised in a New York City suburb, Zuckerberg earned a reputation at Harvard as a prodigiously talented programmer. One application, which he named Coursematch, let students learn who had signed up for which classes. Another parsed the campus newspaper to find people mentioned in its pages and link them through different articles. His biggest splash came with Facemash, which aped Hot or Not, inviting students to upload pictures for peers to rate. Zuckerberg raided an online cache of Harvard student ID photos, posted them side by side, invited users to vote on who was better looking, and tabulated the results into a top 10 list for each campus house. Facemash proved popular and controversial—the administration charged him with violating students’ privacy. (He got off with a warning.)
Shortly afterward, three seniors hired the precocious freshman to finish coding a social networking site they hoped would compete with Friendster. Zuckerberg never got around to it, instead concentrating on another project.* He contends the small, extracurricular programming projects he had undertaken set the foundation for an all-purpose tool that would bring together all of those elements. The vehicle, he decided, would be the traditional college facebook, the directory that for each freshman included a photo and brief identifying information like name, hometown, high school, and date of birth. It took about two weeks for Zuckerberg to code Thefacebook.com, which debuted on the evening of February 4, 2004.
It was a simple, streamlined site. A Harvard email address was required for registration, with profiles consisting of a photo, the student’s major, favorite books, movies, music, and a place to share pithy quotes. Students could friend other students by linking to their profiles and “poke” someone to indicate they had dropped in. After creating a few test profiles, Zuckerberg made ones for himself and his roommates, Dustin Moscowitz and Chris Hughes. Someone suggested they post an announcement on the dorm mailing list, and dozens joined. Inside twenty-four hours, more than twelve hundred students registered. Five days later the Harvard Crimson ran a story on Thefacebook.com, and by the end of the month three-quarters of the undergraduate population (about seven thousand students) had signed on.
Zuckerberg was surprised it took off so quickly. He and his roommates had “a sense that the type of dynamics we were tapping into were pretty universal,” he says. “The thing that was surprising was that our implementation, specifically, was so efficient at doing it.” Soon other schools asked whether Thefacebook.com would launch outside of Harvard. While enrolled in challenging courses, including an operating systems course that he says is one of the hardest classes at Harvard (a friend tutored him so he could pass), Zuckerberg, Moscowitz, and Hughes spread Thefacebook.com to Yale, Stanford, and Columbia, which they selected because each school had a popular existing community website.
Their reasoning was simple and audacious. To ensure Thefacebook.com was worth their time and effort, they wanted to be sure “we had an implementation that was so efficient that even though everyone already had something they were using, they would just switch and start using ours,” Zuckerberg says. Within two weeks there was a mass migration from the existing campus site to Thefacebook.com. Encouraged, the three roommates over the course of the semester expanded to twenty-five more schools—most without entrenched community sites—tacking up on their walls pictures of S curves representing the adoption rates on various campuses.
The bigger the school, the longer it took to arrive at full inflection. At Cornell a couple of weeks passed before exponential growth kicked in. As with smaller schools, however, eventually a critical mass was achieved; then there arose the social expectation that everyone had to be on it. Since students communicate with those attending other colleges, there was significant pentup demand for Thefacebook.com elsewhere, with campus newspapers trumpeting its arrival. This drove the site through the early sign-up phase, when the landscape was particularly barren and there was little utility for early adopters. “The value that people get is tied to how much information everyone is sharing,” Zuckerberg says. He and his roommates encouraged the first wave of registrants in the ramping-up period to share information through pictures. The second wave would see the information and attract the first wave back, which helped Thefacebook.com “gel as a network.”
Not that it was easy. The faster the network scaled, the more resources had to be thrown at it, which necessitated building new infrastructure on the fly. It wasn’t always a smooth ride, but they avoided disaster by controlling the rate of scaling. “We weren’t structured as a company, and we didn’t have a lot of money, and we were running ads to make money to buy more servers to launch at more schools,” Zuckerberg says. “Because we knew we were going to be constrained, we built into the system that not everyone at the system could sign on at once.” To accomplish this they required each sign-up to have a valid college email address. It helped Thefacebook.com become “exclubiquitous,” to walk the line between being exclusive and ubiquitous on any given campus. “In a lot of ways we slowed down our growth,” he says, “but the flip side of that was that as we were growing, we were able to not fall over.”
While Facebook’s scorching growth appears reminiscent of eBay, there is a stark difference. Through network effects, eBay locked up auctions, making it virtually impossible for a competitor to take root. It’s different for Facebook, which eventually dropped the “the” from its name. “Its not like social networking by itself is an activity,” Zuckerberg says. It’s simply a platform for various social activities expressed through different applications. So “network effects aren’t as clearly aligned as they are with auctions. By offering a superior and more efficient product, you can pretty predictably displace any competitor even if they have network effects.”
Comparing Facebook to MySpace is perhaps less about being superior and more a matter of taste, but one trend over the past couple years is indisputable. In 2007 both sites appeared to have hit a point of ultimate saturation, their growth slackening. Then Facebook made two changes that spurred on a new wave of sign-ups, leaving MySpace, stuck on 100 million users, in the dust. Facebook calculated that when a new user made ten friends, she would likely shift into becoming active on the site, and her networks of friends would continue to expand. To encourage this, the company added the feature “people you may know,” which immediately began to pay dividends. This small change led to a big uptick in Facebook’s viral coefficient.
With growth once again jump-started in the United States, it then applied its original college growth strategy globally. Zuckerberg notes the growth curves abroad are “very similar, except instead of colleges we have countries.” As with Ivy League colleges’ part of Facebook’s initial expansion, some nations, like Canada, have reached a point of slow growth since 40 percent of its Internet population is already on Facebook, while others just starting out are in the vertiginous ramping-up phase. As Facebook is translated into more languages, growth has been accelerating in non-Eng-lish-speaking countries in Europe and Latin America, which makes calculating its global growth rate more complex. In 2007, when Facebook was spreading fast and furiously, it grew 3 percent a week, but that didn’t mean i
t experienced equal growth rates in every nook and cranny of the world. Saturated markets flattened out, while new ones whirled upward. “It’s really a combination of markets that are more saturated with other new markets that are just starting to grow exponentially,” Zuckerberg says.
His ultimate goal: to attract so many people around the world on Facebook it becomes not only the global standard for social networking, it becomes the new operating system. He takes his lead from Microsoft, which controlled the desktop in the 1990s. Whoever controls the standard wins. Then you can leverage your control with greater numbers of products and applications, giving you a decisive advantage over competitors. With the trend toward cloud computing and the mobile Internet, however, Microsoft’s operating system is fast turning into an albatross. Competitors like Google are bypassing it to offer applications in the cloud and there’s nothing Microsoft can do to stop them.
[ GOOGLE: FACEBOOK’S FUTURE FOE? ]
Even Google, with its $100 billion plus market capitalization, is vulnerable, because social networks, which count on user engagement, are, for many people, their first stop on their Web journeys. Why click to Google to find out where you should take your next vacation, what kind of computer you should buy, what the best recipe for chocolate cookies is when you can query your expanding social network—people who are your friends because, in part, you trust them. Instead of being faced with hundreds of thousands of results, you can engage in a dialogue until you arrive at the answers. This doesn’t mean Google will go out of business any time soon, but if Zuckerberg gets his way, Facebook will become the portal for half a billion people. (Approaching 200 million users, he is more than one-third of the way there.) This could conceivably help him skim significant amounts off the top from Google’s search action. And if Facebook were to incorporate its own trusted network search within the vast informational grid of its members, where users tap the expertise and knowledge of those outside their cliques, Facebook might not only become the Microsoft of Web 2.0; it could become Google, too.
* * *
FACEBOOK BY THE NUMBERS…
5: number of years that have passed since launch
120: number of friends the average user has
15,000,000: number of users who update their status at least once a day
24,000,000: number of pieces of content (applications, blog posts, messages and chat, news stories, photos, and Web links) shared each month
850,000,000: number of photos uploaded to the site each month
Source: facereviews.com.
* * *
There is another perhaps more perplexing problem that Google faces: trust. In other words, it can be gamed, its results skewed by various digital ne’er-do-wells. “Black-hat” search engine optimization (SEO) has been an ongoing problem for Google. Dave Dittrich, a senior security engineer and researcher at the University of Washington Information School, says a typical approach is to create thousands of web pages running on hundreds of servers that cross-link to one another. Each file contains text that includes a word and strings that result from doing a search for that word. It can then push a product or service onto the first page of results, and that is by far the most valuable search engine real estate, because studies show that 90 percent of people don’t bother to venture past the first page. (And 97 percent don’t read past page three or the first thirty results.) This means there’s a lot of money at stake. The difference between appearing on page one of results versus page four can be worth millions of dollars. But it’s more than just a question of money. It involves security, too.
As far back as November 2007, cybercriminals have been borrowing black-hat SEO techniques to target popular keywords on Google, everything from “how to teach a dog to play fetch” to terms relating to Easter, March madness, Barack Obama, and in the weeks leading up to April 15, IRS forms. Their goal: to disseminate destructive payloads. This malware, as it’s called, can, if downloaded, cause serious harm to a PC—like surreptitiously installing adware, spyware, malicious programs to turn it into a zombie and unleash billions of spam, or even wipe out the hard drive. Google boasts that it uses “more than 200 signals,” including its patented PageRank algorithm, to rank sites. Yet, by one count, more than a million links point to a single poisonous domain that has been churning out billions of pages that seek to fool Google’s spiders. In response Google created a filter to counter this malware frenzy, which once went haywire, blocking every single site that turned up for almost an hour and freaking out some users. If Google search isn’t democracy incarnate, which is how it advertises itself, then what is it? In some instances a rigged system that rewards not the sites that have earned placement on the most valuable real estate—the first page or two of results—but one in which scammers can profit.
And what if these cybercriminals, like those behind the mysterious Conficker worm that penetrated millions of computers around the world, were to deploy more damaging payloads? For the most part they have stuck with basic PC-busting malware, which is often sniffed out by antivirus products. If these hackers were to switch to more damaging Microsoft PC “0days” (pronounced “oh-days” or “zero days,” it generally refers to unknown, or zero-hour, software threats that are easily attained on the hacker black market), Google could become a most inhospitable place to search. A 2009 report identified a vast cyberespionage campaign dubbed GhostNet that infected 1,295 infected computers in 103 countries, including embassies, international organizations, ministries of foreign affairs, news media, and NGOs. It, too, relied on malware to disseminate an application called Gh0st Rat that transformed PCs into spy devices, pilfering confidential documents and turning on cameras and microphones without users’ knowledge. Less than a third of antivirus products on the market provided protection.
[ FAILED SOCIAL NETWORKS ]
By offering a trusted (and trusting) environment, social networks like Facebook may be direct beneficiaries of what ails Google. But while you hear about the ones that make it big (Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, LinkedIn), you rarely hear about those that don’t. Yet they offer equally valuable lessons. Tribe, for one, which its founder, entrepreneur Mark Pincus, dubbed a “social marketplace,” is a cross between Craigslist and Friendster, with the inspiration coming from the book Urban Tribes, by Ethan Watters. Launched in 2003, Tribe was an attempt to nichify people’s interests within a hyperlocal context. Because if you think about it, when you go about your life, you become linked, based on your interests, hobbies, and needs, to smaller niche communities. You might live in New York, work on Wall Street or in a Soho art gallery, play tennis, love jazz, prefer a Mac to a PC, take Pilates classes, shoot your own video that you post on your blog, collect wine and take bicycle trips over the weekend. To some you are a colleague, to others a fellow tennis player (with perhaps some crossover with your job), and to an entirely different group a blogger, and so forth. Each of these interests is, in and of itself, the foundation for a niche community that can act as a filter.
“So much of what we do around the Internet is about personal lead generation,” Pincus says. “You have this close-knit tribe and there’ll be value in a community level with you connecting with that group.” Want to improve your topspin backhand in tennis? Canvass more advanced players? Look for a new job? “The best possible place for lead generation is a cocktail party,” Pincus says, with Tribe, in a sense, an online version of that, with cliques collecting around specific interests and vocations. Over the first six months, it scaled to five hundred thousand members, then stagnated. (MySpace, in contrast, had 1.4 million users at the end of its first month.) Tribe was beset by growing pains, which affected site performance. The coup de grâce, however, was its attempt to broaden its appeal. In 2006 Tribe underwent a redesign to make it more mainstream, which pulled it away from its original grass-roots mission and alienated its core user base, many of whom had joined because they were into alternative lifestyles and the arts.
But Pincus believes his big mistake was that Tribe wa
sn’t naturally viral. Because it focused on cities, communities were geographically fixed and grew separately with little synergy. A New Yorker wouldn’t bother to invite a friend from San Francisco since his community revolved around being in New York, and vice versa. Pincus also found it nearly impossible to gain critical mass in urban areas. “Once you penetrate fifteen to twenty percent of an online community, the value is so massive that you get the other eighty percent, but a city is too big,” Pincus says. “Even if you had fifty thousand in San Francisco, you’re not even at ten percent, whereas at Harvard you get two thousand kids” to sign on to Facebook, “you’re done. Then you have grounds for word of mouth from school to school.”
Another early social network was LiveJournal, a virtual community centered on interests from celebrity gossip to TV shows to rakish science fiction and Harry Potter porn. Started in 1999, users created blog journals they could push to their friends. The site employed a paid subscription model, didn’t allow advertising, and counted on the support of volunteers and open-source software to keep the site up and running. While it grew to several million members, LiveJournal wasn’t inherently viral either, which limited its growth. That was fine by Brad Fitzpatrick, the founder. He was exhausted from keeping the site afloat and had considered pulling the plug. Instead, he sold to Six Apart, a blogging platform company, which in turn unloaded it to a Russian media company.
Viral Loop Page 23