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T EC H N O LO G Y
M ark Zucke rbe rg Use s the
Word "Social" a Lot
Facebook's grand plan f or the f uture.
By Dav id Gelles
Posted Sunday , Dec. 5, 2010, at 6:46 AM ET

Mark Zuckerberg is pacing bef ore a crow d

in Facebook's Palo Alto, Calif ., caf eteria just
bef ore lunch on a Wednesday in November.
Fit and jovial, w ith pale skin and curly brow n
hair, his boyish f ace gives aw ay his 26
years. "Zuck," as f riends call him, is w earing w hat he alw ays w ears: a gray T-shirt w ith an
embroidered Facebook logo, blue jeans, and tennis shoes. With this perennially casual demeanour,
he is show ing of f new technologies to a f ew hundred employees, partners, and the press. "It's a
good day to launch some stuf f ," he says w ith a laugh. And w ith that, Zuckerberg introduces
Facebook Deals, a new service that in a matter of days w ill transf orm the w ay local businesses
reach consumers as they w alk dow n the street.

With Deals, smartphone users w ho dow nload Facebook's application can "check in" to a physical
location, such as their local cof f ee shop, and get a little rew ard. If the cof f ee shop is so inclined, it
can create a "deal" f or users w ho check in—50 percent of f , f or example, an incentive just to
show up. Tw o days af ter Zuckerberg's presentation, the pow er of Deals became clear as the Gap
gave aw ay f ree jeans to the f irst 10,000 people w ho checked in to its stores. As Zuckerberg w as
still onstage, an analyst leaned over to me and says, "They just changed local commerce f orever."
It w asn't even lunchtime yet.

During his presentation, Zuckerberg uses w ords such as "revolution" and "disruption." He talks in
sw eeping terms and w ith no sense of irony, telling the crow d, "our goal is to make everything
social." This is bold talk f rom the young chief executive, yet he has reason to be bullish. In recent
years, as individuals, businesses and political movements have embraced Facebook, the
company's clout has only grow n. Though still a start-up by some measures, it is now squarely one
of the three or f our most inf luential technology companies in the w orld.

Af ter the public presentation I join Zuckerberg and a couple of bloggers in a glass-w alled
conf erence room in the middle of Facebook's of f ices. He and I sit on a couch, and f or 40 minutes
he talks animatedly, cracking the occasional joke, expounding on his w orld view and his vision of
the f uture.

"If you look f ive years out, every industry is going to be rethought in a social w ay," he says. "You
can remake w hole industries. That's the big thing." His ambition, it turns out, is not simply to make
Facebook an inf luential technology company, but the most important company in the w orld.

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"You can integrate a person's f riends into almost anything and make [it] instantly more engaging
and viral," he told me. "You care so much more about your f riends. It's not an intellectual thing. It's
hard-w ired into humans that you need to f ocus on w hat the people around you are doing. It's this
very visceral, deep thing. That, I think, is the structural thing that is going to make it so that all these
industries change."

Zuckerberg uses the w ord "social" a lot, and it's not alw ays obvious w hat he means. He is not
simply talking about telling your f riends w hat you had f or breakf ast w ith a status update. To
Zuckerberg, a more social w orld is one w here nearly everything—f rom the Web to the TV to the
restaurants you choose to eat at—is inf ormed by your stated pref erences and your f riends'
pref erences, and equipped w ith technology that lets you communicate and share content w ith
people you know . What Zuckerberg is talking about is a new w ay of organizing and navigating
inf ormation.

This is a somew hat dif f erent Zuckerberg to the one the public knew just a year ago. In recent
months he has transf ormed f rom an aw kw ard w underkind w ith a preternatural ability to anticipate
w here the Web is going into an amicable executive unaf raid of laying out his grand plan. It is not
just that he is a bit more conf ident and articulate, though he is both; w hat is striking is that f or the
f irst time in my tw o years of interview ing him, Zuckerberg seems at ease. "The f ear is behind him,"
said a f riend of Zuckerberg's. "Until a year ago, he thought this might be the next Google, but he
w asn't sure. Now he's sure. The f ear is gone."

Facebook's soaring user base and booming revenues are, strangely, not really w hat is behind this
shif t in disposition, impressive as both f igures are. (Facebook now has more than 500 million active
users, and is expected to take in at least $1.5bn in revenue this year, mostly f rom advertising.
Facebook does not charge users, and as a private company, it does not share its f inancials.) Nor
is it Facebook's "stickiness": The site is the largest on the Web in terms of time spent and page
view s. Instead, w hat has endow ed this company w ith a new conf idence is a more subtle
transf ormation.

The change is this: Facebook is no longer merely a social netw ork, w here users check out
updates f rom f riends, glance at photos and play some games. Rather, it is making moves to be an
essential part of the entire online experience. The company is becoming people's home page,
e-mail system, and more. Much in the w ay Google extended its capabilities f rom search to include
e-mail, maps and books, Facebook is becoming a part of ever more daily services on the Web. The
company is also making strides to achieve one thing Google has not: It is w ell on its w ay to
becoming the de f acto identity platf orm f or the Internet.

With its map of prof iles of people f rom Australia to Venezuela—w hat it calls the "social graph"
—Facebook is becoming the virtual driver's license, house keys, and passport f or those traveling
around the Web. Since 2008, users have been able to log in to other sites using their Facebook
credentials. And in April, the company rolled out a suite of new f eatures that made it even easier
f or other Web sites to tether themselves to Facebook. These include the Like button, w hich
enables people to quickly express their af f inity f or a product and share it back to their Facebook
new sf eed, and other "social plug-ins" that enable users to interact w ith their Facebook f riends on
other sites.

It is a global phenomenon. There are millions of users in countries such as Indonesia, Taiw an,
Colombia, and Turkey. Zuckerberg has said he w ants to push f urther into the developing w orld,
and Facebook has a range of products that allow users w ith the simplest mobile phone to access
the site.

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More than 2 million sites have integrated w ith Facebook since 2008, including 90 percent of the top
1,000 sites on the Internet. That number is grow ing by about 10,000 sites a day. Nearly one-third
of Facebook's 500 million users interact w ith it on third-party sites every month. In this w ay, a
grow ing portion of online activity involves Facebook, even though it is not happening on
Facebook.com.

"They made this very ballsy decision to transf orm themselves f rom a place w here everyone came
to—a destination—into a service that lets me take my inf ormation everyw here," says Sam Altman,
chief executive of Loopt, a location services company that w orks w ith Facebook.

Facebook colors this as a w in-w in f or the sites w ith w hich it w orks. By giving sites such as The
Times of India and TVGuide.com access to Facebook's graph of f riends, it allow s them to draw in
new traf f ic and easily acquire new users. When movie review site Rotten Tomatoes integrated
w ith Facebook, the number of review s on the site doubled. Facebook, of course, benef its too. By
implanting its links and cornf low er-blue F logo on millions of pages, the company is enmeshing itself
deeper into the f abric of the Web, one site at a time.

B.J. Fogg is a researcher at Stanf ord University w ho studies how machines inf luence human
behavior. In 2007 he began teaching classes about Facebook at Stanf ord, a matter of miles f rom
the company's of f ices. "It w as pretty apparent to me, even bef ore they had half a billion people
onboard, that they w ere in a position to w in the game," he told me. "Now that they have their
tentacles in many millions of Websites, it w ill be really hard f or them to ever go aw ay."

It can be tempting to w rite of f Zuckerberg as an overzealous youth too excited w ith his ow n ideas.
In the six years since its f ounding, how ever, Facebook has already reshaped at least tw o
industries online. The f irst w as photos. By 2004, w hen Facebook arrived, online photos w ere
nothing new . The digital photography revolution w as in f ull sw ing. Film w as on its w ay out, and
sites like Snapf ish and Shutterf ly w ere processing millions of snapshots. Flickr, f ounded the same
year as Facebook, quickly became a popular venue to share photos, and w as soon acquired by
Yahoo. But as Facebook expanded it surpassed Flickr as the largest photo-sharing site on the
Web. By February this year, more than 3 billion photos w ere being uploaded to the site each
month. Though the company has made little ef f ort to make any money f rom its photos service, it
has invested heavily in it, designing new sof tw are and building data centers to cope w ith this
torrent of data.

What made Facebook the largest photo site on the Web w as not simply its enormous user base—it
w as the ability to "tag" people in a photo, or link that photo back to their prof ile. In this w ay, you
don't have to look through all of your Aunt Gertrude's holiday pictures; you can just quickly see the
ones she appears in. "The takeaw ay f rom that is that the social f eatures are really the killer part of
this," Zuckerberg told me. "Having good social integration is more important than high-res photos."

More recently, Facebook has upended the video-game industry. In 2007, it began allow ing outside
companies to build simple applications and games that run on Facebook.com. Games proved the
most popular, and lucrative, too. The largest of the social-gaming companies, Zynga, w ill reportedly
take in revenues in excess of $600 million this year. Playf ish, one of the largest social-gaming
companies, w as bought by Electronic Arts, the second-largest video-games company, f or up to
$400 million in 2009. A nd earlier this year, Playdom, another social-games company, w as acquired
by Disney f or up to $735 million. Today, upw ard of 200 million people play games on Facebook,
more than on the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Wii combined.

This change in behavior points to the key reasons f or Facebook's success, according to Sam
Altman. Whether it be in photos, games or location, users tend to be more engaged if their f riends

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are involved. "In the past three months there's been this massive change in terms of acceptance of
Log In w ith Facebook," Altman said. "We've gone f rom something most of my f riends didn't use, to
something most of them use several times a day on the Web. That is w hat has made people realize
how much value there is w ith Facebook."

This more personalized w orld is already appearing online. Among the bevy of f eatures Facebook
introduced in April w as Instant Personalization. It's a w onky term f or an intuitive, if somew hat
creepy, f eature: if a user is logged in to Facebook and then goes to a handf ul of other sites, such
as Internet radio Pandora or the local review s site Yelp, the user is automatically logged in to those
sites as w ell, w hich are customized to promote content relevant to a user and his or her f riends.

Even Instant Personalization, how ever, is a "light" integration. "This is really just the early stage,"
Zuckerberg told me, af ter the Deals launch. It's a big change f or the Web. For the past 15 years
w e've all had the same experience w hen w e w ent to a Web site. That is over now . If Zuckerberg
is to be believed, w e are rapidly moving f rom a w orld w here the Web doesn't know w ho you are,
to a w orld w here the Web know s exactly w ho you are.

"What w e're imagining is very dif f erent," says Chris Cox, w ho dropped out of Stanf ord to join the
company in 2005 and is now one of Zuckerberg's closest lieutenants. "If you imagine a television
designed around social, you turn it on and it says, 'Thirteen of your f riends like Entourage. Press
play. Your dad recorded 60 Minutes. Press play.'" In other w ords, the w orld w ill be experienced
through the f ilter of one's Facebook f riends.

Zuckerberg points to companies such as Zynga (built on Facebook's Platf orm) and Quora (a
question and answ er service f ounded by f ormer Facebook employees, w hich relies almost
exclusively on Facebook f or users) as examples of companies building around social "f rom the
ground up." "The real disruption is going to come f rom people w ho are rethinking these spaces," he
said.

This is a sly piece of semantics. Zuckerberg and other Facebook executives talk about the
importance of building new companies and services around "f riends" and of being "social." But
seeing as Facebook alone is the keeper of the most comprehensive social graph on earth, w hat
they really mean is building new companies and services around Facebook. And w hile this may
sound hubristic, it ref lects Zuckerberg's belief that Facebook's map of human relationships is
among the most important developments in business history. "That, I think, is the strongest product
element w e have," he said. "And [most] likely one of the strongest product elements that ever has
existed."

Not everyone is onboard w ith Zuckerberg's mission. Users have revolted against many of the
changes Facebook has made this year, calling f or more control over their ow n inf ormation. Privacy
advocates and regulators, too, are demanding that the company proceed cautiously as it grow s.

There are also concerns that by encouraging users to share more inf ormation about themselves
online, Facebook is changing the very nature of privacy. Zuckerberg acknow ledged these shif ting
mores in an interview earlier this year. "People have really gotten comf ortable not only sharing
more inf ormation, and dif f erent kinds, but more openly and w ith more people," he said. "That social
norm is just something that has evolved over time."

Whether Facebook is responding to changing social norms or, in f act, leading the charge is an
unresolved question. "There's no point in demonising Facebook, w hich is obviously providing a
great service to hundreds of millions of people," said Alessandro A cquisti, associate prof essor of
inf ormation technology and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University. "But to use a f amous

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saying, 'With great pow er comes great responsibility.' "

The concern expressed by Acquisti and others is that w hile Facebook itself may be benign, the
same cannot be said about everyone online. And it is the unintended consequences of a more
social w orld that cause the most consternation. In one nightmare scenario, a user shares
inf ormation about their eating and exercise habits on Facebook, and this is paired w ith other
inf ormation, such as Web brow sing history, by any number of so-called "data mining" companies.
These companies create a prof ile of the user that is sold to various parties, potentially including
health insurers. Based on some of this unf lattering inf ormation, the insurer decides to deny the
user coverage.

Such salacious anecdotes are thus f ar the stuf f of speculation. But as Acquisti said: "The major
concern is that w e are getting used to more and more inf ormation about ourselves being available
to others. It's of ten invisible how much inf ormation is available about us, how much can be inf erred
f rom that, and how that can be recombined and misused. The more this happens, the more
consumers become adjusted to this being the new normal."

When Facebook launched Instant Personalization and made other changes to its privacy policy in
April, there w as initially very little resistance to the moves. But in the w eeks af ter the launch, a
grow ing chorus of critics, including privacy groups and US senators, began calling f or Facebook
to roll back some of the changes.

The row shook the company to its core. "The privacy backlash w as my most dif f icult time at the
company," says Chris Cox. "We w ere on 100 f ront pages. That w as a moment as a company
w hen w e came to grips w ith how important w e are."

Facebook responded the f ollow ing month, giving users more control of their data. "We really do
believe in privacy," Zuckerberg said at the time. It w as a f amiliar pattern. Since Facebook's earliest
days, its users have resisted changes to the service. Facebook has routinely made some
concessions, only to push f urther ahead. Users have never lef t the site in droves. For now ,
Facebook has succeeded in quieting its critics. But if history is any guide, it is only a matter of time
bef ore the company is in hot w ater once more.

On June 2, Zuckerberg appeared f or an onstage interview at the "D: All Things Digital" conf erence
in southern Calif ornia. The privacy backlash w as still f resh, and the interview ers conf ronted him
on the subject. Zuckerberg broke into a prof use sw eat, stuttering his w ay through largely
incoherent answ ers. "D w as a low point," a longtime conf idant of Zuckerberg's acknow ledged. "It
w as hot in there. He started sw eating. He w as suddenly really self -conscious. It w as a f uck-up.
We all f uck up."

Since then, how ever, Zuckerberg has spoken in public several times, seeming more conf ident at
each appearance. "Mark has alw ays been really good at getting better," Cox told me. "It's one of
his tw o or three superpow ers. This year he had to be a better communicator. He did that."

The need f or a more polished public persona w as amplif ied this year by the emergence of
Zuckerberg as a celebrity in his ow n right. He has appeared on f ront pages and magazine covers
nearly every w eek, and guest-starred as himself on The Simpsons. An authoritative book about
the company, The Faceb ook Effect, came out. An unauthorised movie, The Social Network, took
the box of f ice by storm, even as it portrayed Zuckerberg in an unf lattering light. (Zuckerberg said
he w asn't going to see the f ilm but eventually hosted a screening f or Facebook employees.) It w as
enough to elevate the young chief executive to A-list status. "Zuckerberg is the Angelina Jolie of
the Internet," said Nick Denton, f ounder of gossip Web site Gaw ker, earlier this year.

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A f ew w eeks bef ore Zuckerberg launched Deals, I w as at Facebook f or another event. A f ter the
presentation in the caf eteria, the company hosted a barbecue on the law n. I saw Zuckerberg
sitting alone on a picnic blanket and joined him. I had meetings later in the day and happened to be
w earing a suit (most people in Silicon Valley w ear jeans and T-shirts). Zuckerberg told me to be
caref ul not to get grass stains on my trousers and made some more room on the blanket f or me.
Then, w ithout prompting, he said: "At least in the movie they got that part right. The f irst time I met
venture capitalists, I really w as w earing pyjamas." It w as a f lip remark, but it indicated a new
self -aw areness in Zuckerberg. Others w ho know him conf irmed as much. "I met him six years
ago, and he w as in shorts and f lip-f lops," said Ron Conw ay, an angel investor and early adviser to
Facebook. "Now you see him and he's literally a business leader."

He has also become a philanthropist. In September, just as The Social Network hit cinemas,
Zuckerberg appeared on The Oprah W infrey Show to announce he w as donating $100 million to
the troubled schools of New ark, N.J. Some w rote of f the gif t as a publicity stunt, but people close
to Zuckerberg say the decision w as months in the making and heartf elt. As a longtime f riend of his
said, "He's excited about the opportunity to do something good f or the w orld, beyond Facebook."

These distractions have done little to knock Zuckerberg of f balance. "He's alw ays been very
f ocused," said the longtime f riend. Today, he seems more intent than ever on extending
Facebook's inf luence. With photos, video games and local deals already f eeling the ef f ects of
Facebook, Zuckerberg is now looking f or other industries that are ripe f or disruption. "We're going
to see that in probably the other entertainment-type verticals f irst." Music and movies, he argues,
are poised to change. "Those are naturally social things," he said.

Meanw hile, Facebook's pow er as an identity platf orm keeps grow ing. The site w ill most likely hit
600 million users soon, giving it more muscle as it moves to be the def ault single sign-on f or the
Web.

Industry veterans stress that Facebook may not be the only identity one has on the Web. "I think
there w ill be a couple of dif f erent identities on the Web," said John Donahoe, chief executive of
Ebay. (Ebay, w hich ow ns PayPal, w orks closely w ith Facebook.) "Facebook w ill be one of the
identities you carry w ith you. The identity w e're f ocused on w ith PayPal is your monetary identity.
It's not one w here you w ant to share all your inf ormation."

And w hile Facebook has the early lead, the changing nature of social structures makes this an
inherently dynamic industry. "The f luidity of social netw orks is one of the reasons it's not entirely
clear that Facebook w ill be the be-all and end-all," says one prominent social media executive. So
f ar, how ever, no credible alternative has caught on. OpenID, a single sign-on service designed to
w ork across many companies, is f oundering; w hile Microsof t tried, and f ailed, in the 1990s w ith a
single sign-on product called Passport. "Facebook has done a much cleaner job of exactly the
same thing," says the executive. "It has basically f igured out how to create a quasi-monopoly on
the address book of the Web, a universal people directory. It's a f undamental service. If you ow n
the address book at some point you can actually monopolise communications."

Last month, Facebook took another step in this direction w hen Zuckerberg announced that the site
w ould now of f er @f acebook.com e-mail addresses to its members. He noted that users w ere
already sending 4bn messages a day via Facebook Messages.

Facebook's burgeoning pow er caught the attention of the biggest companies in Silicon Valley
years ago. Many, including Yahoo, Microsof t, and Ebay have sought to partner w ith Facebook.
Google tried to invest in Facebook in 2007 but w as beaten of f by Microsof t. Since then, it has
increasingly become Facebook's main adversary.

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The f ear, according to people close to Google, is that as Facebook users index the Web through
their Likes and shares, Google's algorithmic indexing of the Web w ill become less relevant.
"Search is a business that w ill be pretty prof oundly disrupted by social media," said Augie Ray, an
analyst w ith Forrester Research. "Ultimately, w hat matters to you is not w hat Google thinks is
important, it's w hat your f riends think is important."

Advertisers are already voting w ith their dollars. While Google still commands the lion's share of
online ads, big brands are increasingly turning to Facebook, w here they can target users based on
stated pref erences. A ccording to comScore, about one in f our online display adverts in the U.S.
now appears on Facebook.

In an ef f ort to respond, Google is developing its ow n more coherent social product. Buzz, a social
service it launched earlier this year, f lopped. A new ef f ort is tentatively called GoogleMe. "It f eels
like Google is on red alert," says one source close to both companies. "There is a f eeling at Google
that this could be f or them w hat search w as f or Microsof t."

Few in Silicon Valley are optimistic that Google w ill deliver a Facebook killer. That Google just
doesn't get social is w idely accepted as f act. This being the case, Facebook looks on track to
become an increasingly important part of people's online lives. The benef its should be easy to spot:
As more sites integrate w ith Facebook, there w ill be f ew er new accounts to create, f ew er
passw ords to remember. Sites w ill be pre-populated w ith content you f ind interesting. The Web,
once anonymous, w ill be customised to each person.

"Facebook has alw ays thought that anything that is social in the w orld should be social online,"
said Matt Cohler, an early employee at Facebook w ho has gone on to w ork as a venture capitalist.
"Anything w here people ask their f riends to help them make decisions—w hether it's f ood or
movies or travel—could be transf ormed online by social."

Though it can seem a tad Orw ellian, Zuckerberg is resolute in his belief that the f uture is at once
more social and better. "To be a technologist is f undamentally to be an optimist," Cohler said.
"Technology is an amplif ier and enabler of human behavior, so w hen you're creating it you'd better
have an optimistic view of human nature."

Cohler and others close to Zuckerberg attest to his desire to do good in the w orld. That is
reassuring, seeing as Facebook is a company w ith big plans f or the f uture. "If you look at their
behavior, they are not optimizing f or the short term, or even the medium term," says one source
close to the company. "They have a 20-year horizon." Exactly w here this w ill lead is unclear.
Technology moves f ast. Last month, Yuri Milner, chief executive of a Russian investment group
that ow ns about 10 percent of Facebook, said he believed Facebook w ould be pow ering artif icial
intelligence w ithin 10 years.

Instead of maximizing revenue as soon as possible ("They haven't tried to make money yet," says
one source w ho w orks directly w ith Zuckerberg. "They've made enough to keep the lights on"),
Facebook is instead trying to w eave itself as deeply as it can into the f abric of the World-Wide
Web. Last year, Facebook board member Marc Andreessen told me the company's user base
w ould "cap out at some point at the number of people w ho have electricity." Since that interview ,
Facebook has added more than 300 million users. "It's getting to the point w here it is very hard to
unseat Facebook," Forrester analyst Augie Ray told me. "Not just because people have their social
graph established and don't w ant to recreate it, but because the more Facebook becomes
integrated into the Web and mobile applications, the harder it is to ever replace."

Thi s a rti cl e ori gi na l l y a ppea red i n Financial Tim e s . Cl i ck here to rea d more covera ge

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from the W eek end FT.

David Gelles is a technology reporter for the Financial Times.

Article URL: http://w w w .s late .com /id/2276807/

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