WHO INVENTED IT AND WHY?

 

The primary mover behind Facebook is a deeply ambitious young man named Mark Zuckerberg. He wrote the first version of the software that would become Facebook while he was a sophomore at Harvard. It was originally intended as a visual directory for the students of the university, but quickly grew beyond that. Within a year, several other colleges were added to the site’s client population. The following year—2005—saw the site expanded to any college or high school student. In 2006, Facebook opened itself up to the population at large.

It is Zuckerberg’s vision that guides Facebook’s explosive growth, and its hunger for your information. He doesn’t view Myspace, Twitter, or the world-famous Qzone as his competition. His sights are set firmly on Google.

If Google’s attitude towards information is socialist (free and easily accessible to everyone), Zuckerberg’s is anarchist. In interviews, he targets Google’s model for information flow as too restrictive. Google may be an excellent research tool, he argues, but the information that truly matters to people is transmitted through traditional social networks—family, friends, coworkers. When was the last time you found a good restaurant through Google? More likely, you got a recommendation from a friend and then used Google to find the address. To Zuckerberg, the recommendation is the high-value piece of information, not the address.

The flow of information through offline social networks—also known as small talk—is what holds communities of people together. You may only have a small number of people with whom you can talk about anything, but the closeness of that group is maintained by consistent communication of less important data: things like movie reviews, book recommendations, and shared recipes.

Zuckerberg believes that the open flow of information between people on Facebook not only creates genuine closeness but that it also creates a self-organizing database of information relevant to his users. His ultimate goal is an environment of free-flowing information that allows people to find what they’re looking for before they even start looking. The perfect friends list will ensure that people know instantly where they’re going to eat on Friday night, what movie they want to see, and what bar to go to afterward.