The Story of Facebook

tot Well, yeah, I would say hundreds of millions. In fact, well I was gonna say, I'm sure a few hundred million of them are fed up with it because they did a design change probably in between the time we record this and the time that this actually goes live. But we're talking about Facebook, Yes, we have. We've recorded several podcasts about various aspects of Facebook, including Facebook and its stands on privacy or lack thereof, and uh and

other other related topics, uh, Facebook apps. We did one on the Facebook redesign a couple of years ago, which is funny because they've been going to say several of them after that. Yes, there's been more redesigns since then, but we've never really talked about the actual history of Facebook and and how it developed into what it is today. And um, one of the things I'm really grateful about for this topic is that there was one definitive timeline

that told us everything we needed to know. That no one was arguing about about how Facebook got started and who was responsible for it. Right, there's no controversy whatsoever, nothing in dispute except everything unless your name is Winklevoss. Yeah, ah, the Winklevosses. It's you know. On a side note before we get into this, it's hard for me to feel sympathy towards them. It's hard for many, many, many people

to feel sympathy for that. When when you're known as being a handsome, wealthy young person who was on the Harvard rowing team, extremely athletic olympians exactly, you get to that point where you're thinking, okay, fine, but yes, the story of Facebook is um is mired in controversy. Actually, what you may know if you saw the film and I am not calling it a documentary because some people

did think of it as a documentary, not the comedy. Yeah, Social Network, which and believe it or not, this is a film that I have seen and Jonathan, but but Sorkin himself was very he very specifically pointed out, this is not a documentary. It was a dramatization based upon one account of the origins of Facebook, and it took a lot of liberties with the story for dramatic purposes, which is, you know, that's what movies do. So that's

why I'm not going to call it. I jokingly call things documentaries when this case I definitely don't want to do like that. It is not a documentary. But there is some truth in it. Yeah, there's there's some truth, and some of it is still kind of ripped from the headlines. Yeah, I'll ripped from the headlines, but some of it is still kind of in that weird, nebulous realm of where does you know who's at fault and what exactly happened. But let's let's let's look back to

the very beginnings. Um, we're talking about around two thousand two, one Harvard student named Divya Narinda had kind of come up with an idea for a platform for Harvard students to use that would allow them to connect socially with one another online, perhaps some sort of online social network for example, but that was back in two thousand two when He's first started getting the idea. Then he he met up with the Winklevoss twins Cameron Cameron and Tyler

Winklevoss uh and together around in two thousand three. In the fall of two thousand three, they started to seriously discuss this and try and come up with a way of creating it, and their idea was going to be called Harvard Connections dot com. UH. It eventually would evolve into connect you dot com the letter letter you, which could mean connect you as in you the person, or connect you as in university because they had they had envisioned this as being a social network for college students.

They were originally going to launch it on Harvard's servers and just to have Harvard students be involved, and then we're eventually planning to opening opening this up to students at other universities. So they start working on this this project and they hire They are not developers. They they've got the idea, but they don't have the expertise. So first they hire a guy named Victor gau g a o UH. They hire him, but Victor eventually decides he

needs to leave the project. It's just two time consuming and he doesn't have the time and effort to be able to pour into it. But he comes up with a name of a guy that he thinks would be perfect to help them develop this project. That guy was a nineteen year old by the name of Mark Zuckerberg. I feel like I've heard that name, but I don't. I don't. Yeah, I'm sure I'll think of where I heard it before. Well, at this point, Winkle, the Winklevoss twins,

and Nerenda are all seniors at Harvard. Zuckerberg at the time was a sophomore. So Zuckerberg comes onto the project and takes a look at what, talks to them about what they want, and says, yeah, this is a great idea. I'm going to help you build this out and I will um, I'll put the functionality in and we'll have more meetings about this. So this is all taking place in the fall of two thousand three. Yeah. Now, now, Zuckerberg had been working on other similar types of projects. Yeah.

In fact, the reason why Victor suggested Zuckerberg in the first place is Zuckerberg was had launched a very high profile, controversial site at Harvard called face mash. Yes. And the reason why this was controversial was that what Zuckerberg did, Zuckerberg, as it turns out, seems to have a a fast and loose approach when it comes to things like privacy and rules that was more evident in the past than it is now. Arguably he's well, he's because now he's incorporated,

he's been more careful about his personal views. His messaging is a little is maybe a little more careful, I think, probably because his lawyers have told him to be right. So what he did with face mash was that he used it was it was brilliant and it was brazen. At the same time, he created a site that what it would do is it would collect images of Harvard students from other from databases on at Harvard. He essentially hacked into these systems like the directories. Yeah, I guess

hacked is probably too strong a term. He created code that would access these directories and pull information from them. So it wasn't so much as this is a closed system that he was trying to get access to. He was just grabbing information that was available and putting it on a new platform. Right. In this case, the information were photos would pull photos names of various students at Harvard, Yeah, exactly.

And what face mesh would do is it would pair two people on a site and you would vote which person was more attractive, and it kept a tally of the people who were being voted the most attractive over and over again. So that part of the site was just this fun thing where you would go on and say, oh, well, uh, she's more attractive than than than she is, or or she and him or he and he whatever. He would vote and vote and vote and vote, and they would keep this tally. And then you could also go and

look at the most attractive students at Harvard University. Um. This kind of upset the college board, the student board at Harvard, not to mention a few of the students who didn't want their pictures being judged up there. Yeah yeah, it Harvard's a little conservative, as it turns out. Um, so the students, uh, student board kind of brought Mark Mark Zuckerberg up on the you know, saying that this was not a very smart thing to do, that it

was a violated privacy dude. Yeah, and uh he was not. Um, he was not expelled for this, but he was reprimanded for it, yes, and said that he was charged specifically with breaching security, violating copyrights, and violating individual privacy. So face mash gets shut down, but he had. He was fairly notorious on campus already because of this, and it was such a successful site. So he was thought of as a guy who could develop not just stuff that worked,

but stuff that appealed to people. And that's why Victor had said, this is the guy you should get to help develop your connect you project. Now I didn't run across this in my actual research, but on the in the movie. Uh And again I don't know whether or not it's actual fact or that was gussied up for the script, but they said that one of the other problems that they had with it was that the it texts the university's network because it was very very popular.

Um it was. It was definitely popular. Though whether or not it actually texts their broad band is yeah, I don't know about that, but yeah, the fact that it was very popular attracted that that would have attracted interest. Yes, so uh So anyway, Mark Zuckerberg joins the connect You team, and again this is taking place in the fall of two thousand three, fall and winter of two thousand three

could possibly go. He's he starts sending the messages. When they're asking him, Hey, what's the status on this project, he starts sending back messages saying, Oh, I'm really busy. I've got a lot of schoolwork. But don't worry. I'm gonna be working on this. It's just I'm gonna have to put it off a little bit longer, but we'll be able to launch. We're just gonna probably launch a

little later than we had planned. Uh, skip ahead into two thousand four and then uh, specifically, February four, two thousand four, Zuckerberg launches a an online site called the Facebook dot com for Harvard students, and it's a social site where people can create profiles and connect with other students, which might sound a little similar to something that the

Winklevosses were working on. In fact, the Winklevosses loot so and within six days of Facebook being launched, the Winklevosses and Nearinda said, Dude, you're working for us, and this thing that you just launched looks an awful lot like the thing we want to launch. What's up with that? And you were telling us this whole time that you didn't have the time to work on our project that

we thought you were a part of. And in fact, this later developed into a very serious lawsuit against Facebook, which stretched on for several years and it um In fact, it went on until two thousand eight, when there was a settlement and settlement for sixty five million dollars, and then the Winklevosses decided to um appeal that settlement, saying that really doesn't reflect the enormity of the problem here, whereas the judges in the cases I was reviewing, we're

essentially saying, hey, this wasn't Zuckerberg was not under a contract. This was like just people chatting in a dorm room. It wasn't. It wasn't like a legally binding thing. And and you haven't really proved than that, Uh, Zuckerberg stole information from connect You, And in fact, most of the reports I read suggests that the way he implemented things on the Facebook dot com was not the way they

were trying to implement things for connect You. In fact, that they us Zuckerberg himself referred to Connect You as more or less a dating site, which to him was too narrow a view. He didn't want to create a site just to try and find a date. He wanted to create a site that would allow people to connect with one another on multiple levels, not just trying to find a relationship. So, uh, it may very well be that the Facebook dot com and connect you dot com

we're not identical. Like, it wasn't that that Zuckerberg was stealing stuff to implement into Facebook. It's just that the two platforms were at least similar, they were going after a similar population. The fact that were going across the identical population originally because it was going to be the Harvard students, right, and that Zuckerberg was purposefully holding back the connect you projects so that he would have a favorable launch for Facebook, which again you might say it's unethical,

but it's different. It's a different kind of unethical than stealing intellectual property. So I can't I don't think Zuckerberg's hands are clean in this, not fully clean, but I don't necessarily believe he was lifting ideas from the wink of voss is. But he certainly wasn't helping their cause at all. And in fact, um that's really evident now because Facebook is huge and connect You is not. It

doesn't exist. Yeah, And then there's Ah, then there is a person named Aaron Greenspan, uh who who was working on his own site, which he was calling House System. Um. And in two thousand and three he now he's at Harvard student And in two thousand three he was promoting his site with the brand new feature called the Facebook,

which showed up before the Facebook dot com. And uh, you know, so there are several people who would like to disagree with Zuckerberg's assertion that he was the one who came up with the entire thing himself, right, And then there's there's some other problems too. Um, there's some other controversies in this these early days of Facebook. So six days after Facebook launches, there's the complaint from the

Winklevoss twins um and uh. And Zuckerberg starts to worry that that the college is going to get involved in this dispute, and in fact is worried about um, the folks from connect you at connecting with the the university newspaper. So uh, Harvard crimson is one of the problems. So

so he starts to it starts to really get complicated. Now, at one point there were allegations of Zuckerberg hacking into connect you profiles to make them less useful, and that he was supposedly um accessing connect you profiles and changing a setting to turn profiles invisible to other people. So if you log into your profile, you might say, why is no one interacting with me? And it's because no one can find you because he had gone in there and reset your your settings so that it was a

private profile. Uh. And so it was essentially a case of sabotage if those allegations are indeed true. But beyond that, uh, there was the point of worrying about the Winkle bosses going to the Crimson and saying Zuckerberg ripped us off. And so the Crimson reporters, for their part, were doing their due diligence and reporting the news and trying to

research this before they ran a story. So they went to Zuckerberg and they asked him, you know, about the allegations, and he said, look, the stuff on the Facebook dot com the platform is totally different and the implementation is totally different from connect you. And he said I can even prove it. And originally he wanted them to sign

a non disclosure agreement. Uh, while he showed them that the two systems were totally different, but they're reporters, and they said, uh, we don't do that because then we couldn't report on it. What would be the point. So eventually Zuckerberg agrees to show them without the use of an NDIA, and they also come to the same conclusion. They say, no, these two systems are different enough so that, uh, we don't see that there's really any allegation that could

be supported by this. We don't really think there's a story here. So they kind of back off, but the story doesn't in there. The Winklevoz continue. The wink Winklevoss twins continue to pressure the Crimson reporters, saying, look, there's something more here and we need you to really look into this, and so the story keeps on moving. Zuckerberg doesn't know what's going on and allegedly decides to access the reporter's email to hack the reporter's email, although it's

not really hacking because here's what he did. He looked at the servers for the Facebook dot com. He looked for profiles of people who were reporters or worked for the Crimson, and then he looked for any records of failed lugin attempts and looked at the failed passwords to guess the real password, and then assumed that the real password for the Facebook dot Com account would likely be the same one used for the email, then logged into

the email. Yeah, so not really hacking, because hacking would involve, you know, some sort of guesswork or decrypt ing or No. He was just taking a list of passwords that he had available to him because he was the one running the show at the Facebook dot Com and using the logic that most people don't bother with creating different passwords for different accounts. This, by the way, is where we

tell you make different passwords for your various accounts. It's a pain in the butt, but it prevents stuff like this from happening where someone you know, you never know. There may be a service that you connect to and everyone but one person in that company is on the up and up, but that one person is kind of a jerk, and then they use that information to try and access your your stuff elsewhere. That's why you need to have different passwords, unique passwords for each place. So

he starts to try and access email. The ironic thing here was that the reporters had come again come to the conclusion that there isn't really a story there, and so they weren't really moving on stuff. They were going to report the story, but they weren't going to come down on uh. You know, this is a legitimate, uh allegation. Um, so that that's also kind of interesting. Uh. And again I have to say, all of these are allegations that have been leveled. There's no definitive yes he did or

no he did not. There are the nials from Facebook essentially come down to we don't comment on that because we don't want to give more uh publicity to people who are dragging up mud and just slinging it at Zuckerberg. We stand by the success of Facebook dot com. Yeah. I think there's really only one person who knows everything for sure. Yeah, and he's incredibly rich, so uh Yeah.

Then in that same year, in two thousand four, in September two thoour he at the first round of of real investment money, which came from the former PayPal CEO Peter Thiel, who poured in half a million into Facebook. That's pretty impressive, although at the time before that, the man who was funding the Facebook servers was another Harvard student Eduardo Severin, Yes, and he was. He was a big part of the company for quite some time. Yeah.

I think he owned like a share of Facebook dot com, which seven or fifty million active users, multibillion dollar company. That's that's some that's some hard cash right there. So yeah, that's uh, that's the that's the really controversial part of the beginning of Facebook. And like we said, you know, there was the whole the whole lawsuit, the settlement, the appeal of the settlement, but there are other um parts

of Facebook that had some controversy that same year. Uh for example, Well, first of all, before I jump ahead there, it launched in February, and March it opened up to not just Harvard, but to Stanford and Columbia and Yale as well. So March of two thousand four, now it's up open to four universities. Um. In June, that's when Zuckerberg's like, this is this is what I'm doing. I'm gonna be I'm gonna make a ment, this is my this is my meal ticket and he high tails it

out to Palo Alto, California. That becomes the headquarters for Facebook. So Harvard no longer uh. In September two four, they add the application of groups so that you can create groups within Facebook, so that you've got your own like group of folks who have a similar interest or are from a similar place. Uh, and they add the wall to the profile because before we gotta remember, you know, today it's easy to forget that. When Facebook first launched,

it was incredibly basic. You had a profile page. It was a profile page where people could find out more information about you. That was pretty much it. So if you wanted to have Jonathan on your list of people, basically you would bookmark the page and go back there. Yeah, and it would just really like a directory. It would be almost like an online business card, but a little

more personal than that. And then, uh, but in September that's when they have two thousand four US when they added the wall feature where you could update little status is and that's where you got the whole you know, tonight, I'm gonna go out to blah blah blah. However, no education. However, to see what your friends were talking about, you still had to visit their profile. So in other words, if I wanted to know what Chris was up to, I would go to Chris's profile and read it on his page.

It wouldn't show up on my page at all. We'll get into that because that's another thing, is that it's easy to forget when the features of Facebook got introduced. Yeah. As a matter of fact, I think a lot of people since um, since it was originally aimed at college students U, it may be difficult for the majority of the rest of us who didn't have accounts until Facebook went public um. And I don't mean I p O, I mean opened up to opened up to the public.

Um that that we realized that and a lot of these features had already been implemented, the very basics had been implemented. Will be getting into one of those in a minute. But yeah, Uh, back then it was you had to be a college student or to be able to access Facebook at that point, and it before two thousand four was over, they had switched from the Facebook to Facebook. Uh. Also, in fall of two thousand four they tried to launch, in fact, they do launch another

service that connects to Facebook. This should sound familiar to anyone who's used any sort of application which requires you to connect through Facebook. First, they called it wire Hog. Do you remember wire Hog? No, I don't wire Hog. I mean I've heard of it, but I don't remember it.

So wire Hog launched in two thousand four, fall of two thousand four, and the idea was that it was going to be a sharing platform that would allow you to share things like photos or music from your computer with other people, so almost like a peer to peer thing. But it used Facebook's log in system as a connector. So it was a precursor to a lot of the other websites and applications that you know, you you log in through Facebook and then you can interact more with

that site. It kind of was a predecessor to that now because of the file to file sort of relationship with you know, the fact that the whole peer to peer networks and file sharing got a super bad name because of piracy, rampant piracy. Uh, Facebook dropped wire Hog, and they do not really refer to that at all anymore.

But that originally was going to be a huge platform, and Zuckerberg and and Facebook had poured a lot of of time and effort into creating a and all indications early on seemed to be that wire Hogg was going to be just as big, if not bigger than Facebook itself. It's just that because of all the heat, they decided

to drop it. Yeah. Some people have said that it was because it wasn't taking off as fast as they had hoped, and it was sort of distracting them from the possibility that, uh, they could promote Facebook more thoroughly. But I think it's more that they didn't want the legal headaches, legal head Yeah, no, I think I totally

agree with you. So, but it did it did provide some, uh, some clues as to what Facebook could do because and I speaking of the connecting other parts of the web to Facebook and vice versa, which we see a lot of now. Yeah, well by December of two thousand four, so it's not even quite a year old, yet they had almost hit a million active users, and uh it's

big news. I mean now, granted, at this point, my Space is already up and running as well and is way ahead of Facebook because my Space did not limit itself to just college students. What about friends? Friends Store was never well, Friendster was. Friendster was big because there was nothing else to do to use at that point, so Friendster was not. Friendster would later come into the story again, but was not not not as big a player well, I guess it was a little larger at

that time, but not not from very much longer. Yea, it was something ork. It was also out, but orch It, which was Google's social network, didn't really take off except in other countries like Brazil and India, never really took off in the United States or anywhere else in North America. Considering though the head start that some of these other sites had, um it is it is almost shocking in in uh in hindsight to see how Facebook out maneuvered them and so many different and there's so many they

were there. There was a lot of hubris on the part of the other companies as well. There's no we're too big to fail. There's no way this little upstart company is gonna cause problems for us. I should also add now that I misspoke earlier. I said that the Facebook dot com became Facebook, and two thousand four it did not. It was August two thousand five. Was looking

at the wrong section of my notes. So for all those people who wrote in to tell me I was wrong, you were right, um But I did correct myself before the end of the podcast, So shame on you for pausing it and writing to me before you finished. Um. Moving on. By September of two thousand five, that's when Facebook opens up to high school students. So now it's colleges and high schools. And by the end of two thousand five they're up to five point five and a

half million users active users. They also in that year added uh, folks Photos as an application, so you can have a photo book inside a photo album inside your Facebook profile. Now, I think when I first joined Facebook, uh, the there was a limit to how many photos you could have within an album, and it was sixty. So if you want to upload, if you had more than sixty photos for an event, you had to actually create two albums at least to be able to house them all.

It's different now, um, but yeah, back then that was that was it was still really cool. I mean the fact that you know, people could actually have a place where they interacted and they could share photos. It wasn't just a photo sharing site uh meant that it had some added value. By April of two thousand and six, they had raised more than more than twenty seven million dollars in invent your capital. Uh. Every year, essentially Facebook

was getting more and more investments. Uh. It took a while for Facebook to find a business model that was going to work out for them. Now, of course, today we know that they use a lot of advertising to generate revenue. And this would be a good time to mention. If you ever see a message on Facebook that says be aware that Facebook is going to start creating premium accounts or charging people to use Facebook, that's just a hoax. It doesn't if you think about it for a second,

it makes no sense for Facebook to do that. You could argue, Facebook has seven million users. If it charged for access, think of all the money they can make. Well, that assumes that the seven million people wouldn't immediately say no, I'm out. Uh yeah, yeah, I imagine a lot of

people would bail on that. And they already have a very lucrative position because they have chosen to partner with pretty much everybody and they are working you know, people are working with Facebook on revenue opportunities, so there's no need to charge for and if yeah, and if face, if Facebook makes a lot of its money through advertising, well it would it would put those relationships with its advertisers in jeopardy because the advertisers would say, hey, wait

a minute, you're driving away our audience. That's what we're paying you for. We're paying you for access to these people. If you drive those people away, then why are we paying you. So it makes no financial sense at all from Facebook's perspective, to create a premium account or start charging people. It makes way more sense to keep it as open as possible because ultimately the product that Facebook

is selling is you. Your information is what is valuable to Facebook's advertisers, and so it makes way more sense for Facebook to try and gather as many of us as there as it possibly can, and it makes no sense to try and limit that. So if you ever do see that making the rounds at Facebook, just know that it's a hoax. Also, most of them say paste this in your status update to prevent it from happening

to you. How does that make sense anytime anybody? And that goes for email too, When people say share this with all of your friends, that's usually a signal or some sort of chain letter or something. Yeah, I just don't understand. I don't understand because there's someone at Facebook who says, no, we shall turn on the premium account setting. Oh eight. He posted that in his status update last Wednesday, trat you escape my defarious plan. I like to think they do that, but I doubt it. I have no

follow up to that. Yeah, I've had a lot of coffee this morning, all right, So tangent aside. Back back to the story of Facebook. So moving through two thousand six, they start to work to to flesh out Facebook even more, uh, and they start to create something that in September two thousand six made a big thud in Facebook. Today it's instrumental in the way we use Facebook. But at the time people saw it and said, whoa which was the

news feed and the mini feed? Yeah, the news feed the mini feed, but the news feed, you know, this is where you would log onto your Facebook account and suddenly you had a centralized view of what your friends were up to. And it wasn't like that before. Remember before, if you wanted to find out what your friends were up to, you had to visit their profile to find out. But now you had a place that was funneling their activities into your news feed. And some people really I

thought this was terrible. And then they did something else that was very controversial. What they sold out man, Well, yeah they did that too. They allowed the regular guy two and and and you know lady to join. They no longer had to be a student to join. Same Yeah, the same month that they opened up the news feeds. So for most of us who joined Facebook once we could, we only knew Facebook using the news feeds. So for

us it was not a big deal. But to the people who had been there before, it was a very big deal. And uh, and admittedly there were some missteps, and in fact, Zuckerberg apologized for the way the news feed was implemented. This would not be the first time that Zuckerberg or the last time that Zuckerberg would offer an apology based upon what Facebook had done the last No,

it will not be. But the the problem was that a lot of the activities were showing up in news feeds, whether people wanted them to or not, and so Facebook eventually had to, you know, they had to tweak the privacy settings behind the scenes so that not everything would publish all the time. So for example, the poke feature, where yeah, all it is just a little thing where it sends a message to someone saying that they've been poked.

That's all it is. That's it. But some people use as a way of flirting or whatever, or or irritating someone they did. They did not want it publishing on everyone's news feed that they had poked someone else, especially if they were a pathological poker, if they were poking lots of pe bowl. They didn't want people to see that, like, especially if you're using it as flirtation, right, pathological. Let's say that I want to send a poke to some

dreamy gal um. I'll say, Candice, I want to poke Candice uh formerly of stuff you missed in history class, and I send a poke to her. But then I think, you know what, Doblina, who is now on stuff you missed in history class, I want to I'm gonna send her a poke too. Well. I definitely don't want Cannison Deablina to see that I've poked both of them. That's just gonna be awkward. They don't listen to tech stuff,

do they. I have no idea. All right, listeners, I need you all to raise your right hands and repeat after me. I promise I will not tell Candice or Debilina that Jonathan talked about them on text stuff. Okay, now, but that's an example of the sort of stuff that people were upset about. And of course they tweaked at Facebook tweak these things so that not everything would pop up.

But yeah, it's kind of interest seem to think that the news feed was such a controversial, uh feature, when today it is like the central place people go to when there are using Facebook. Uh. By the end of two thousand six, Facebook had hit twelve million active users, so more than doubling in size from the previous year. Uh. And then in two thousand seven, you start getting into things like they had. They they start opening up and getting popular in Canada the United Kingdom, they launched the

Virtual Gift Shop, which lasted for a while. Well less than six months later in April of two thousand seven, they had twenty million active users. It was starting to grow really really quickly. At this point that was almost again, that was almost doubled from just a few months previous. And in May two thousand seven, that's when they launched the Facebook platform. Now this was where people could develop, uh, develop sort of extensions or games or other features using

Facebook as its own platform. Yeah. Yeah, this is this is what allows this is what allows all those games like Farmville and Mafia Wars and the zombie games and the pirate games and all of those different variations. Uh, they're using Facebook as a platform now. When it first launched, there was something like applications, but now there are thousands of them. And if you have the kind of friends who like to play lots of games and you yourself are not that kind of person, you know how irritating

that could be. Although the hide feature is fantastic. Um, So then you go on a little bit further. We should also mention that Facebook, uh, in two thousand seven launched and then eventually buried something else that caused a lot of controversy. Beacons Beacon. I knew you could. I was like, I knew he was going to do that. I knew it. I almost said that before we started recording. I was gonna put money down, Um and I would

have won. But yeah, So Beacon was this idea of Facebook being involved in transactions, like if you're starting to shop through Facebook, so that Facebook can market your shopping habits and your preferences to advertisers to target advertising specifically to you so that you would continue to shop online and spend more money so that more advertisers could be targeted to you. And um, the way it was implemented.

People freaked out and said this is a terrible, gross violation of privacy, and Zuckerberg said, whoops, sorry, and they quietly killed it. Actually, I guess quietly is not really true. They publicly killed it. However, one could argue that today what Facebook is doing is essentially the same thing that

Beacon was doing, is just not branded Beacon Beacan. As a matter of fact, in two thousand six, they had already begun partnering with other companies um to work together to uh share information um and and to share uh different stories and things on Facebook. UM. So this was sort of a logical extension of that. They've realized that their their customer base is an important source of revenue

for the company. Um and as a matter of fact, Facebook and Microsoft we're working together before the end of two thousand seven to reach out to foreign markets. So um and then you know, the Facebook adds you know, funny they don't they don't. Facebook's official timeline doesn't mention Beacon by name. That's strange. I wonder why that is.

It was a it was a black eye for the company. Yeah, and it was definitely becoming something a very public uh publicly popular site they had the featured their presidential debates with ABC News in uh January two UM. They started releasing in foreign languages also in that year, with Spanish, French, German. UM launched the Facebook Chat application in April of two UM and got to a hundred million active users, which is, you have to think about it among the most popular

sites on the Internet already by August two eight. And then there was Facebook Connect, yes, by the end of that and that Facebook Connect that's the one we've been talking about obliquely throughout this podcast, the one that allows you to create some sort of Facebook interaction on your site and have people log in through their Facebook log in account to create a profile on your site, so you don't have to log in create a user name and password on multiple sites. They will allow you to

log in on other sites with your Facebook. It keeps you in Facebook's ecosystem. It's good for the consumer and that it simplifies how many you know accounts you have. It's good for Facebook because it means that they get even more information about you. UM, and it's good for the sites that you log into because it gives them a higher profile. Facebook being so incredibly popular by the way in two thousand nines, removing over to that. That was when Beacon was officially shut down. It was launched

in two thousand seven. It was not officially shut down till two thousand nine. And by the way, the reason, you know, we talked about how it gives off gave away a lot of your personal information. One of the big reasons why people hated Beacon was that it would post things to your wall based upon your actual shopping habits. Yeah,

you remember all those partners that they had. So if you went shopping at you know, I like toys dot Com and you bought a whole box of um construction toys, and all of a sudden, you went back to your Facebook while I went, wait a minute, how they know that I just spent two dollars on plastic bricks? Yeah. Or let's say that you went to some site and bought some jewelry for, uh, for your sweetheart, and your

sweetheart is on for for a gift. Yeah, then your sweetheart suddenly knows that you bought this jewelry because it's it's posted right there in your Facebook. Or let's say you bought some uh, some jewelry for someone who's not your sweetheart, because you're sweetheart, says honey, you know I don't like amethysts, and then you said, but I didn't buy it, I mean, and then it goes to your relationships. That goes from from either either married or in a

relationship to either single or it's complicated. Um. Yeah. So that's why people fought felt it was a real gross violation of privacy, was that it was posting all this stuff about you. So in two thousand nine probably took more time than you would expect. September twenty one, two thousand nine, Facebook shuts down Beacon. Yes, now check this out. Just some January two thine, Facebook gets to a hundred fifty million active users, February hundred seventy million active users.

And if you like that, you can now click the like button because that's when that showed up April two million. Yeah, which is which is funny because that means it March slowed things down. Yes, and when it went up twenty five million from January to February and then up million

from February to April. They'll catch up because in July they got two million, in September three million, in December three fifty million, which means they started the year at one fifty million and ended in three fifty million, So they more than doubled over the course of twelve months, and that was pretty incredible, especially when you consider how large it was already in August two thousand nine, that's

when they um when Facebook purchased acquired a friend feed. Yes, uh, and then you started to see some of friend feeds kind of functionality implemented in the Facebook UI. Yes. So yeah, friend feed goes by by and becomes one with Facebook. I remember a lot of people being a not a lot of people, well yes, but I remember there were people who were upset, which kind of interested because canceled

their friend feed accounts. But then friend feed wasn't that huge, but the people who were using it were upset are some passionate users. So then h February you get up to over four million, and then by July you get over to over five million active users. And in August they launch Places, which is a yet another location based service which we've seen throughout the Internet in various applications, and you can check in and you can check other

people in, which that was a problem for a while too. Uh. Facebook had again had to tweak some privacy settings because the idea was that you could check people into places that you were at, and who's to say that you were to be honest about that. You know, maybe maybe I'm the kind of guy who wants to go to some sort of seed joint and uh, and I don't mind that I'm there, and I check in, and I'm like, I don't care if people know that I'm in, you know,

this this biker bar. Then uh, which, by the way, I actually to go to biker bar, so hey, there's that. But then I think, hey, you know what would be funny. Chris is totally not the kind of guy who would go to this biker bar, but I'm gonna check him in anyway, and then everyone's gonna see that Chris is at a biker bar even though he's actually at home with his family. Yeah. I could have done that. Um, they've since tweaked that, so it's not like that anymore.

But uh, yeah, that was what are you thinking? You kind of have some sort of verification process so that the person who's being checked in can say, dude, I am totally not there, or dude, I totally don't want people to know I'm there. What if I'm at the person who's not my sweetheart giving her this amethyst necklace I bought. Do you know how much trouble I got in when I bought the necklace? I am going to

remove the soapbox from this room. Um so Yes, And by July eleven, the year in which we are recording this,

they reached seven hundred fifty million users. Yeah. Also in twenty eleven, that's when they launched the timeline feature, which um arranges your your profile page, arranges your wall in a interactive time line, with the most recent posts to your wall being at the top and the oldest ones being at the bottom, with with a certain ones called out based upon mostly how many people liked or commented

on that particular status update. So you might have one month where you updated your Facebook page a lot, but you're not going to see every single one of those entries necessarily represented in your timeline. It will just be the ones that got the most response. Uh. And because Facebook says, well, the algorithm guesses that those have to be the most important ones because they had the most activity. So then you look at your Facebook profile page now

and it's a reverse timeline. Not everyone has implemented that. I've noticed because that's some of my friends have yet to activate that feature. I activated it during the developer phase to see what it was all about, and I actually kind of think it's neat. It definitely does post some privacy issues, but you have to remember that everything that shows up in that timeline is stuff you have

chosen to share on Facebook. It's not like Facebook is graping data about you and inserting it into the timeline. It's just putting the stuff you've already inserted into the the system, uh, and putting it into the timeline itself. So if you're careful about what you and put in Facebook, then you shouldn't have any nasty surprises there. And you can tweak that too. You can change the setting so

that not everyone can see it. Facebook also ended up implementing a lot of changes that seemed to um bear some resemblance to another social network that launched in Yeah, Google Plus. You know Google Plus? Head this I think Yeah. Facebook ended up doing a lot of making a lot of changes that some people have said was a direct response to Google Plus, including allowing you to subscribe to someone without being their friend. So that you would see public updates, kind of like you do on Google Plus

or on Twitter. Also, they created lists that made it easier to filter people out so that you can publish updates to specific groups in a very stream line fashion. You could already do that for a while, but it wasn't the easiest thing in the world to do. You kind of had to know the system pretty well to be able to to post to the specific group of people you wanted to. Now it's a little bit more intuitive. They also included the the little uh was it called

like the little timeline kicker thing? The name of it as escape ticker, the ticker timeline kicker. There you go, the ticker, the ticker on the side the right rail where you can see the the live updates that are going on amongst your friends, which may or may not

have anything at all to do with you. That can sometimes get a little irritating because you can sometimes see that your friend or your friend is commenting on someone else's page and you don't know that other persons, so you're like, why do I care about that somebody's going to post this on our Facebook feed and go kind of annoying. Well, again, you can change the settings on your Facebook profile so that the the amount of information

that will pop up in someone else's ticker is very limited. Now. Yeah, but if you don't know that, then that means that pretty much everything everyone interacts with is going to be popping up on tickers of all your friends. That gets really pretty irritating. So anyway, that kind of brings us up to speed. Now, there's lots of other stuff that's going on with Facebook. It's still not a public company. It's still a private company. There's a lot of you know,

there's always conjecture about when it will go public if ever. Yep, there used to be conjecture about who would buy them. It's more of a conjecture about who who will they buy. Yeah, because Facebook has purchased, has acquired several companies over it's in its past, so it's um and you know, we've seen it partner with other companies like Spotify. We haven't

really seen full integration of Spotify. We've seen it integrated so that you can see what people are listening to if they have their settings uh set to public for their Spotify accounts. And of course in the United States anyway, you now have to log in to Spotify through Facebook if you were to create a new account. So that's irritated some people who said I wanted to use Spotify, but I don't want to use Facebook, and now you're

forcing me to do that. So um, yeah, there's still some controversy there, and I'm sure there will continue to be controversy, especially since Zuckerberg himself has on past occasions made comments that essentially say he believes privacy is a thing of the past and that people who make a fuss over um features that violate privacy are really kind of out of date, like that's it's no privacy. Since

privacy doesn't matter, then these complaints don't really matter. Although he'll still go and fine, if it will be it will make it be quiet. I'll stop violating a privacy so rampantly, or at least so so visibly. Um I am out of date? Yeah, yeah, no, I'm right there with you, Pillett. I personally think that some sense of privacy should be maintained. It doesn't necessarily mean that you shouldn't have any uh any presence online, but I don't think that we should just um feel compelled to share

everything about us all the time. So it's too easy for someone to take advantage of you that way. I mean, we've the both of the guys in this room have had bitter experience of folks taking advantage of stuff and or you know, just unscrupulous people being unscrupulous and you don't want to give them more material to work with. So anyway, that's the story of Facebook. We're gonna wrap this up so it doesn't become the longest episode ever.

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