Mark Zuckerberg: Building the Facebook Empire

Mark Zuckerberg was a Harvard freshman with a knack for computer programming, less than a decade later he's the powerful, baby-faced billionaire who rubs shoulders with the president. My name is Barack Obama and I'm the guy they

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ed to wear a jacket. And I think most people still haven't digested the scale of Facebook or how quickly it's grown. The goal is obviously to reach ubiquity. I mean, Mark Zuckerberg wants everyone to be on this service. He transformed a bedroom project into the largest on the Internet. Global Village, the site now has over 900 million users, it cannot be understated how motivated Mark Zuckerberg really is.

Zuckerberg is as visionary as Steve Jobs, he is going to prove as influential as Bill Gates, but despite all that success, Zuckerberg has faced bitter battles and lawsuits. about Facebook Origins, one wanted to control his own thing and two, if he was going to go against someone he was going to crush, we spent 3 months working with Mark and they basically let us know that we were all surprised, we had no idea that you knew that was working on a competing product, has waged an all-out war against its biggest competitors Facebook and Google, the relationship is pretty simple, they just don't like each other and Zuckerberg has been criticized for pushing the boundaries of user privacy, users have less control over private information you don't You don't fully know how your information is shared.

He's not just dealing with a piece of technology. He's dealing with people and their behavior and, in many ways, he's doing it on the fly. They have amassed this huge database of information about us because we trust them. So the question is should we continue to trust them? I think the goal we set out with was not to create a community, but rather something of a mirror of the actual community that existed in real life. Mark Zuckerberg, we think we know him because We've seen his life unfold in the Oscar-winning film, The Social Network, the portrayal was ruthless, super-geek, intense, murderous, brilliant and socially crippled.

I don't understand what part, but it was accurate. He has always had friends. You know he's a pretty sociable guy. I think last time I checked 879 friends on Facebook, this is the real Mark Zuckerberg in rarely seen footage filmed at Facebook's first corporate headquarters by young filmmakers in 2005. What are we celebrating? We have 3 million users 3 million users and how long has Facebook been? around uh not that long a little over a year a little over a year F yes, while Zuckerberg goes beyond user privacy, he opted out of this program in 2004 at the age of 19 he created Facebook today he is 28 years The CEO has accumulated a net worth estimated at $15.5 billion.

Mark's mission from the beginning was to connect people and he clearly built on this theory that if the world was more connected it would be a better place, but there are a lot of surprises when you really dig deeper. Deep into Facebook's history, the biggest surprise is Mark Zucker's quirky, tenacious personality, and you already know the depth of his convictions and the consistency of him. Born in 1984, he grew up in the Hudson River town of Dobs Ferry, a northern bedroom community. from New York City, David Kirkpatrick spent two years researching a book about Zuckerberg and Facebook called The Facebook Effect.

He comes from an incredibly supportive family in which he is the only male child and has three sisters, so he was kind of like a Prince and actually, I think. His parents called him prince and treated him accordingly, so he is a boy without any self-confidence problem, knowledgeable about computers from the beginning. Zuckerberg taught himself the complicated computer language C++ and by ninth grade had created a digital version of the board game Risk. Journalist José Antonio Vargas interviewed Zuckerberg for his profile in the New Yorker magazine. In fact, he created a thing called Zuck net, which is an internal instant messaging system for the family so that computers could talk to each other.

That's the kid he was when he became friends. Tired of his local high school, he decided to go to Exitor High School really because he just wanted more challenges. It was at the exclusive Exitor Academy where Zuckerberg and his friend Adam D'Angelo created a music website called Synapse with the intention of anticipating what your preferences might be and it was very, very popular even before Facebook started, it was turning down offers of Microsoft and others to buy Synapse for more than a million dollars, like a global technology version of an All-Star athlete, big companies wanted to recruit him.

Zuckerberg was unimpressed and opted to enter Harvard in 2002, where it wasn't long before he got into trouble. Zuckerberg hacked school computers to collect images of students. Nicholas Carlson is an associate editor at businessinsider.com. to say he's a bit of a troublemaker, he creates something called face mash in his first year at Harvard and it's kind of the hottest knot for the Harvard community and then you can get a whole list of Harvard students and which ones were the most attractive and rank them by attractiveness Ellen McGurt interviewed Zuckerberg for Fast Company magazine face Mash worked in a slightly gross way that made people angry, obviously people felt mocked or exposed and it was one of the first big experiences Mark had with the privacy problems of the masses Under pressure Zuckerberg closed the site the Harvard board of administration accused him of violating security, violating copyright and violating individual privacy, but by then the great success was a sensation on campus.

Zuckerberg had seen his future at the same time he climbed the

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. This Naughty Web Tool created a Naughty Web Tool that was very popular. I imagine he spent a couple of sleepless nights worrying about how bad this was going to be. He was relieved when it was all over, but he was also incredibly curious to know what. then you could do this, if you're a genius with genius friends sitting in a dorm room, suddenly the world seems like one big open happy place, if you can get into that database at the time when the technological landscape was changing dramatically.

Brad Stone is a senior writer at Bloomberg Business Week The internet was really a very different world in 2004 frer it really shows that a social network needs to have technical skills the site goes down all the time it's not reliable Myspace plus it's full of ads it's very distracting it also starts to have technical instability at Harvard Zuckerberg met his classmate and future business partner Eduardo Savin the author Ben Mesich is one of the few who interviewed Savin about the early days of Facebook Eduardo met Mark Zuckerberg at an underground Jewish fraternity the scene underground at Harvard you know These weren't really fun events, they were weird little social settings, really bad parties, mostly all guys, so Eduardo and Mark met in this scene, um, and became friends pretty quickly because they both They were a kind of Outsiders face.

Mash made Zuckerberg take notice of the insiders. seniors who built a social networking site called Harvard Connection, Olympic rowers, and twins Cameron and Tyler Winlos with their partner Divan Narendra, Harvard Connection was an idea I came up with when I was a junior in college, a late 2002, the team. They had been

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the site for almost a year. Two of their original programmers had moved on and were in desperate need of a new partner. The three of us are not computer programmers by trade or practice. We did need a real programmer to write the strict lines. of the code and we thought Mark was that guy, the trio approached Zuckerberg, he was excited, excited, uh and clearly his eyes were lighting up.

What happened next sparked a furious battle over how Facebook was actually created. The details unfold in email exchanges between Zuckerberg and the Harvard Connection team. At first, Zuckerberg seemed anxious. I read all the material you sent and it looks like it shouldn't take long to implement so we can talk about it after I have all the basic features tomorrow night and then Zuckerberg started Delaying the project on December 4th. Sorry, I wasn't available tonight. I just received three of your missed calls. I was working on an issue set on December 10th. The week has been pretty busy so far, so I haven't had a chance to work on the project much. site or even really thinking about it Zuckerberg was stalling, but since he was busy working on a similar social networking site based on the Harvard student directory called Facebook, he and Savin partnered to finance it, Mark approached him and said : You know, you put up $1,000 and We're launching this site and you know, there were no contracts, it was really just two kids in a bedroom, but that's where it started.

Writer Nicholas Carlson interviewed more than a dozen people involved in Facebook's founding and found instant messages recovered from Zuckerberg's computer, which he said Zuckerberg sent to Savin. According to Business Insider, the IM suggests Zuckerberg was deliberately misleading users. Winlos twins, says things like look at this site I'm working on the Harvard connection haha, they made a mistake and asked me to do it. them because I'm working on my own Facebook, we were always under the impression that Mark was working on Harvard Connection.com, there was never any indication from him that he couldn't do the job, didn't want to do the job, or was working on something identical on the side called Facebook when he met with the Wink brothers the last time he saw he should probably tell them that he had been working on a competing product, he kind of chatted about it with friends, but in the end he said: you know what I'm going to do.

I'm going to delete them. I'm going to delete them on February 4, 2004, just as he was expected to complete the work on his site. Zuckerberg and his friends launched Facebook, the Wink brothers and Narendra found out about this the same way almost everyone else at Harvard found out about it, completely surprising us. We definitely didn't expect Mark to want to have control over his own project. He saw that they were onto something interesting. bar Brothers, but he saw that he could do something cooler, so he wanted to control his thing and two, if he was going to go against someone, he would crush them and that's what he did.

Mark Zuckerberg's new Harvard-based social networking site, Facebook was mired in controversy from the beginning just days after he launched it in February 2004, the Winlos Twins and Divia Nendra sent him a cease and desist letter. In short, our complaint against Mark Zuckerberg is fraud, unjust enrichment and breach of contract. Zuckerberg responded with a letter denying any wrongdoing, claiming that his site was a separate company and did not use the same code. The Twins and Narendra would later appeal. a $65 million settlement with Facebook that they lost in federal court, but that deal could now be worth $200 million, but none of the vicious legal disputes stopped Facebook's incredible momentum.

At the time, my roommates were like, “You know, this is cool.” I bet it would work at other schools, so we launched it at Columbia, Yale, and Stanford, and a couple. of weeks, each of those three schools also had thousands of users who like it, okay, this is pretty cool, let's go all out and see how many schools we can launch this as quickly as possible right now, um. They started meeting with venture capitalists and larger advertisers and this is all Eduardo's work. They got a deal pretty early with Visa and they had an agreement with American Express.

They had several advertisers that came and went. Recreation companies began to take interest and began to make quite a good income from the music industry. Shawn Parker, who had his own connection to the music business, on a trip to New York, Zuckerberg and his partner Eduardo Savin had dinner with the 24-year-old. former co-founder of Napster, a seasoned entrepreneur and a truly creative individual, an extraordinarily interesting person who had worked his way up a network in the valley that is to die for, particularly at that time for Zuckerberg, Parker was a hero and a role. Fellow model Savin disagreed.

Eduardo didn't have a good opinion of Shawn from the beginning. He thought Shawn was a snake oil salesman. That they didn't need Shawn. That Shawn talked a lot but he lived out of a duffel bag. and had been kicked out of two companies in the summer of 2004, with Savin remaining on the East Coast. Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard and we came to Palo Alto for the summer just to hang out because Pal Alto is kind of this mythical place where you know all the things. The startups came from and were preparing to launch in another 150 schools as the year began.

One of the things that Mark did and that he was very smart about going to Paloalto was to enter the Petri dish of entrepreneurship,particularly for new technologies. Zuckerberg and his friends moved away. in a large house with a pool and reconnected with Shawn Parker, who later became Zuckerberg's roommate. He was the supervising adult. He's the guy who showed them how things are done in Silicon Valley. He is the one who showed them how to meet investors. negotiate with them who to hire Mark has told me stories about all the kids who gather late at night around the dining room tables and eat chicken McNuggets and cereal and, uh, party.

Sean Parker is taking them to different types of Silicon. Valley hot spots and meanwhile the website is growing astronomically fast, I mean there are a million members in the party in December of that year, during this time Parker gave Zuckerberg some astute advice that he took to heart , he kind of looked at him and said, "You have to be the founder of this and you need to be the CEO forever, you know you can't change this thing." This happened to the investors and Mark can negotiate a series of increasingly important investment deals that make Two things: one allow him enough operating cash to hire some of the smartest engineers in the business and two help him retain majority control of the company, but tensions began to rise with Zuckerberg's original partner, Eduardo Savin. , who remained on the East Coast, Eduardo felt that you know he was the business director of the company and he wasn't being treated that way anymore You know Mark and Shawn were having meetings all over California. with the venture capitalist um and they were ignoring Eduardo, he retaliated Eduardo froze the bank accounts to try to get Mark's attention and Mark and Shawn started to find a way to build the company without Eduardo Zuckerberg responding and freezing Savin , Eduardo was removed from the Mast head company and essentially became a non-entity, became a non-person, um, got kicked out and got very upset.

Facebook had a million active users on college campuses across the country and a lot of money was starting to flow to Shawn. Parker, Facebook's new president, introduced Zuckerberg to Silicon Valley angel investor Peter Teal, who invested $500,000 in the company and then, in the spring of 2005, venture capital firm Excel Partners offered Zuckerberg 12 .7 million for an 11% stake in the company and he didn't do it. asking for a lot of control by walking away from that investment Mark controlled three of the five seats on the board of directors, which is a strange and unprecedented situation for one individual to have absolute and effectively dictatorial control over the layout and direction of an increasingly overnight giant, the investment in Excel gave it Facebook gained a $100 million valuation as Facebook's public profile grew, so did Zuckerberg's control this time.

Shawn Parker was overtaken in August 2005. Parker was arrested on suspicion of cocaine possession, although he was not formally charged with any crime and immediately released, leading to his abrupt resignation as President of Facebook, he was the main face outside the company and it felt like someone who was under some kind of drug cloud wasn't the right guy to be the public face of Facebook, so Mark reluctantly agreed that he should leave Facebook. was growing at a re

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able rate, and Zuckerberg moved the company from his large house with a pool to a larger, more conventional space in downtown Palo Alto, but the college atmosphere remained the same.

One of the things I focus on at Facebook is making I'm sure the culture is very friendly, you know, and that people come together in terms of managing this whole process. Nothing, you know, like me. I have no idea what I'm doing. You know, even the interviews with the employees were different. Chris Kelly was brought in to the new chief privacy officer position to deal with Facebook's increasingly contentious privacy issues at a time when the entire company had only a couple dozen employees when I first met Mark, We went up to the roof, went out the window and did our interview.

On the roof of what was then a world and it was clear that she was young, but she had a very sophisticated understanding of what had happened so far and where she wanted to take the company. She was determined to keep Facebook's unusual creative culture alive throughout. time. Late night hackathons were one way to do it. We have these hackathons in the company right where basically everyone gets together and just hacks something and builds something all night and the only rule is that you're not allowed to work on in a hackathon what do you work on the rest of the time so that people work In crazy stuff, hackathons were one of the most creative approaches you can imagine in a company, imagining these amazing talented engineers getting together for a night and saying let's stay up all night and we're just going to code and we're going to pick a project. and we're going to finish it that night it's cool, do it, we'll prototype it and there will be a prototype war and seeing who wins can be a contentious environment, man, they couldn't do it no, I don't agree, that's stupid, we had a discussion from Mark's point of view, this is where good ideas come quickly and efficiently.

The good idea is that they flowed. Zuckerberg then made a change that would give Facebook a sudden and dramatic boost, allowing people to identify or tag themselves and their friends in photos. It was a huge change that led to a massive new use. of Facebook and Photos very quickly became by far the most used part of Facebook and became the biggest driver of its growth. Growth continued at One Direction, according to Facebook's internal tracking, their user base had skyrocketed to 5.5 million users in less than 2 years. and media giants were knocking on the door in 2006. Yahoo enticed the 22-year-old Zuckerberg with an extraordinary offer: an even more extraordinary $1 billion buyout.

Zuckerberg turned it down now, if you're a parent of someone Mark's age, you're looking at Yahoo's decision and thinking why didn't they take that money, it was never about money, if it was it would have just dried up, we just feel like doing that and following that path would not help us build Facebook as we thought. it could be in 2006 Mark Zuckerberg turned down a billion dollar offer from Yahoo when MTV pushed the anti even further Michael J. Wolf was CEO of MTV networks Mark took me for a walk around Palo Alto and showed me his apartment and Then we sat down for lunch and I told him that we would be willing to pay up to a billion and a half dollars to buy Facebook outright.

His response was: I think it's worth a lot more and besides, you've already seen my apartment, I don't really need that kind of money. At the same time, I may never have an idea as good as this one, so I'm not that interested in selling, there were internal conflicts around it, there's no doubt that there were a lot of people who wanted to sell, in the end, you know, Mark decided to reject it. the deals that Zuckerberg wasn't ready to sell because he had some ideas that he thought would make Facebook even more popular. One of them was called Newsfeed, a kind of real-time wire service for updates on what users were doing.

Newsfeed is what everyone is doing at that point or what they are publishing, what they are linking to the world they live in, which is really what a newspaper is right, it is a living newspaper of the people around you, but many users of Facebook thought that this newspaper sent too much information and violated their privacy 750,000 of them launched an online protest to say that at first it was unpopular is an endatic euphemism they were under siege in the office they could not leave they were surrounded by news trucks almost 10% of our user base at the time joined the students against the Facebook newsfeed group.

Zuckerberg was forced to apologize. He wrote his apology note himself. It was probably a good learning experience when Facebook changed some of the privacy controls. It was an excessive step. I think he takes them seriously, but I think he is willing to continue going above and beyond in order to make a product that he wants to make, the apology was not a surrender. Zuckerberg was sure that users would get used to this new level of sharing and he turned out to be right after changing the news feed captions. became one of the most popular elements of the Facebook experience.

It just happened that the first time I met Mark was 2 days after that happened and I can tell you that even though his members were at Revolt open, he wasn't the least bit nervous. He had complete confidence that everything was going to turn out well. Zuckerberg decided it was time to take Facebook beyond his college routines and introduce it to the general public. The response was surprising: membership doubled, reaching 12 million in 2006. Zuckerberg radically altered the Facebook experience. Again, when the 23-year-old CEO first invited programmers from around the world to develop applications for Facebook, it was another turning point in expanding Facebook from an insular world of information to a platform and it was like the gold rush brought you knew open this wonderful platform and generate income for all kinds of developers with all kinds of ideas, from video sharing to games, things that blink, things that turned into dancers and hippos and all kinds of wonderful and fun things, the platform companies or The operating system. companies always do the best, I mean, think about Microsoft, you know it had this ubiquitous Windows platform and all these other companies wrote programs for Windows, you know, Facebook is really trying to build itself on that model and in 2007, Microsoft itself came in on the scene this time with a deal Zuckerberg couldn't refuse and for the first time the world got a glimpse of what Facebook could really be worth when people were finally getting used to the idea that anyone would pay a billion dollars for Facebook.

Microsoft comes and pays 250 dollars. million for 1.6% of the company, it was scandalous, he valued the company at 15 billion dollars, this took Facebook from being something that a lot of people use to something that everyone was talking about the 15 thousand company billion dollars, but for a $15 billion company, Facebook was only making a meager $30 million profit to remedy Zuckerberg's announcement of a radical new advertising system in the fall of 2007, part of which allowed businesses to create their own Facebook pages and advertise through social ads. Luk ker covers social media and owns shares in Facebook social media. Facebook ads are ads that say your friends Meg and Ryan like Virgin America, and it's not surprising that when you see that your friends like a product, you're likely to click on that ad, so Social ads have been very successful. on Facebook, uh, pretty much from the beginning, but another part of Facebook's new advertising plan, Beacon, gave users a lot more of what they wanted and they let Zuckerberg know it.

Zuckerberg made a lot of mistakes. The next mistake, which was really big, was Beacon. a third party e-commerce site and you buy something and unless you tell it not to very quickly, it will come back and tell all your friends that you just bought a diamond and an engagement ring and obviously you know that that kind of secret revelation can cause a lot of problems there was the big battle cry that Facebook ruined Christmas because suddenly everyone's purchases were broadcast to their entire network Zuckerberg actually tried to defend him for a while, it took him a while to realize he was wrong which was on December 5, 2007.

Zuckerberg apologized again that he had overstepped his bounds once again, but as with previous mistakes, it wouldn't really matter. Facebook was too popular and it wasn't long before Zuckerberg loosened the network's privacy controls once again, more than four years after he co-founded Facebook Zuckerberg still seemed uncomfortable in front of the public Spotlight what's your next thing what are you going to do? Let them buy you no, none of these rumors are true, you know? Facebook would go public instead, Zuckerberg received money from a new investor, Yuri Milner, the CEO of Russian digital Internet investment firm Sky Technologies, offered a $200 million deal for just 1.9% of the company.

Deals of that size are never easy, there is a lot to recover and going forward this deal was about the vision that we shared how big this company can be, everything else was kind of secondary. Milner's investment allowed Facebook to continue expanding and kept the company's development firmly in the hands of its founder. Zuckerberg knew that pushing Facebook advertising even further was the key to continued growth for years. Zuckerberg believed Facebook was in a unique position todayNowadays, even with the most advanced advertising systems out there, they only have estimates of what someone's gender might be or what their age might be or what they might be. you might be interested, but at Facebook we know exactly what gender someone is and exactly how old they are and exactly what they are interested in Jeremy Smith is the chief strategy officer of Second Market, a company that trades stocks and private companies that cannot yet be listed on the market public What makes Facebook so desirable from the perspective of advertisers is that they are able to accumulate information about their users like no one else;

The funny thing is that users don't really see it as data, it's themselves, it's their information, it's their lives that they're putting out there, but as far as advertisers are concerned, it's the Holy Grail of data that pushes the boundaries. of that Holy Grail of data that was about to get Zuckerberg in trouble again. In December 2009, he revamped Facebook's privacy settings. so, 350 50 million users, unless users individually restored their settings, information that was previously private was now available to everyone on the Internet, many people simply took that default and somewhat inadvertently allowed much of of his information became public, and many privacy advocates believe he didn't explain or disclose it enough.

A storm of complaints from users and consumer groups forced Zuckerberg to back down again over concerns in Congress. We are here today to urge Facebook creator and CEO Mark Zuckerberg to review this new policy as soon as possible. We think Facebook should reverse its policy and start exploring guidelines to let users know in advance what is happening, adding fuel to the fire was the appearance of even more instant messages. Business Insider published messages that they said showed a friend asking then-college AED Zuckerberg why people shared their emails with Zuckerberg's response was brusque and profane, you know?

I mean, I asked him point-blank about it and he was very embarrassed by the fact that he had sent these IMS. Less than a month later, he was put on the spot in a memorably awkward moment. interview at everything digitalconference do you feel like you are violating people's privacy? you know there were real learning points and turning points along the way in terms of um in terms of building things if I had known what I knew now then I hope I didn't make those mistakes, but I can't go back and change the past. I can only do what we believe is right in the future.

You know someone who has ever doubted what Facebook is all about or wants to question its integrity. I mean, they can do it. they can, they can continue to point out that right to that example that I can't trust that guy who will be our control as long as he's still CEO, you know, and in charge of that company. to say "okay, you're not that guy," show us you're not that guy Chris Huf Noogle, the director of privacy programs at the University of California Berkeley, believes Mark Zuckerberg is pushing the boundaries of privacy in the Most situations where a company does something that is unpopular, they have a coup, they lose the ability to do something, but in the case of Facebook we have something called I call coup for W, where they take two steps forward, there is some kind of public reaction and they just take a little step back and so on.

Over time, they have been able to open more and more profiles. Mark doesn't think you should be a different person at work than you are at the bowling alley, in bed at school. You know, he basically thinks you have to be consistent in all of these environments. and that is a very radical view for many older people. By the time Mark Zuckerberg turned 25 in 2009, he had accumulated so much notoriety, wealth and power that author Ben Mesich had written a book about him and the founding of Facebook. This story started for me in I received an email out of the blue on my website and Eduardo SA was angry.

He wanted to tell his story. He had co-founded Facebook with Mark Zuckerberg and later said he had been kicked out of the company and felt betrayed. and wanted to talk Savin talked to mesri for 6 months about a lawsuit he filed against his former Harvard classmate for diluting savin's stake in the company according to mesri Facebook found out Eduardo was talking to him and they essentially settled with Eduardo, no one he knows it for sure. what happened but what I heard is that he got 5% of Facebook and had to sign an agreement that said he would never talk to Ben mesri again but mesri already had enough material for his book my proposal had been leaked on the Aon sorin website saw it, um, Scott Ruden saw it, so Sorin immediately signed on to write the script and everything happened very quickly from there, the pre-release publicity surrounding the film also seemed to force Zuckerberg to go on a PR offensive. .

Zuckerberg, previously press shy, suddenly became everywhere, if you build something GR, that's what people care about when people don't care what someone says about you in a movie. He gave Oprah a tour of her home in 2010 and announced on her show a $100 million donation to Newark public schools. New Jersey $100 million yo yo yo yo The social network launched widely on October 1, 2010. People want to go online and see their friends, so why not create a website that offers photos of those friends, profiles of them talking about taking all the time? college social experience and putting it online Zuckerberg complained about his on-screen portrayal as a ruthless, friendless, socially challenged power geek, said there were factual errors in the script, framed it as if the only reason to create Facebook and build something out because I wanted to get girls or I wanted to get into some kind of social institution um and I mean the reality for people who know me is that I've actually been dating the same girls since before I started Facebook, I just don't They can understand the idea that someone might build something because they like building things, although he initially said he wouldn't watch the movie, Zuckerberg ended up bringing his entire staff, he even appeared on Saturday Night Live, do you ever end up watching the movie.

Social network yeah, I did great, oh, oh, thank you, uh and uh, what did you find interesting? Thank you to Hollywood Farm Press for this extraordinary honor. The social network won a Golden Globe Award for Best Drama Film, as well as three Academy Awards - first Tunisia, now Egypt, what's next? - but for a growing number of people around the world, Facebook was not just a Hollywood movie, but it was affecting real life. In late 2010, protesters began taking to the streets in Tunisia and later Egypt to protest against their repression. governments at the time More than 70% of Facebook's more than 500 million users lived outside the United States in Egypt a flashpoint of anger was a case of police brutality at the center of the protest was a Google employee who ran a Facebook page Gham was the administrator in Egypt of a page that was a memorial to this guy who had been beaten, tortured and murdered by the secret police and that group became very large, many hundreds of thousands of members during the Leading up to the revolt against Mubarak, Facebook accelerated people's ability to express their discontent, which clearly accelerated the process of these revolts.

The governments of Tunisia and Egypt fell. Protesters expressed their gratitude to Facebook. In the streets, one named his newlywed daughter. born Facebook and while gim sang on social media sites Praise on CNN I want to meet Mark Zuk someday and thank him. I am speaking on behalf of Egypt. This revolution began on Facebook when hundreds of thousands of Egyptians began contributing content. You know, we would post a video on Facebook. being shared by 50,000 people in their worlds uh in a few hours Facebook itself was very quick to try to distance itself from that political activity. I mean, obviously they supported it, but they don't really want to be seen as a tool of change because obviously Facebook wants to be active in regimes like China, they don't necessarily want to be seen as a tool of insurgency.

Zuckerberg has taken on a personal goal that could help him with his mission to connect the world. He says that he spends an hour a day studying. Chinese that could potentially help you gain a billion new friends. It is the largest and fastest growing Internet market in the world. There are hundreds of millions of users and your mission is incomplete if you are not in China. Mark Zuckerberg's power has never been greater and once again. Speculation grew that he would take his company public despite enormous pressure. Zuckerberg has hesitated to pull the trigger and get paid in 100 years.

In 200 years, what will be more important, the right to money or the fact that it had this kind of impact? the fact that he, you know, ran and developed and helped evolve this which is more than just a technology site and it's more than just a website and I think that's why it's never been about money and it never will be. has been about status when companies go public. It's a tremendous strain on the administration, and in fact, on top of all that, when you make it public, you open yourself up to even more government scrutiny, aware of that scrutiny.

Facebook has expanded its presence in Washington with a team that includes several former White House AIDS and influential political officials on Capitol Hill, political official after political official, will tell you if you are absent from the debate. um you're probably the person that gets eliminated and therefore your presence in that debate, especially when you know Google and Yahoo and Microsoft and a number of other very big players are spending a lot on lobbying. It's a mistake. Today, several Facebook founders, including Mark's friends and classmates, have left the company to start new companies on their own. They have been dubbed the Facebook mafia, but much of Silicon Valley's talent is on the way, top programmers are leaving companies like Google to be part of Zuckerberg's push, and Facebook and Google, the two Internet giants, are competing in other ways.

Ways Ryan Single is a staff writer at Wired Magazine The relationship between Facebook and Google is pretty simple, they just don't like each other, they're actually, I mean, they're competing cultures, you know, Facebook was a little young and brash and Google is like you know an algorithm company like these, they are guys who like any problem. There has to be a way they can write a little algorithm that will fix it. It's clear that Google missed the rise of social media and Eric Schmidt admitted to being blindsided by Facebook and social media. They have tried. A number of more spectacular things were social media that just didn't work.

Then in May 2011, Facebook was embarrassed when it was revealed that they had launched a secret attack on Google. Facebook is doing damage control after Revelations hired a PR. company to plant negative stories about Google Facebook publicly claimed it was not a smear campaign, but the exchange revealed how cutthroat the competition has become. The whole Burston Marcel scandal was really just a direct expression of the animosity that has arisen not only between these two companies, but almost the Shakespearean personal drama that is unfolding between Google and Facebook, which frankly has many former Google executives who would like nothing more than to supplant their old company.

You can't underestimate how motivated Mark Zuckerberg really is, he says. His mission is, you know, to make the world more open in a better place. His mission is also to be number one, right? He wants to be, you know, inscribed in granite above Bill Gates. I think he is on the right track, like Gates, another Zuckerberg who dropped out of Harvard. He is a fierce competitor, he quickly moved on to Vanquish Rivals Google and Twitter with a surprise acquisition in April 2012. Instagram exits the market in an instant. Facebook likes the photo-sharing app so much that it's paying $1 billion for it in cash and stock ahead of its initial public offering. but the app is free and has little known income.

Still, Facebook may need Instagram more than Instagram needs money. Instagram has become a photo-sharing competitor and its own social network; It was considered a radical and defensive movement. Facebook can't take any chances that any other photo-oriented social network could actually gain traction, compared to theirs, and I think there's a precautionary quality to this. I also think it's almost certain that Google was interested and probably forced Facebook to act now, a month later, Facebook finally went public. In the largest IPO on record for an Internet company making Mark Zuckerberg a billionaire, this is an incredible moment in thethat the CEO in the hoodie and sneakers maintains tight control of his company with 57% of shareholder voting rights.

Facebook has literally changed the world we live in. I moved from the country to the Village, to the city, to Facebook. It's also just getting started. I think it's going to get bigger and bigger for a place that can go from the bedroom to a place where you know my 80's. My one year old mother, my chiropractor and my third grade class meet at the site and we all have something to talk about. speaking, it is an achievement. Zuckerberg is as visionary as Steve Jobs, he is going to be as influential as Bill Gates, but he is not dealing with a piece of Gadget, he is not dealing with some program, he is dealing with our lives, he is dealing with our identities, that's why I think That we're all going to have to keep it in check in the way we make decisions at Facebook.

Not optimizing, you know what's going to happen next year, but what will prepare us to really be in this world where every product experience you have is social and everything is powered by Facebook.