In the past 15 years, Facebook's development has far exceeded anyone's expectations-including Zuckerberg.
Editor's note: Facebook is 15 years old. After 15 years of development, Facebook has grown from a social networking site for college students to a behemoth. What has Facebook experienced in this process? Recently, "Wired" magazine published an article that extracted 15 key moments in the development of Facebook. It is these 15 moments that define the current Facebook. The author is ISSIE LAPOWSKY, the original title of the article "15 MOMENTS THAT DEFINED FACEBOOK'S FIRST 15 YEARS", compiled by 36 krypton, hope to inspire you.
On February 4, 2004, when "Hey, hello!" appeared, 19-year-old Harvard sophomore Mark Zuckerberg and his roommates published their work on human nature TheFacebook.com. In their view at the time,
couldn't even think of gaining global domination. At least, they just put it on the human elite of Harvard University.
But in the past 15 years, Facebook's development has far exceeded anyone's expectations-including Zuckerberg.
In June 2004, Wired magazine published its first article about it, comparing it with Friendster and some other products.
Zuckerberg said, "I hope a few people at Harvard will tell their friends, but I didn't expect it to become this all-encompassing directory." At that time, the success of
meant that there were 250,000 users on the platform. In the past fifteen years, Facebook has added four zeros to this number, from a university dating site to the most powerful communication engine in the world.
For better or worse, Zuckerberg's creation has forever changed the connection between people, how companies make money, how politicians are in power, and how information flows between communities and cultures.
Here, grannies share photos of their grandchildren, and state-backed "trolls" launched cyber warfare against other countries.
This is how volunteers raise funds for hurricane victims and how haters gather followers to kill people.
How did this happen? We reviewed 15 moments of Facebook over the past 15 years. These 15 moments made it what it is today and showed what it will be like earlier than most people realize.
1, Winklevos brothers sued Facebook
In 2004, Harvard students Winklevoss brothers, Cameron and Taylor (Winklevoss), and Divya Narendra (Divya Narendra) founded When ConnectU sued Facebook for breach of contract, TheFacebook.com was only 7 months old.
In the Oscar-winning film "The Social Network" (The Social Network), the founder of ConnectU claimed that Zuckerberg had plagiarized their ideas and violated his verbal contract to develop a social network for Harvard students. The network was called HarvardConnection at the time.
A year ago, Zuckerberg released a website called FaceMash, which cloned a short-lived product Hot or Not. This website caused him trouble at Harvard.
because it used their photos without the students' permission, but it also attracted the attention of the founders of HarvardConnection, who asked Zuckerberg to help build their website. According to subsequent court documents and instant messaging messages,
did not know at the time that although Zuckerberg seemed to be working hard for HarvardConnection, he was also developing TheFacebook. After
was released on TheFacebook, the HarvardConnection team officially launched in SeptemberFiled a lawsuit and sent a letter to Zuckerberg asking him to shut down immediately.
finally this lawsuit ended in settlement.
However, the struggle with Winklevoss provides an early perspective on how Facebook will use skills, speed, and ultimately scale to replicate or defeat competitors.
2, News Feed release
In the beginning, Facebook was more or less just a directory of people's personal information. Killing time there means jumping from one friend’s display wall to another to see the latest news. The News Feed launched by
in September 2006 changed all of this forever, creating a centralized stream on the user's homepage where users can see updates from all their friends.
However, when Facebook turned on the News Feed switch, users were irritated.
Suddenly, all their actions on Facebook are visible to all their friends. In a blog post against Facebook, a user predictably wrote, “It’s almost impossible to leave your information to yourself now.” The shock brought by
News Feed provided Facebook with the first opportunity. Let it defend against allegations of infringement of user privacy. Things are not going well.
"Calm down. Take a deep breath. We heard it," Zuckerberg responded to this backlash in a less sympathetic Facebook post. "Everything you do is not broadcast; it is shared with those who care about what you do-your friends -"
A few days later, Zuckerberg apologized in an open letter, saying, "We Really screwed this up" and announced new control measures so that users can control the content in their News Feed.
"When we launched News Feed and mini-Feed, we tried to provide you with a series of information about your social world," he wrote. "On the contrary, we didn't explain well what the new features are, and worse, we didn't let you control them." This apology of
will become very familiar in the next few years.
But News Feed does more than just remind users of the privacy risks inherent in all these sharing.
It has also begun the process of integrating the world of information into a continuously rolling, personalized world that conforms to the interests and beliefs of each user.
News Feed seized control from the publisher and put it in the hands of Facebook's powerful algorithm.
3, began to promote the business to the brand, released Ads, Pages and Beacon
Zuckerberg launched the Facebook brand Ads and Pages in an event attended by hundreds of marketers in November 2007.
"In the past 100 years, the media has been selling to people," he said, "but now marketers will be part of the conversation."
is expanding by inviting brands to have their own Pages on Facebook and through advertising. With their Pages, Facebook not only created a very successful business model, but also promoted a new advertising model, a model that Google has already started.
Facebook does not provide advertisers with a general audience like TV and print ads, but gives them a way to use the user data collected by Facebook for a long time to find exactly who they want to reach.
On the same day in 2007, Facebook released another new product called Beacon, through which companies can share consumer purchase information with Facebook.
Then Facebook will immediately distribute this information to the user's friends. Only a year after News Feed triggered the protest, the protest broke out again.
Zuckerberg apologized again and promised to let users turn off Beacon.
"I am not proud of the way we handle this situation, I know we can do better," he wrote in a post.
Facebook finally solved the Beacon facingClass action lawsuit, and completely shut down this product in 2009.
4, hire Sheryl Sandberg (Sheryl Sandberg)
Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg.
In 2007, Zuckerberg met Sheryl Sandberg, then a Google executive, at a party in Silicon Valley. At the time, he was seeking help to turn his popular but unprofitable website into A legitimate business.
Sandberg used to be a senior staff member of the US Department of the Treasury. He joined Facebook in 2008 as the chief operating officer to develop the company’s fledgling advertising business into what it is today, and is responsible for handling its often unstable relationship with Washington. relationship.
5, launch Facebook Platform
Facebook has always insisted not to sell user data. But it did share this data with third parties. This decision can be traced back to the launch of the Facebook Platform in 2007, allowing developers to develop games and other applications integrated with Facebook. A year later,
launched Facebook Connect, which allows people to log in to other websites using Facebook usernames and passwords.
is not just a simple way to log in-it also allows you to see which of your Facebook friends are on these sites.
Over time, Platform and Connect have evolved into the current Graph API. The
Graph API was launched in 2010 to enable developers to obtain a large amount of data on Facebook users, including the user’s friends. This feature caused controversy many years later. When the
Graph API was released, Wired reported that “When Facebook said that it was just responding to our hope that our lives became more standardized, there was a disturbing suspicion that it was actually creating this situation, not Respond to this."
6. Launch of the Like button
When Facebook launched the Like button in 2009, the company created a new currency for the Internet.
It’s not enough to just share all aspects of our lives. The
Like button satisfies people’s continuing desire for recognition by turning each post into a popularity contest.
Like began to drive corporate decisions and became an informal polling method for politicians. They help the post spread like a virus.
They also gave birth to a new profession. Those big V who get a lot of Likes can make a living by selling products.
Facebook is not the first company to use this mechanism, but due to its large scale, the blue "thumbs up" has become ubiquitous.
It changes human beings on a deep psychological level. Whenever we receive another notification, it will give us sweet dopamine stimulation.
This will only encourage us to share more content. Ten years have passed, and it is difficult for us to remember a world without it.
7. The Federal Trade Commission’s investigation into Facebook’s privacy settings ended with a consent decree
After the Federal Trade Commission concluded its investigation into Facebook’s deceptive privacy practices, the company signed a consent order in 2011. In addition to this, Facebook promises not to misrepresent users' privacy and security settings, and obtain user consent before modifying these settings.
This is one of the few regulatory actions against this company in the United States.
Eight years later, the Federal Trade Commission is investigating whether Facebook has fulfilled its promise. The
scandal last year involving a political consulting company called "Cambridge Analytica" showed that until mid-2015, Facebook still allowed developers to access user friends’ data without the user’s explicit consent.
According to reports, the Federal Trade Commission is considering imposing a "record-setting fine" on Facebook for violating the agreement.
this will be FaFor the first time, cebook suffered major financial penalties due to privacy issues. This company has been plagued by privacy issues since its establishment.
For a company with a market value of more than $476 billion, even a record fine may be a small price.
8, Facebook and its business model are moving towards mobile development
Facebook's growth as other application platforms coincides with the rise of smart phones, which poses a challenge to the company.
As Zuckerberg said in a recent article, "Running a development platform is expensive, and we need to support it. When people use Facebook on their computers, we develop Show ads next to the app to support this platform."
But Facebook can’t do this on mobile phones. Therefore, around 2012, Zuckerberg considered whether to change the business model. With the company's IPO in May 2012, the pressure for growth is particularly high. According to a batch of sealed internal e-mails published late last year, a proposal was placed on the table: requiring developers to purchase advertisements to obtain user data. In fact, this means that Facebook will start selling user data, and this is something it has vowed not to do. In an email from
in October 2012, Zuckerberg summarized how such a process works:
Any other income you bring to us can be paid from you using Plaform (sic) Obtain a certain return from the cost. For most developers, this may completely cover the cost.
Facebook finally chose to oppose this approach. Instead, it doubled the number of mobile ads to help it tide over the difficulties.
Since 2012, this company has distributed sponsored advertisements on News Feed. Also in that year, Facebook launched a customized audience service, which allowed advertisers to more accurately target users.
Last quarter, mobile advertising accounted for 93% of Facebook advertising revenue. This decision point in Facebook's history represents a critical moment, both for the company and the people sharing information with it.
9, the acquisition of Instagram
This is the wisest $1 billion investment in Facebook history. When Zuckerberg snapped up this photo-sharing app in 2012, it was less than two years old. The
acquisition of Instagram not only put a potential competitor under the control of Facebook, but also helped the company win the support of a younger generation of users who are fleeing this "big blue application."
Today, Instagram has more than 1 billion users. In a recent earnings conference call, Facebook announced that the app’s "Stories" feature now has 500 million daily active users. The company
also integrated some of Instagram's most popular features, including Stories and photo filters, into Facebook's main application.
In 2018, Instagram's co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger left Instagram, reportedly because their autonomy is getting weaker.
Instagram may still only account for a small part of the company's total advertising revenue, but it accounts for an increasing proportion of new advertising revenue, which convinces analysts that Instagram is vital to Facebook's long-term growth.
10, launch of Internet.org
Zuckerberg launched the Internet.org project in 2013 to make it easier for developing countries to access the Internet and Facebook.
purpose? Depending on who you ask, it is either altruism or the desire to conquer the world. The
plan is to use drones to bring the Internet to people who are not connected, and to cooperate with mobile phone operators to allow people to access a small number of applications for free.
Zuckerberg described this effort optimistically: "Developing countries have huge obstacles in connecting and joining the knowledge economy," he wrote. "Internet.org brings together global partners and is committed to overcoming these challenges, including providing Internet access to those who cannot currently afford it."
But in dozens of countries, this project is being protested, saying it violates net neutrality The principle of making Facebook become the gatekeeper of what people can’t see on the Internet. They worry that this will create a "single centralized checkpoint for the free flow of information."
Facts have proved that these concerns are well-founded. In countries like the Philippines and Myanmar, Facebook launched the so-called Free Basics project, and Facebook has become synonymous with the Internet.
This has brought some unexpected consequences. In Myanmar, Facebook admits that it has contributed to the spread of conspiracy theories and a brutal and violent campaign against local Rohingya.
Facebook has closed the Free Basics project in some countries including Myanmar. But Facebook continues to have an impact on these places.
In the recent earnings conference call, Facebook said that the Philippines and Indonesia, the two countries that launched Free Basics, are one of its fastest-growing markets.
11, Facebook announced the change of privacy settings
In 2014, Facebook announced that its Graph API would no longer allow developers to access the data of user friends, and officially closed this feature in April 2015. The move by
triggered strong opposition from application developers, who said that they rely on this data, and a company called six43 is still fighting against Facebook over this change. This change of
is crucial to Facebook.
For many years, this company has been providing developers with an unknown amount of data, which belongs to those who never knew that these apps were spying on them.
If your friends agree to collect their data, you will also be the target of attack.
Organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union try to sound the alarm about this loophole, but it will take several years for the public to really notice this loophole.
When they finally did this, Facebook’s best defense was that it realized its mistakes and strengthened privacy protections.
However, many years after Facebook made this change, there are still some questions, such as which companies have gained extended access to this data and why.
In December last year, the "New York Times" reported that in 2017, Facebook also provided such access to companies such as Microsoft, Netflix and Spotify.
12, Facebook’s hot topic tool triggered controversy about partisanship in 2016.
Facebook launched the hot topic feature in 2014 as a way to show users the hot news of the day through the Facebook platform. The
company hired human editors to edit the final list of stories recommended by the Facebook algorithm. In 2016, during the climax of the US presidential campaign, Gizmodo published a report claiming that these editors “frequently suppress conservative news”. The story of
spread throughout the right-wing media, and legislators took note.
Zuckerberg held a meeting of conservative thought leaders in Facebook's office, but this did not calm people's anger. In the end, Facebook succumbed to right-wing complaints and removed human editors from the hot topics feature in the same year.
As Wired magazine later reported, this moment “layed the foundation for the most chaotic two years of Facebook’s existence.” Without human editors, algorithms began to recommend fake news that everyone could see.
Facebook has been under attack for being accused of prejudice against conservatives.
Republicans in Congress asked the company to answer questions such as Gatew under oathThe problem of declining influence of extreme right-wing websites such as ay Pundit.
Although there is evidence that Facebook’s algorithm changes have led to a decrease in the traffic of various news publications, regardless of their party affiliation. As companies work to combat the spread of fake news and other issues, allegations of bias will only continue to grow.
Last year, Facebook closed hot topics.
13. Facebook admits that foreign countries rigged the U.S. election.
In the fall of 2017, Facebook issued a statement: Before the 2016 election, it found 5,000 advertisements worth $150,000. These advertisements were created by a Russian giant named Internet Research Agency. Purchased by Magic Group.
In fact, the scope of the problem is far beyond 5000 ads.
Facebook also admitted that the Irish Republican Army (IRA) has brought 150 million Americans into contact with the IRA through Facebook and Instagram, and they published disagreement and sometimes racist posts that made Americans confront each other.
Of course, now we know that the Irish Republican Army is not the only group spreading false information and propaganda on Facebook, and Facebook is not the only platform for these global trolls to attack.
Google, Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr, Pinterest, and almost all other open platforms on the Internet have been hit by some foreign manipulation movement.
These movements continue to this day. Just recently, both Facebook and Twitter announced that they will close hundreds of accounts and pages disguised as people and groups that do not belong to them. The information disclosed by
Facebook in 2017 forced the company and its Silicon Valley counterparts to keep paying attention to similar activities in each country where they have operations.
They have also created some new transparency efforts, requiring advertisers to report who they are, how much they spend, and who the ads cover.
Facebook’s head of cybersecurity, Nathaniel Gleicher, recently said that the company is getting better and better at detecting these activities and quickly destroying them.
But no one knows how to stop them completely.
14, Cambridge Analytica scandal exposed
In March 2018, all parties around the world have a clear understanding of data transactions and the role of Facebook as a major supplier. At that time, it was reported for the first time that Donald Trump’s presidential campaign adviser Cambridge Analytica collected data on tens of millions of American Facebook users without knowing it, thanks to Facebook sharing user friends with developers Data easing policy.
This is the policy that Facebook changed in 2015. But for most Americans, these details are not important, because no one takes back the data from a company like Cambridge Analytica that already owns the data.
Facebook’s stock price plummeted, and the company was forced to take responsibility for its past actions. Zuckerberg is committed to rethinking all aspects of Facebook's business to protect user privacy.
However, whether these changes are purely superficial is still questionable.
It was reported not long ago that the company has been paying 13-year-olds to download an app called Research. This app allows Facebook to view everything Research users do on their phones, including encryption information. The research app
has striking similarities with Cambridge Analytica. It can also see information about users' friends.
15, Zuckerberg testified before Congress
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that Facebook does not sell user data, but a lawsuit accused the company of seriously considering this.
15 years after Harvard punished Zuckerberg for the FaceMash incident, Zuckerberg was summoned to a stronger commissionThe Committee-the U.S. Congress-to explain Facebook's scandals over the past two years and the decisions that led to them.
This is Zuckerberg’s "Big Tobacco Company" moment: he has the opportunity to explain the trade-offs made by Facebook between growth and privacy, people have the opportunity to ask him how Facebook treats competitors, and the opportunity to doubt whether Facebook really has Any real competitor. We have not found all the answers to these questions.
If there are any similarities between Facebook's next 15 years and its first year, it is these problems. This will be the question we will keep asking in the next few years. Produced by
compilation team. Editor: Hao Pengcheng
