{"id":4198,"date":"2010-09-15T11:06:56","date_gmt":"2010-09-15T09:06:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tokao.com\/?p=4198"},"modified":"2010-09-15T11:06:56","modified_gmt":"2010-09-15T09:06:56","slug":"facebook-co-founder-mark-zuckerberg-in-the-new-yorker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tokao.com\/wordpress\/2010\/09\/15\/facebook-co-founder-mark-zuckerberg-in-the-new-yorker\/","title":{"rendered":"Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg in the New Yorker"},"content":{"rendered":"

A very interesting article that you can find at the New Yorker<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook in his college dorm room six years ago. Five hundred million people have joined since, and eight hundred and seventy-nine of them are his friends. The site is a directory of the world\u2019s people, and a place for private citizens to create public identities. You sign up and start posting information about yourself: photographs, employment history, why you are peeved right now with the gummy-bear selection at Rite Aid or bullish about prospects for peace in the Middle East. Some of the information can be seen only by your friends; some is available to friends of friends; some is available to anyone. Facebook\u2019s privacy policies are confusing to many people, and the company has changed them frequently, almost always allowing more information to be exposed in more ways.
\nAccording to his Facebook profile, Zuckerberg has three sisters (Randi, Donna, and Arielle), all of whom he\u2019s friends with. He\u2019s friends with his parents, Karen and Edward Zuckerberg. He graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy and attended Harvard University. He\u2019s a fan of the comedian Andy Samberg and counts among his favorite musicians Green Day, Jay-Z, Taylor Swift, and Shakira. He is twenty-six years old.
\nZuckerberg cites \u201cMinimalism,\u201d \u201cRevolutions,\u201d and \u201cEliminating Desire\u201d as interests. He likes \u201cEnder\u2019s Game,\u201d a coming-of-age science-fiction saga by Orson Scott Card, which tells the story of Andrew (Ender) Wiggin, a gifted child who masters computer war games and later realizes that he\u2019s involved in a real war. He lists no other books on his profile.
\nZuckerberg\u2019s Facebook friends have access to his e-mail address and his cell-phone number. They can browse his photograph albums, like one titled \u201cThe Great Goat Roast of 2009,\u201d a record of an event held in his back yard. They know that, in early July, upon returning from the annual Allen & Company retreat for Hollywood moguls, Wall Street tycoons, and tech titans, he became Facebook friends with Barry Diller. Soon afterward, Zuckerberg wrote on his Facebook page, \u201cIs there a site that streams the World Cup final online? (I don\u2019t own a TV.)\u201d
\nSince late August, it\u2019s also been pretty easy to track Zuckerberg through a new Facebook feature called Places, which allows users to mark their location at any time. At 2:45 A.M., E.S.T., on August 29th, he was at the Ace Hotel, in New York\u2019s garment district. He was back at Facebook\u2019s headquarters, in Palo Alto, by 7:08 P.M. On August 31st at 10:38 P.M., he and his girlfriend were eating dinner at Taqueria La Bamba, in Mountain View.
\nZuckerberg may seem like an over-sharer in the age of over-sharing. But that\u2019s kind of the point. Zuckerberg\u2019s business model depends on our shifting notions of privacy, revelation, and sheer self-display. The more that people are willing to put online, the more money his site can make from advertisers. Happily for him, and the prospects of his eventual fortune, his business interests align perfectly with his personal philosophy. In the bio section of his page, Zuckerberg writes simply, \u201cI\u2019m trying to make the world a more open place.\u201d<\/p>\n

from the issue
\ncartoon bank
\ne-mail this
\nThe world, it seems, is responding. The site is now the biggest social network in countries ranging from Indonesia to Colombia. Today, at least one out of every fourteen people in the world has a Facebook account. Zuckerberg, meanwhile, is becoming the boy king of Silicon Valley. If and when Facebook decides to go public, Zuckerberg will become one of the richest men on the planet, and one of the youngest billionaires. In the October issue of Vanity Fair, Zuckerberg is named No. 1 in the magazine\u2019s power ranking of the New Establishment, just ahead of Steve Jobs, the leadership of Google, and Rupert Murdoch. The magazine declared him \u201cour new Caesar.\u201d
\nDespite his goal of global openness, however, Zuckerberg remains a wary and private person. He doesn\u2019t like to speak to the press, and he does so rarely. He also doesn\u2019t seem to enjoy the public appearances that are increasingly requested of him. Backstage at an event at the Computer History Museum, in Silicon Valley, this summer, one of his interlocutors turned to Zuckerberg, minutes before they were to appear onstage, and said, \u201cYou don\u2019t like doing these kinds of events very much, do you?\u201d Zuckerberg replied with a terse \u201cNo,\u201d then took a sip from his water bottle and looked off into the distance.
\nThis makes the current moment a particularly awkward one. Zuckerberg, or at least Hollywood\u2019s unauthorized version of him, will soon be starring in a film titled \u201cThe Social Network,\u201d directed by David Fincher and written by Aaron Sorkin. The movie, which opens the New York Film Festival and will be released on October 1st, will be the introduction that much of the world gets to Zuckerberg. Facebook profiles are always something of a performance: you choose the details you want to share and you choose whom you want to share with. Now Zuckerberg, who met with me for several in-person interviews this summer, is confronting something of the opposite: a public exposition of details that he didn\u2019t choose. He does not plan to see the film.
\nZuckerberg\u2013\u2013or Zuck, as he is known to nearly everyone of his acquaintance\u2013\u2013is pale and of medium build, with short, curly brown hair and blue eyes. He\u2019s only around five feet eight, but he seems taller, because he stands with his chest out and his back straight, as if held up by a string. His standard attire is a gray T-shirt, bluejeans, and sneakers. His affect can be distant and disorienting, a strange mixture of shy and cocky. When he\u2019s not interested in what someone is talking about, he\u2019ll just look away and say, \u201cYeah, yeah.\u201d Sometimes he pauses so long before he answers it\u2019s as if he were ignoring the question altogether. The typical complaint about Zuckerberg is that he\u2019s \u201ca robot.\u201d One of his closest friends told me, \u201cHe\u2019s been overprogrammed.\u201d Indeed, he sometimes talks like an Instant Message\u2014brusque, flat as a dial tone\u2014and he can come off as flip and condescending, as if he always knew something that you didn\u2019t. But face to face he is often charming, and he\u2019s becoming more comfortable onstage. At the Computer History Museum, he was uncommonly energetic, thoughtful, and introspective\u2014relaxed, even. He addressed concerns about Facebook\u2019s privacy settings by relaying a personal anecdote of the sort that his answers generally lack. (\u201cIf I could choose to share my mobile-phone number only with everyone on Facebook, I wouldn\u2019t do it. But because I can do it with only my friends I do it.\u201d) He was self-deprecating, too. Asked if he\u2019s the same person in front of a crowd as he is with friends, Zuckerberg responded, \u201cYeah, same awkward person.\u201d
\nZuckerberg grew up in a hilltop house in Dobbs Ferry, New York. Attached to the basement is the dental office of his father, Edward Zuckerberg, known to his patients as \u201cpainless Dr. Z.\u201d (\u201cWe cater to cowards,\u201d his Web site reads.) There\u2019s a hundred-and-sixty-gallon fish tank in the operating room, and the place is packed with marine-oriented tchotchkes that Dr. Zuckerberg\u2019s patients have brought him. Mark\u2019s mother, Karen, is a psychiatrist who stopped practicing to take care of the children and to work as her husband\u2019s office manager.
\nEdward was an early user of digital radiography, and he introduced Atari BASIC computer programming to his son. The house and the dental office were full of computers. One afternoon in 1996, Edward declared that he wanted a better way of announcing a patient\u2019s arrival than the receptionist yelling, \u201cPatient here!\u201d Mark built a software program that allowed the computers in the house and the office to send messages to one another. He called it ZuckNet, and it was basically a primitive version of AOL Instant Messenger, which came out the following year. The receptionist used it to ping Edward, and the kids used it to ping each other. One evening while Donna was working in her room, downstairs, a screen popped up: the computer contained a deadly virus and would blow up in thirty seconds. As the machine counted down, Donna ran up the stairs shouting, \u201cMark!\u201d
\nSome kids played computer games. Mark created them. In all of our talks, the most animated Zuckerberg ever got\u2014speaking with a big smile, almost tripping on his words, his eyes alert\u2014was when he described his youthful adventures in coding. \u201cI had a bunch of friends who were artists,\u201d he said. \u201cThey\u2019d come over, draw stuff, and I\u2019d build a game out of it.\u201d When he was about eleven, his parents hired a computer tutor, a software developer named David Newman, who came to the house once a week to work with Mark. \u201cHe was a prodigy,\u201d Newman told me. \u201cSometimes it was tough to stay ahead of him.\u201d (Newman lost track of Zuckerberg and was stunned when he learned during our interview that his former pupil had built Facebook.) Soon thereafter, Mark started taking a graduate computer course every Thursday night at nearby Mercy College. When his father dropped him off at the first class, the instructor looked at Edward and said, pointing to Mark, \u201cYou can\u2019t bring him to the classroom with you.\u201d Edward told the instructor that his son was the student.
\nMark was not a stereotypical geek-klutz. At Exeter, he became captain of the fencing team. He earned a diploma in classics. But computers were always central. For his senior project at Exeter, he wrote software that he called Synapse. Created with a friend, Synapse was like an early version of Pandora\u2014a program that used artificial intelligence to learn users\u2019 listening habits. News of the software\u2019s existence spread on technology blogs. Soon AOL and Microsoft made it known that they wanted to buy Synapse and recruit the teen-ager who\u2019d invented it. He turned them down.
\nZuckerberg decided, instead, to enter Harvard, in the fall of 2002. He arrived in Cambridge with a reputation as a programming prodigy. He sometimes wore a T-shirt with a little ape on it and the words \u201cCode Monkey.\u201d He joined the Jewish fraternity Alpha Epsilon Pi, and, at a Friday-night party there, Zuckerberg, then a sophomore, met his current girlfriend, Priscilla Chan, a Chinese-American from the Boston suburbs. They struck up a conversation while waiting in line for the bathroom. \u201cHe was this nerdy guy who was just a little bit out there,\u201d Chan told me. \u201cI remember he had these beer glasses that said \u2018pound include beer dot H.\u2019 It\u2019s a tag for C++. It\u2019s like college humor but with a nerdy, computer-science appeal.\u201d
\nZuckerberg had a knack for creating simple, addictive software. In his first week as a sophomore, he built CourseMatch, a program that enabled users to figure out which classes to take based on the choices of other students. Soon afterward, he came up with Facemash, where users looked at photographs of two people and clicked a button to note who they thought was hotter, a kind of sexual-playoff system. It was quickly shut down by the school\u2019s administration. Afterward, three upperclassmen\u2014an applied-math major from Queens, Divya Narendra, and twins from Greenwich, Connecticut, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss\u2014approached Zuckerberg for assistance with a site that they had been working on, called Harvard Connection.
\nZuckerberg helped Narendra and the Winklevoss twins, but he soon abandoned their project in order to build his own site, which he eventually labelled Facebook. The site was an immediate hit, and, at the end of his sophomore year, Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard to run it.
\nAs he tells the story, the ideas behind the two social networks were totally different. Their site, he says, emphasized dating, while his emphasized networking. The way the Winklevoss twins tell it, Zuckerberg stole their idea and deliberately kept them from launching their site. Tall, wide-shouldered, and gregarious, the twins were champion rowers who competed in the Beijing Olympics; they recently earned M.B.A.s from Oxford. \u201cHe stole the moment, he stole the idea, and he stole the execution,\u201d Cameron told me recently. The dispute has been in court almost since Facebook was launched, six years ago. Facebook eventually reached a settlement, reportedly worth sixty-five million dollars, with the Winklevosses and Narendra, but they are now appealing for more, claiming that Facebook misled them about the value of the stock they would receive.
\nTo prepare for litigation against the Winklevosses and Narendra, Facebook\u2019s legal team searched Zuckerberg\u2019s computer and came across Instant Messages he sent while he was at Harvard. Although the IMs did not offer any evidence to support the claim of theft, according to sources who have seen many of the messages, the IMs portray Zuckerberg as backstabbing, conniving, and insensitive. A small group of lawyers and Facebook executives reviewed the messages, in a two-hour meeting in January, 2006, at the offices of Jim Breyer, the managing partner at the venture-capital firm Accel Partners, Facebook\u2019s largest outside investor.
\nThe technology site Silicon Alley Insider got hold of some of the messages and, this past spring, posted the transcript of a conversation between Zuckerberg and a friend, outlining how he was planning to deal with Harvard Connect:<\/p>\n

FRIEND: so have you decided what you are going to do about the websites?
\nZUCK: yea i\u2019m going to fuck them
\nZUCK: probably in the year
\nZUCK: *ear<\/p>\n

In another exchange leaked to Silicon Alley Insider, Zuckerberg explained to a friend that his control of Facebook gave him access to any information he wanted on any Harvard student:<\/p>\n

ZUCK: yea so if you ever need info about anyone at harvard
\nZUCK: just ask
\nZUCK: i have over 4000 emails, pictures, addresses, sns
\nFRIEND: what!? how\u2019d you manage that one?
\nZUCK: people just submitted it
\nZUCK: i don\u2019t know why
\nZUCK: they \u201ctrust me\u201d
\nZUCK: dumb fucks<\/p>\n

According to two knowledgeable sources, there are more unpublished IMs that are just as embarrassing and damaging to Zuckerberg. But, in an interview, Breyer told me, \u201cBased on everything I saw in 2006, and after having a great deal of time with Mark, my confidence in him as C.E.O. of Facebook was in no way shaken.\u201d Breyer, who sits on Facebook\u2019s board, added, \u201cHe is a brilliant individual who, like all of us, has made mistakes.\u201d When I asked Zuckerberg about the IMs that have already been published online, and that I have also obtained and confirmed, he said that he \u201cabsolutely\u201d regretted them. \u201cIf you\u2019re going to go on to build a service that is influential and that a lot of people rely on, then you need to be mature, right?\u201d he said. \u201cI think I\u2019ve grown and learned a lot.\u201d
\nZuckerberg\u2019s sophomoric former self, he insists, shouldn\u2019t define who he is now. But he knows that it does, and that, because of the upcoming release of \u201cThe Social Network,\u201d it will surely continue to do so. The movie is a scathing portrait, and the image of an unsmiling, insecure, and sexed-up young man will be hard to overcome. Zuckerberg said, \u201cI think a lot people will look at that stuff, you know, when I was nineteen, and say, \u2018Oh, well, he was like that. . . . He must still be like that, right?\u2019 \u201d
\nIn Hollywood\u2019s version, the early founding of Facebook is, as Sorkin said in an interview, \u201ca classical story of friendship, loyalty, betrayal, and jealousy.\u201d Sorkin described Zuckerberg as a \u201cbrilliant guy who\u2019s socially awkward and who\u2019s got his nose up against the window of social life. It would seem he badly wanted to get into one of these final clubs\u201d\u2014one of the exclusive, \u00e9lite-within-\u00e9lite party clubs at Harvard. The Winklevoss twins were members of the Porcellian Club, the most prestigious.
\nIn the movie\u2019s opening scene, according to a script that was leaked online, Zuckerberg and his girlfriend, Erica, a student at Boston University, sit in a campus bar, exchanging disparaging zingers. (\u201cYou don\u2019t have to study,\u201d he tells her. \u201cHow do you know I don\u2019t have to study?\u201d she asks. \u201cBecause you go to B.U.!\u201d) Erica takes his hand, stares at him and says, \u201cListen. You\u2019re going to be successful and rich. But you\u2019re going to go through life thinking that girls don\u2019t like you because you\u2019re a tech geek. And I want you to know, from the bottom of my heart, that that won\u2019t be true. It\u2019ll be because you\u2019re an asshole.\u201d
\nThe movie is based on \u201cThe Accidental Billionaires,\u201d by Ben Mezrich, a book about the founding of Facebook. Mezrich is also the author of a best-seller, published in 2003, about college students striking it rich. The book, titled \u201cBringing Down the House,\u201d used invented scenes, composite characters, and re-created dialogue. The new book has been criticized for using similar methods. Mezrich says that the book is not \u201can encyclopedic\u201d description of Facebook\u2019s founding but is nevertheless \u201ca true story that Zuckerberg would rather not be told,\u201d written in what he called a \u201cthriller-esque style.\u201d The book draws heavily on interviews that Mezrich conducted with Eduardo Saverin, Facebook\u2019s initial business manager, who had a falling out with Zuckerberg and sued him. Mezrich did not talk to Zuckerberg. (The producer of \u201cThe Social Network,\u201d Scott Rudin, tried to talk to Zuckerberg and other Facebook executives, but he was rebuffed.) Mezrich sold the movie rights to the book even before it was completed. He called Sorkin his \u201cfirst reader,\u201d and handed over chapters as soon as he finished them.
\nSorkin said that creating Zuckerberg\u2019s character was a challenge. He added that the college students were \u201cthe youngest people I\u2019ve ever written about.\u201d Sorkin, who is forty-nine, says that he knew very little about social networking, and he professes extreme dislike of the blogosphere and social media. \u201cI\u2019ve heard of Facebook, in the same way I\u2019ve heard of a carburetor,\u201d he told me. \u201cBut if I opened the hood of my car I wouldn\u2019t know how to find it.\u201d He called the film \u201cThe Social Network\u201d ironically. Referring to Facebook\u2019s creators, Sorkin said, \u201cIt\u2019s a group of, in one way or another, socially dysfunctional people who created the world\u2019s great social-networking site.\u201d
\nSorkin insisted that \u201cthe movie is not meant as an attack\u201d on Zuckerberg. As he described it, however, Zuckerberg \u201cspends the first one hour and fifty-five minutes as an antihero and the last five minutes as a tragic hero.\u201d He added, \u201cI don\u2019t want to be unfair to this young man whom I don\u2019t know, who\u2019s never done anything to me, who doesn\u2019t deserve a punch in the face. I honestly believe that I have not done that.\u201d
\nAs it happens, Sorkin\u2019s \u201cThe West Wing\u201d is one of Zuckerberg\u2019s favorite television shows. He discovered it while on a trip to Spain with Chan, whom he has been dating, with a brief interruption, since 2003. In Madrid, they both got sick, and ended up watching the first season of the show in bed. In a Spanish department store, they bought DVDs of the six other seasons and eventually watched them all. Zuckerberg said that he liked the authenticity of the series\u2014the way it captured the truth, at least as friends of his described it, of working in Washington.
\nI told Sorkin that his TV series was one of Zuckerberg\u2019s favorites. He paused. \u201cI wish you hadn\u2019t told me that,\u201d he said finally. When I asked Sorkin to guess the episode that Zuckerberg liked best, he said, \u201cThe Lemon-Lyman episode\u201d\u2014the one in Season Three where Josh Lyman, the deputy chief of staff, played by Bradley Whitford, discovers that he has a following on an online message board and unwisely interacts with its members.
\nActually, Zuckerberg\u2019s favorite episode, he told me, was \u201cTwo Cathedrals,\u201d at the end of Season Two, in which Martin Sheen, who plays President Josiah Bartlet, grieves at the death of his longtime secretary and, after disclosing that he has multiple sclerosis, ponders whether he should seek re\u00eblection. He is inside the National Cathedral and orders that it be temporarily sealed. He curses God in Latin and lights a cigarette. \u201cIt\u2019s, like, even in journeys like Facebook, we\u2019ve had some very serious ups and downs,\u201d Zuckerberg said.
\nZuckerberg says that many of the details he has read about the film are just wrong. (He had, for example, no interest in joining any of the final clubs.) When pressed about the movie and what it means for his public persona, he responded coolly: \u201cI know the real story.\u201d
\nA few days after we spoke, Zuckerberg changed his Facebook profile, removing \u201cThe West Wing\u201d from his list of favorite TV shows.
\nOn a recent Thursday afternoon, Zuckerberg took me for a stroll around the neighborhood in Palo Alto where he both lives and works. As he stepped out of the office and onto a street of expensive houses, he told me about his first trip to Silicon Valley. It was during winter break in January, 2004, a month before Facebook\u2019s launch. He was nineteen. \u201cI remember flying in, driving down 101 in a cab, and passing by all these tech companies like Yahoo!,\u201d he said. His gray T-shirt was emblazoned with the word \u201chacker.\u201d \u201cI remember thinking, Maybe someday we\u2019ll build a company. This probably isn\u2019t it, but one day we will.\u201d
\nWe arrived at his house. Parked outside was a black Acura TSX, which he bought a couple of years ago, after asking a friend to suggest a car that would be \u201csafe, comfortable, not ostentatious.\u201d He drives a lot to relax and unwind, his friends say, and usually ends up at Chan\u2019s apartment. She lives not far from Golden Gate Park and is a third-year medical student at the University of California, San Francisco. They spend most weekends together; they walk in the park, go rowing (he insists that they go in separate boats and race), play bocce or the board game the Settlers of Catan. Sundays are reserved for Asian cuisine. They usually take a two-week trip abroad in December. This year, they\u2019re planning to visit China.
\nZuckerberg has found all his homes on Craigslist. His first place was a sparse one-bedroom apartment that a friend described as something like a \u201ccrack den.\u201d The next apartment was a two-bedroom, followed by his current place, a two-story, four-bedroom house that he told me is \u201ctoo big.\u201d He rents. (\u201cHe\u2019s the poorest rich person I\u2019ve ever seen in my life,\u201d Tyler Winklevoss said.) As we crossed the driveway, we spotted Chan, sitting on a chair in the back yard, a yellow highlighter in her hand, reading a textbook; she plans to be a pediatrician. There was a hammock and a barbecue grill nearby. Surprised, Zuckerberg approached her and rubbed her right shoulder. \u201cI didn\u2019t know you were going to be here,\u201d he said. She touched his right hand and smiled.
\nHe walked into the house, which is painted in various shades of blue and beige, except for the kitchen, which is a vibrant yellow. Colors don\u2019t matter much to Zuckerberg; a few years ago, he took an online test and realized that he was red-green color-blind. Blue is Facebook\u2019s dominant color, because, as he said, \u201cblue is the richest color for me\u2014I can see all of blue.\u201d Standing in his kitchen, leaning over the sink, he offered me a glass of water.
\nHe returned the conversation to the winter of 2004, describing how he and his friends \u201cwould hang out and go together to Pinocchio\u2019s, the local pizza place, and talk about trends in technology. We\u2019d say, \u2018Isn\u2019t it obvious that everyone was going to be on the Internet? Isn\u2019t it, like, inevitable that there would be a huge social network of people?\u2019 It was something that we expected to happen. The thing that\u2019s been really surprising about the evolution of Facebook is\u2014I think then and I think now\u2014that if we didn\u2019t do this someone else would have done it.\u201d
\nZuckerberg, of course, did do it, and one of the reasons that he has held on to it is that money has never seemed to be his top priority. In 2005, MTV Networks considered buying Facebook for seventy-five million dollars. Yahoo! and Microsoft soon offered much more. Zuckerberg turned them all down. Terry Semel, the former C.E.O. of Yahoo!, who sought to buy Facebook for a billion dollars in 2006, told me, \u201cI\u2019d never met anyone\u2014forget his age, twenty-two then or twenty-six now\u2014I\u2019d never met anyone who would walk away from a billion dollars. But he said, \u2018It\u2019s not about the price. This is my baby, and I want to keep running it, I want to keep growing it.\u2019 I couldn\u2019t believe it.\u201d
\nLooking back, Chan said she thought that the time of the Yahoo! proposal was the most stressful of Zuckerberg\u2019s life. \u201cI remember we had a huge conversation over the Yahoo! deal,\u201d she said. \u201cWe try to stick pretty close to what our goals are and what we believe and what we enjoy doing in life\u2014just simple things,\u201d she said.
\nFriends expect Chan and Zuckerberg to marry. In early September, Zuckerberg wrote on his Facebook page, \u201cPriscilla Chan is moving in this weekend. Now we have 2x everything, so if you need any household appliances, dishes, glasses, etc please come by and take them before we give them away.\u201d
\nFacebook\u2019s headquarters is a two-story building at the end of a quiet, tree-lined street. Zuckerberg nicknamed it the Bunker. Facebook has grown so fast that this is the company\u2019s fifth home in six years\u2014the third in Palo Alto. There is virtually no indication outside of the Bunker\u2019s tenant. Upon walking in, however, you are immediately greeted by what\u2019s called the Facebook Wall, playing off the virtual chalkboards users have on their profiles. One day in early August, the Wall was covered with self-referential posts. An employee, addressing the constant criticism of the site\u2019s privacy settings, had written, \u201cHow do I delete my post??? Why don\u2019t you care about my privacy? Why is the default for this app everyone??\u201d Inside is a giant sea of desks\u2014no cubicles, no partitions, just open space with small conference rooms named after bands (Run-DMC, New Edition, ZZ Top) and bad ideas (Knife at a Gunfight, Subprime Mortgage, Beacon\u2014a controversial advertising system that Facebook introduced in 2007 and then scrapped).
\nZuckerberg\u2019s desk is near the middle of the office, just a few steps away from his glass-walled conference room and within arm\u2019s length of his most senior employees. Before arriving each morning, he works out with a personal trainer or studies Mandarin, which he is learning in preparation for the trip to China. Zuckerberg is involved in almost every new product and feature. His daily schedule is typically free from 2 P.M. to 6 P.M., and he spends that block of time meeting with engineers who are working on new projects. Debate is a hallmark of the meetings; at least a dozen of his employees pointed out, unprompted, what an \u201cintense listener\u201d Zuckerberg is. He is often one of the last people to leave the office. A photograph posted by a Facebook employee over Labor Day weekend showed Zuckerberg sitting at a long table in a conference room surrounded by other workers\u2014all staring at their computers, coding away.
\nIn the early years, Facebook tore through a series of senior executives. \u201cA revolving door would be an understatement\u2014it was very unstable,\u201d Breyer said. Within ten days of hiring an executive, Breyer told me, Zuckerberg would e-mail or call him and say that the new hire needed to get the boot. Things calmed down in March, 2008, when Zuckerberg hired Sheryl Sandberg, a veteran of Google who was the chief of staff for Lawrence Summers when he was Secretary of the Treasury. She joined Facebook as the company\u2019s chief operating officer, and executives followed her from companies like eBay, Genentech, and Mozilla. A flood of former Google employees soon arrived, too.
\nMeanwhile, however, most of Zuckerberg\u2019s close friends, who worked for Facebook at the start, have left. Adam D\u2019Angelo, who has been friends with Zuckerberg since their hacking and programming days at Exeter, teamed up with another former Facebook employee, Charlie Cheever, to start Quora.com, a social network that aggregates questions and answers on various topics. Chris Hughes, Zuckerberg\u2019s Harvard roommate, left to join the Obama campaign and later founded the philanthropic site Jumo.com.
\nIn part, the exodus reflects the status that former Facebook employees have in the tech world. But the departures also point to the difficulty some people have working for Zuckerberg. It\u2019s hard to have a friend for a boss, especially someone who saw the site, from its inception, as \u201cA Mark Zuckerberg production\u201d\u2014the tag line was posted on every page during Facebook\u2019s early days. \u201cUltimately, it\u2019s \u2018the Mark show,\u2019 \u201d one of his closest friends told me.
\nIn late July, Facebook launched the beta version of Questions, a question-and-answer product that seems to be a direct competitor of Quora. To many people, the move seemed a vindictive attack on friends and former employees. In an interview, Cheever declined to comment, as did Matt Cohler, another friend who left the company, and who invested in Quora.
\nChris Cox, Facebook\u2019s vice-president of product, said that Facebook Questions is not an attack on Quora. \u201cWe\u2019ve been talking about questions being the future of the way people search for stuff, so it was a matter of time before we built it,\u201d Cox told me. \u201cGetting there first is not what it\u2019s all about.\u201d He added, \u201cWhat matters always is execution. Always.\u201d
\nZuckerberg\u2019s ultimate goal is to create, and dominate, a different kind of Internet. Google and other search engines may index the Web, but, he says, \u201cmost of the information that we care about is things that are in our heads, right? And that\u2019s not out there to be indexed, right?\u201d Zuckerberg was in middle school when Google launched, and he seems to have a deep desire to build something that moves beyond it. \u201cIt\u2019s like hardwired into us in a deeper way: you really want to know what\u2019s going on with the people around you,\u201d he said.
\nIn 2007, Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would become a \u201cplatform,\u201d meaning that outside developers could start creating applications that would run inside the site. It worked. The social-game company Zynga\u2014the maker of FarmVille and Mafia Wars\u2014is expected to earn more than five hundred million dollars this year, most of it generated from people playing on Facebook. In 2008, Zuckerberg unveiled Facebook Connect, allowing users to sign onto other Web sites, gaming systems, and mobile devices with their Facebook account, which serves as a digital passport of sorts. This past spring, Facebook introduced what Zuckerberg called the Open Graph. Users reading articles on CNN.com, for example, can see which articles their Facebook friends have read, shared, and liked. Eventually, the company hopes that users will read articles, visit restaurants, and watch movies based on what their Facebook friends have recommended, not, say, based on a page that Google\u2019s algorithm sends them to. Zuckerberg imagines Facebook as, eventually, a layer underneath almost every electronic device. You\u2019ll turn on your TV, and you\u2019ll see that fourteen of your Facebook friends are watching \u201cEntourage,\u201d and that your parents taped \u201c60 Minutes\u201d for you. You\u2019ll buy a brand-new phone, and you\u2019ll just enter your credentials. All your friends\u2014and perhaps directions to all the places you and they have visited recently\u2014will be right there.
\nFor this plan to work optimally, people have to be willing to give up more and more personal information to Facebook and its partners. Perhaps to accelerate the process, in December, 2009, Facebook made changes to its privacy policies. Unless you wrestled with a set of complicated settings, vastly more of your information\u2014possibly including your name, your gender, your photograph, your list of friends\u2014would be made public by default. The following month, Zuckerberg declared that privacy was an evolving \u201csocial norm.\u201d
\nThe backlash came swiftly. The American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Privacy Information Center cried foul. Users revolted, claiming that Facebook had violated the social compact upon which the company is based. What followed was a tug-of-war about what it means to be a private person with a public identity. In the spring, Zuckerberg announced a simplified version of the privacy settings.
\nI asked Zuckerberg about this during our walk in Palo Alto. Privacy, he told me, is the \u201cthird-rail issue\u201d online. \u201cA lot of people who are worried about privacy and those kinds of issues will take any minor misstep that we make and turn it into as big a deal as possible,\u201d he said. He then excused himself as he typed on his iPhone 4, answering a text from his mother. \u201cWe realize that people will probably criticize us for this for a long time, but we just believe that this is the right thing to do.\u201d
\nZuckerberg\u2019s critics argue that his interpretation and understanding of transparency and openness are simplistic, if not downright na\u00efve. \u201cIf you are twenty-six years old, you\u2019ve been a golden child, you\u2019ve been wealthy all your life, you\u2019ve been privileged all your life, you\u2019ve been successful your whole life, of course you don\u2019t think anybody would ever have anything to hide,\u201d Anil Dash, a blogging pioneer who was the first employee of Six Apart, the maker of Movable Type, said. Danah Boyd, a social-media researcher at Microsoft Research New England, added, \u201cThis is a philosophical battle. Zuckerberg thinks the world would be a better place\u2014and more honest, you\u2019ll hear that word over and over again\u2014if people were more open and transparent. My feeling is, it\u2019s not worth the cost for a lot of individuals.\u201d
\nZuckerberg and I talked about this the first time I signed up for Facebook, in September, 2006. Users are asked to check a box to indicate whether they\u2019re interested in men or in women. I told Zuckerberg that it took me a few hours to decide which box to check. If I said on Facebook that I\u2019m a man interested in men, all my Facebook friends, including relatives, co-workers, sources\u2014some of whom might not approve of homosexuality\u2014would see it.
\n\u201cSo what did you end up doing?\u201d Zuckerberg asked.
\n\u201cI put men.\u201d
\n\u201cThat\u2019s interesting. No one has done a study on this, as far as I can tell, but I think Facebook might be the first place where a large number of people have come out,\u201d he said. \u201cWe didn\u2019t create that\u2014society was generally ready for that.\u201d He went on, \u201cI think this is just part of the general trend that we talked about, about society being more open, and I think that\u2019s good.\u201d
\nThen I told Zuckerberg that, two weeks later, I removed the check, and left the boxes blank. A couple of relatives who were Facebook friends had asked about my sexuality and, at that time, at least, I didn\u2019t want all my professional sources to know that I am gay.
\n\u201cIs it still out?\u201d Zuckerberg asked.
\n\u201cYeah, it\u2019s still out.\u201d
\nHe responded with a flat \u201cHuh,\u201d dropped his shoulders, and stared at me, looking genuinely concerned and somewhat puzzled. Facebook had asked me to publish a personal detail that I was not ready to share.
\nIn our last interview\u2014this one over the phone\u2014I asked Zuckerberg about \u201cEnder\u2019s Game,\u201d the sci-fi book whose hero is a young computer wizard.
\n\u201cOh, it\u2019s not a favorite book or anything like that,\u201d Zuckerberg told me, sounding surprised. \u201cI just added it because I liked it. I don\u2019t think there\u2019s any real significance to the fact that it\u2019s listed there and other books aren\u2019t. But there are definitely books\u2014like the Aeneid\u2014that I enjoyed reading a lot more.\u201d
\nHe first read the Aeneid while he was studying Latin in high school, and he recounted the story of Aeneas\u2019s quest and his desire to build a city that, he said, quoting the text in English, \u201cknows no boundaries in time and greatness.\u201d Zuckerberg has always had a classical streak, his friends and family told me. (Sean Parker, a close friend of Zuckerberg, who served as Facebook\u2019s president when the company was incorporated, said, \u201cThere\u2019s a part of him that\u2014it was present even when he was twenty, twenty-one\u2014this kind of imperial tendency. He was really into Greek odysseys and all that stuff.\u201d) At a product meeting a couple of years ago, Zuckerberg quoted some lines from the Aeneid.
\nOn the phone, Zuckerberg tried to remember the Latin of particular verses. Later that night, he IM\u2019d to tell me two phrases he remembered, giving me the Latin and then the English: \u201cfortune favors the bold\u201d and \u201ca nation\/empire without bound.\u201d
\nBefore I could point out how oddly applicable those lines might be to his current ambitions, he typed back:<\/p>\n

again though
\nthese are the most famous quotes in the aeneid
\nnot anything particular that i found. \u2666<\/p>\n

Read more http:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/reporting\/2010\/09\/20\/100920fa_fact_vargas?currentPage=all#ixzz0zaTq94wB<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A very interesting article that you can find at the New Yorker: Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook in his college dorm room six years ago. Five hundred million people have joined since, and eight hundred and seventy-nine of them are his friends. The site is a directory of the world\u2019s people, and a place for private […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[95],"class_list":["post-4198","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-facebook"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tokao.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4198","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tokao.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tokao.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tokao.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tokao.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4198"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tokao.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4198\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tokao.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4198"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tokao.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4198"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tokao.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4198"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}