Facebook’s wunderkind CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, is starting to remind me of “Patch Adams.” Remember when Patch was sitting with the psychiatrist and Patch said, “…I just want to help people…” and the psychiatrist said, “…but that’s my job…” and Patch responded: “…but you suck at it!”
Like Patch, many think Zuckerberg is crazy for not accepting billion dollar buy-out offers for his young company. So far Zuckerberg has not waivered in his intention to build his company into what he calls a “social utility.” Unlike Patch, Zuckerberg’s motives aren’t completely altruistic. He is building a business, but he is taking a long term approach rather than a slash and burn, get rich quick strategy.
Last week Facebook announced a new strategy to let other companies provide their services on special pages within its popular Web site. These companies will be able to link into Facebook users’ networks of online friends, according to people familiar with the matter.
Here are a few articles explaining the details:
From CNN.COM
From GigaOM
From ZDnet
From Mashable
Here are some key passages from the CNN article:Zuckerberg uses one term constantly to describe the core value of Facebook: the “social graph.” The programmer-turned-CEO says he means this “in the mathematical sense of a series of nodes and connections, with the nodes individuals and the connections the friendships.” This is the essential asset that Facebook will now make available to others, he says.
His epiphany about its importance came when Facebook launched a rudimentary photo application in 2005. Though it lacked many features of other online photo sites, it almost immediately garnered the most traffic by far. The reason, he decided, was that Facebook members could quickly learn when friends uploaded new photos, and thus they looked at more of them. He hopes the best new applications by outsiders on the Facebook platform will experience a similar viral popularity.
But it is News Feed that gives Facebook its viral power. “News Feed brought interesting things to people’s attention quicker, so they looked at more content,” Zuckerberg says. Now, as businesses build applications and users install them, their friends will automatically be notified.
Thanks to my colleague, AJ Macht, we’ve taken great pains in designing MyColts to make sure that ever action inside our network could trigger another action or reaction from other users in the system.
says Matt Cohler, the vice president for strategy who joined the company as employee number five in June 2004: “One of the first things I ever heard Mark say is ‘We don’t strive to keep it cool. We strive to keep it useful.‘”
Imagine, a company that understands that profit should not be the PRIMARY purpost of business. First, we should strive to deliver value, which in this case is “usefulness”. Then, we can expect to make a profit. Refreshing.
I agree with Zuckerberg’s strategy, especially his strategy for using data to personalize the customer experience and improve advertising results with behavioral targeting:
“First, we get additional usage and page views, and we can put ads towards that. But in addition, users will be telling us more about themselves by using a richer site, and we can use that information to serve them a more relevant experience, both in advertising and other ways.”
On the other hand, I don’t think I’ll be able to convince my colleagues (and bosses) to follow Facebook’s strategy toward partners, it’s just too too “enlightened”:
As for the developers themselves, Facebook will impose no limitations on how they make money. Says Zuckerberg: “They can sell sponsorships, they can have ads, they can sell things, they can link off to another site - we are just agnostic.”
NFL regulations prevent us from building Colts content inside Facebook or other similar sites, otherwise I’d make a strong move in this direction. After all, seems to make sense to use the utility that’s already built rather than creating our own infrastructure.
The guy behind facebook is a genuis. I thought mysapce was great but this is awesome! Well done!