The Facebook Effect

The Facebook Effect is the only official account of the history of the world’s largest social network, explaining why it’s so successful and how it’s changed both the world and us.

The difference between a million-dollar company and a billion-dollar company is often as little as a few months time or a few thousand miles of distance.

Friendster and MySpace weren’t bad, they were just too early to reach critical mass (or too slow to innovate). Other sites like Eons targeted the wrong people (a social media site for over 50 year olds in 2006 – really?).

In the case of Facebook, timing, location, everything came together.

First, broadband internet access was just starting to spread in 2004, when Facebook was launched. This was crucial, because photo upload would later become a core function of Facebook, so people needed faster uploading and downloading speeds. Not only that, the sheer number of internet users was also sharply on the rise, more than doubling in the first 6 years the company was around – from less than one billion to over two!

Second, in restricting Facebook to college campuses, Mark Zuckerberg picked the perfect spot for his network to spread. Many Ivy League schools tried to put their campus communities online at the time and college students are among the most socially active groups of people as is, so they more than welcomed this new way of connecting.

Also, being at Harvard he had access to some of the world’s brightest minds, who would help him build the team the company needed to become that big in the first place.

You can easily tell that Facebook is really politics-content-driven by opening your newsfeed any time between August and November every four years (like this year) – all you’ll see are posts about presidential candidates (and with Trump it’s particularly bad this year). The reason Facebook can be used so well by political activists is that it’s like an organized rally or protest – except that it’s cheaper, safer and faster. In 2008 people in South Africa formed a Facebook group against brutal drug raids and mistreatment of citizens therein, garnering 3,000 members in just two days. The group organized a protest march and a petition, but also constantly shared updates, photos and videos of ongoing raids, which got a lot of people to file complaints. This resulted in an investigation into the matter by the country. And looking back at Hillary vs. Trump, it’s been clear ever since Obama won “the Facebook election” in 2008 by outshining John McCain on Youtube, Facebook, Twitter and pretty much everywhere else online, that even the most powerful people in the world are now voted for…