Business | Technology
Facebook's route to social issues
When Mark Zuckerberg walked away last year from a reputedly $1 billion offer for Facebook, the social networking site he had launched from his Harvard dormitory two years before, some predicted it was a decision that the 23-year-old internet prodigy would come to regret.
- Financial Times
- Published: 23:11 September 14, 2007
- Image Credit: Illustration: Luis Vazquez/Gulf News
- Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg wants to improve "inefficient" communication among people.
When Mark Zuckerberg walked away last year from a reputedly $1 billion offer for Facebook, the social networking site he had launched from his Harvard dormitory two years before, some predicted it was a decision that the 23-year-old internet prodigy would come to regret.
It was less than a year since Rupert Murdoch's News Corp had bought MySpace, the world's biggest social network, for a then eye-popping $580 million.
That deal sparked a frenzy of interest in websites that allow people to find each other and share messages, photographs and other personal information online.
MySpace had shown that money could be made from users tending to spend large amounts of time on such sites, where information - including advertisements - spread rapidly.
Still, the notion that Facebook could so soon command a valuation nearly double that of its larger rival struck many as far-fetched.
The fickle nature of web audiences and the slew of sites popping up in an attempt to cash in on the social networking craze meant that, in walking away, Zuckerberg risked missing his chance to become a very wealthy man at an age before many people land their first full-time job.
Bigger plans
But he had bigger plans. Even today, as pundits are beginning to predict that Facebook could become the next big internet powerhouse, Zuckerberg suggests that outsiders have yet to realise the company's true potential.
"What we're building... is probably underestimated by most people," says the Facebook founder. "Communication is really inefficient. If we can improve that just a little bit for a lot of people, that's a massively important thing for the economy and the world."
Such comments seem incongruous coming from a Harvard dropout clad in a T-shirt, jeans and Adidas sandals. But beneath his casual, sometimes shy, exterior Zuckerberg exhibits a level-headedness uncommon in entrepreneurs twice his age.
Two big events in the past 12 months have contributed to the sense of excitement around Zuckerberg and his team. The first came last September, when Facebook welcomed the general public after two years of limiting membership mostly to people with a university or secondary school e-mail account.
The result was a flood of new users. Facebook had 12 million active users in December last year. This year, Zuckerberg says, the company is set to top 50 million- according to ComScore, an internet information provider, the broader number of unique visitors has already exceeded 60 million - with the number of new registrations doubling roughly every six months.
The second came in May, when Facebook threw open its inner workings to outside programmers and asked them to build features that can take advantage of connections between the site's users.
Peter Thiel, a founder of PayPal, the online funds transfer system who is Facebook's second biggest investor, says the company's backers think it is worth $8 billion-$10 billion.
Big player?
Are predictions that Facebook will join the ranks of Google and Yahoo atop the list of internet titans merely a symptom of a new internet bubble around online media companies?
"Right now everyone is saying Facebook is the next big thing," says another investor in the company. "I think that's great, I think it's really interesting, but they're not Google yet."
Nonetheless, the buzz around Facebook is increasingly reminiscent of that surrounding Google in the days before the internet search company went public in 2004.
Before the MySpace deal, most social networking sites were viewed as mere curiosities. Today, they are increasingly viewed as important communications tools.
Many of the candidates for US president have rolled out profile pages on MySpace, Facebook and elsewhere in an attempt to connect with voters online.
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