The second part of the Facebook Effect by David Kirkpatrick revolved around what was happening behind the scenes with Facebook, mostly regarding its financial status. The more I read, the more weirded out I am of Zuckerberg. He is certainly a character.
Despite the huge success Facebook had even back then, it was hard for them to be financially stable and independent. Because they had such an incredible growth rate that even they were not expecting, they had to spend more and more on storage space to make sure their database did not overflow and crash the entire site. Nevertheless, they were able to survive and stay on track with the help of VCs and smart negotiations from Parker and the likes. Not to mention, there were numerous CEOs of really BIG name companies such as MTV, Viacom, and even Yahoo who were willing, even desperate, to negotiate a deal to buy out Facebook.
It was really interesting to see how certain features of Facebook I use and take for granted were developed and received initially by users back then. When I first joined, the photo albums were developed but definitely not as widely used as they are used nowadays. Then, when the news feed option came to be, it drove people to participate in an endless chain of take pictures, upload onto computer, make facebook album, upload pictures to facebook, tag people, repeat! It became a competition of some sort to be tagged the most by others, to upload the most albums, and even to get the most comments on one's photos. As a side note, when the news feed feature first came to be, I saw all the negative feedback. In fact, I was one of those who just didn't understand the need for such a thing. However, I'm really glad Zuckerberg decided to keep the news feed because it really is a convenient way to see what my friends have been up to while I was out, in class, sleeping, or working. I never have to worry about what I'm missing anymore (haha).
In a short amount of time this social networking site grew from a small project at one college campus to a site with over 10 million members from early teens to adults in their 50's and older. This shows the immense power the web has in this new technology-centered world. How else could this small project have been turned into the crazy addicting site we all know and "love" today? Yet, this brings up the controversy over privacy. In a virtual world where we can be friends with even strangers, how can people be safe and secure? As explored in the last chapter of this second part, Facebook is not at fault. In actuality, it can help us to better control our privacy; we can control what we want to share and what we don't want to share. Ultimately, it's up to us to decide what should and should not be plastered all over our facebook pages.
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