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Zuckerberg's Side of 'The Social Network'
alkasem sent in a video clip where Mark Zuckerberg, speaking at Y-Combinator, tells
his side of The Social Network. He says [the movie-makers] "can't wrap their head around the idea that someone might build something because they like building things." I did really like that a monologue describing Zuckerberg building his first website was shockingly technically accurate — they mention tools, tasks and languages, and show screenshots that were all more or less exactly how we were doing things back then.
Enough said.
If you believe what the multi-billion dollar worth guy who owns the company which is making cash hand-over-fist while violating your privacy says about the roots of the website.
You couldn't get a more biased source.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Facebook was nothing new or revolutionary. There was Friendster way before it came along, Granted, FB was a lot better than MySpace (it's biggest competitor at the time), but that was more due to a failing on the part of MySpace than on the merits of FB. Social networking sites are not really complicated.. Why so much worship, hatred, and jealousy over this?
I don't mind that people make companies to make money. I just find it sad that he has to get up and lie about his own motivations. He's attempting to put a positive spin on his motivations when all his recent actions suggest just the opposite.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
Speaking as someone who was in college when facebook first started being used I have the strong feeling it started out as just an application he was building that he thought was cool. You generally don't put such hard limits on your user-base if you're simply interested in money right off the bat. Of course, once it started getting used and taking off the natural question is how do I best make money of this, and the natural answer is advertisements and data. Then your little hobby project turns into a profit driven company. I really don't think he had the foresight to sit down and say "How can I best create an internet phenomenon that everyone will use in order to get everyone's user data and information and sell it to advertisers to make millions?" and then immediately bang out facebook. That's generally not how people/life works. There's a natural progression and a shifting of goals/values, the world is not binary.
You couldn't get a more biased source.
You must be new here..... You post a summary on Slashdot, you get 30 more biased sources within 30 min.
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
All the comments say that he was in it for the money from the start. Facebook didn't have a real financial model for years. Facebook, which started at a single university, and spread to a few more, eventually opening up to anyone with a .edu address was a different Facebook than the one we know today. Maybe the percentage of slashdotters that were in college when Facebook was strictly for .edu user is so small you are unaware. Trust me, alotta people were pissed when Fb opened up to everyone and started commercializing- it has been downhill ever since- But to say that it has been a privacy violating money maker since the get go is complete bullshit.
It's extremely simple. Before Facebook, it was still considered weird to use your real name on a website. Most names on MySpace were like "johnnys123" rather than "John Smith". Obviously using real names is much more desirable, and one of the main reasons Facebook became popular. And the reason people were willing to use real names on Facebook was because you needed a .ac.uk or .edu email address to get an account, and only people from your uni could see your profile.
In a nutshell:
1. It was much more secure than the alternatives.
2. So people felt ok using real names and details, and allowing other people to see their profiles (because only people from the same uni could).
3. The use of real details made it much more friendly and useful.
There were other reasons too:
1. It didn't look like shit like MySpace. .ac.uk/.edu requirement it wasn't filled with idiots.
2. Due to the
3. Luck.
cant wrap their head around the idea that someone might build something because they like building things.
If someone just wanted to build something, why wouldn't they build something useful, instead of just profitable?
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I completely agree.
First, some claim Zuckerberg didn’t build Facebook. Zuckerberg was actually hired by fellow Harvard undergraduates to build a website similar to Facebook. The more accurate accusation as that he stole the idea of Facebook. All articles on the inception of the website clearly state that Zuckerberg wrote the code himself. No one is going to claim that Zuckerberg was the next Don Knuth, Facebook was mainly hacked together using PHP over a couple of nights.
Second, some claim Zuckerberg is just in it for the money. If that were true he could have sold out a LONG time ago for around $1 billion. I think the subtext about building things just because you like to build things is that Zuckerberg is building his company not just for the money. I seriously doubt most of the posters on Slashdot, at the age of 22 would not have taken $1billion for a side project they worked on at school. It takes a special kind of person to have that resolve. Those are the people we should venerate in this country not vilify.
Third, some claim Zuckerberg is a douche. This is largely irrelevant. Most of us geeks aren’t the nicest guys in the world, let’s be real. Borderline Asperger’s/autism is rampant as is narcissism and a complete lack of humility. Find me a geek without a major personality flaw and you haven’t found a geek.
Moreover, I find it ironic that men like Bill Gates and Zuckerberg are constantly shat on here, but Steve Jobs is lauded as the second coming of Christ. If you read about the early history of Apple, you could make perfect parallels between the criticisms leveled at Zuckerberg and Jobs’s rise and fall and rise. Steve Jobs is megalomaniac clearly demonstrated sociopathic tendencies, has questionable tech credentials and could not give two shits about his customers’ opinions. And Apple is all the better for it.
So why does /. hate Zuckerberg so much? I think it is largely a generational divide. Many of you come from the gold old days of tech (command lines, walking five miles in the snow to get your code to compile, etc) and don’t really understand that just because something wasn’t challenging in a technical sense it is still HUGELY useful to millions of people. I was basically part of the first generation to use Facebook in college. It has been a great service for keeping track of friends from high school and family on the other side of the country/world. I can share pictures, stories, articles, links, lolcats and memories on one unified platform. The interface has always been super user friendly and clean. For the vast majority of college students (and increasingly everyone else) Facebook is as essential and important as Wikipedia or YouTube (the latter’s founders sold out for around $165million to Google, I should remind you). So let’s chill with the hating on Zuckerberg’s success. It’s all just a bit tacky and hypocritical.
We never had "Second Life: The Movie"... I think only nerds and pedophiles actually played second life, whereas facebook is full of middle-aged divorcees suffering from empty nest syndrome.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Why should we venerate him because he didn't sold? I'd understand if he hadn't sold to prevent an "evil company" from taking over, but Facebook is already data mining people's private data. Selling wouldn't make it worse.
An obnoxious guy can be avoided. At most he's somewhat a pain for the few people who have to interact with him.
Zuckerberg is data mining the private data of millions of people, introducing protocols and formats incompatible with the standards (see OpenGraph), sucking info frm other websites while at the same time not providing themselves, and more.
He and his company has a stronghold over the web that no average geek has.
Ok, here you're talking about a different Slashdot.
Bullshit. /. has plenty of "fresh blood" (myself included) and lots of new technologies are well regarded here by both old and young.
Plenty of stuff is well regarded even if it isn't challenging in a technical sense. Stack Overflow isn't exactly rocket science and yet every programmer I've read likes it (or at least, doesn't hate it).
We simply value privacy more than the general people, who in many cases don't even understand the concept. We don't like being tracked, data mined, followed, spied upon, logged.
We also don't like releasing control of our data over to others, to do as they please. We know the perils of that.
Most people are ignorant about it, just like I'm ignorant about many other stuff less related with my interests.
But don't get me wrong: I don't "hate" Zuckerberg. But you won't find me on Facebook, and it's not because it's not useful.
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Who cares why he does anything? He's not a remarkable person. Why do you think the book was called Accidental Billionaires?
More notable is his lack of character. He got where he did by screwing over friends, breaking contracts, and treating FB users with contempt.
Despite some other posts here, not all geeks are like that. The Google guys actually invented something incredible, revolutionized the world, created whole industries, and seem to still have a bright future ahead. Fyodor of NMap created a tool that deserves more geek cool cred than FB + Google combined, yet he manages to remain modest, describing himself as a benevolent steward of his project, even as he makes money from the project and contributes back to the open source / security communities. I can respect those guys.
I fail to see any kind of genius in FB or zuckerberg. PHP ain't rocket science.
The facts we know are that Zuckerberg has made his fortune on selling Facebook users up the marketing river. That speaks to his character, and many people will conclude from his actions--not without some justification--that he lacks credibility in matters of truth.
I realise it may come as a shock to some, but just because you've done nothing legally wrong doesn't mean people will be inclined to think you're very trustworthy. PR will only take you so (very) far before people start connecting the dots.
May the Maths Be with you!
It's still weird to use real names on websites.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
This is a fallacy.
What part? All he is trying to convey is that the claims of Zuckerberg being in it for the money from the start are not true. If that's the case for every website out there, it still makes the parents claim true.
And I think you are a little confused about it. Facebook wasn't designed with a "Let's be free to grow as fast as possible" scheme in mind. It didn't have financial incentive UNTIL it got big, but Amazon had financial incentive all along, but didn't invoke any of its plans until it got big. There is a difference.
Maybe he didn't want to bother with implementing interoperability because he had other aspects of the website he wanted to focus on. I know that if I had a pet project going, and some outsider insisted that I should do X, Y, and Z because it is right and just makes sense, I might respectfully tell them to piss off because I would rather work on U, V, and W. It is my project after all, right?
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I think Zuckerberg managed to do exactly that... though that doesn't mean it is good idea.
You can't have a hit product without haters. Part of the hating is fueled by jealousy from not coming up with the idea themselves.
You have no business here on /. Get out
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?