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.

Comments

Zuckerberg is so full of shit.

[kuzb]

He didn't build it because he "likes building things". He built it because he wanted to make money. Facebook is designed from the ground up to do just that - violate your privacy and make the company money in the process.

Re:Zuckerberg is so full of shit.

[betterunixthanunix]

it started out as just an application he was building that he thought was cool

Perhaps, but I have to wonder why, then, did he ignore calls for interoperability, even early on before he was a billionaire. Perhaps he didn't think interoperability was cool?

The way I see things, he saw how profitable social networking websites were becoming, and thought he would give it a shot. I doubt he knew that it would become so popular, but he certainly knew the concept was popular (or should I say, the people who thought up ConnectU saw the concept was popular, then Zuckerberg ran with the idea).

Re:Zuckerberg is so full of shit.

[betterunixthanunix]

So why does /. hate Zuckerberg so much?

Perhaps because the boy doesn't believe that privacy is a good thing? He is on the record as saying that anyone who wants privacy must be unethical. He uses Facebook to try to undermine the very concept of privacy in our society, and he is doing that at a time when the 4th amendment is being attacked by the government.

Or maybe we were all perfectly content with communicating with our friends and families using interoperable systems that are not designed to lock us in. Everything about Facebook is designed like the Hotel California, and Zuckerberg knows that but refuses to make any meaningful changes.

Re:No matter what he says...

[Jimmy King]

I'm sure he's in it strictly for the money now, but it is possible that initially he built it just because it would be fun. I've started a number of projects just to see if I could do it, what kind of difficulties come up that I haven't thought of, etc. and then later realized that it was actually kind of useful and I could probably make money off of it with some marketing and time spent maintaining it. The difference being he wanted the money bad enough to follow through on that thought while I have decided it was going to be way too much work with a high risk of failure in the end to be worth quitting my stable day job to try.

Re:Lapdogs

[netsharc]

A few years ago people were batshit insane about Second Life... and now it's disappeared from the headlines. Hopefully this will be the Year of Facebook, i.e. next year it'll be yet another niche company.