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 a douche

[Anonymous Coward]

Enough said.

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.

[binkzz]

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.

To be fair, his initial motivation wasn't money but to make something that let him share all the nude pictures of the girls at college.

Re:Zuckerberg is so full of shit.

[L4t3r4lu5]

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.

Re:Zuckerberg is so full of shit.

[kuzb]

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.

Re:Zuckerberg is so full of shit.

[kevinNCSU]

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.

Re:Zuckerberg is so full of shit.

[btcoal]

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.

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:Zuckerberg is so full of shit.

[icebraining]

I'll allow you and all the rest

Oh thank you good sir, how can we ever repay your generosity?

Re:Zuckerberg is so full of shit.

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

At least Zuckerberg knows whether what he is saying is the truth or not. All the people here who post definitively that he was only in it to make money are just giving their gut feeling and they cannot possibly be basing it on fact.

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.

I still can't understand how this all came to pass

[spiffmastercow]

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?

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.

Is noone here aware of the actual history of Fb?

[gblackwo]

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.

Re:Impressing girls

[Smallpond]

Yes, everyone knows you need python for that.

Re:I still can't understand how this all came to p

[Timmmm]

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.
2. Due to the .ac.uk/.edu requirement it wasn't filled with idiots.
3. Luck.

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.

Re:Lapdogs

[Dunbal]

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.

Next he'll be saying computers don't go beboop

[DrXym]

Hollywood strives for accuracy. The Social Network shows Zuckerberg as a precocious 9 year old. He sweeps his hands across the glass wall showing a flyover of facebook in 3D. When an adult asks if he knows what he was doing, he replies "Don't worry this site's password is only protected by fourth polynomial encryption, I'll break it in a few seconds!". With blur-like typing he sets off and the wall fills with a sea of random digits that appear to be crawling along a rotating DNA helix. All of a sudden the screen goes blank and is replaced by a big flashing ALARM sign and a wailing siren. "They must have traced my virus back to the mainframe" he says. "Run!". Then all the magnetic locks on the dinosaur enclosures are tripped and the rest of the movie seems them trying to escape the velociraptors. And that's exactly how it actually happened.