25 July 2013

Why Facebook Matters (my experience from the inside)


NOTE: If you work for Facebook, you really don't have to read this. My intended audience is my friends from college or New Zealand who frequently use Facebook but have never considered it as anything other than a way to procrastinate, all of what I say below will be probably extremely redundant and obvious to anyone who works here.

So, as those of you who have known me for a few years and/or have followed my blog before will know, I have always been pretty pro-facebook. I have made posts before about how I think it's an advantage for everyone around me to get Facebook as a way to stay connected and remain "in the loop" about the current affairs of those who they care about. I made that post 3 years ago, at a time where 500 million people were on Facebook. Today, that number has more than doubled. There are 1.2 billion users on Facebook today, and 700 million of them are active daily. I spoke at that time because speculation was starting about whether the website would last, whether they would fade into the background as something new came to take its place, as many of its predecessors did. I watched in the last few years as Facebook became more and more invasive, and that little blue "Login with Facebook" bar seemed to pop up more often on other websites I visited. I thought to myself as I watched this that Facebook is probably something different, with far greater potential than the other social networks that people kept comparing it to.

My belief that Facebook was special began to be reaffirmed by my experience here this summer. I started my summer internship on July 1, and in less than 4 weeks Facebook has proved itself to me as an employee that what it's doing in the world matters -- and now I'm writing this because I want to share that experience with my friends who are not of the tech world, as a response against those who see it only as a distraction from exam studying, who are annoyed by the ads and the constant changes, who see social networking as a sad replacement for real life interaction.

Facebook aims to provide not only a service, but a great one. There is no way 10 years ago you would have been able to reach a billion people on Earth, even with the internet. No forum was that huge. Facebook is not meant to be a closed circle between you and your closest friends only; it serves as a complement to real life interaction between you and your best friends, not a substitute. Many complain that their Facebook 'friends' are not really their friends at all, but the power of the social graph is undeniable -- 70% of jobs today are found through networking and personal connections. Obviously you will be close to your closest friends regardless of whether or not they are on Facebook. You will always find time and ways to reach those who you love the most. But what about those connections that you would like to keep around but maybe don't always have the time for? Friendships are not an all-or-nothing kind of deal, and this is where Facebook excels.

My thoughts on why Facebook has not fallen the way Myspace, Friendster, Bebo did -- they bring together not only people who already know each other, but potentially great future friendships and connections. Furthermore, their monetization strategy is reverse-motivated -- there is a poster around headquarters which essentially reads "We do not make things to earn money, we earn money to make things". Zuckerberg as a CEO truly cares about the positive social impact that Facebook has on the world. These are positive externalities far beyond the reach of a dollar symbol -- today, he addressed the entire company at headquarters in person (similar to the way he does every week, by the way, and answers any questions anyone in the company may have, including interns -- not something you would see at most other companies) and told us this story, as well as showed us a video that the men made to thank Facebook for making changing an entire village worth of lives possible. You'll have to take my word for it, but it was very compelling. This is a software company which monetizes on the people that use its service, yet keeps in mind that these people have real lives and real connections that transcend the statistics they sell to advertisers, and prides itself on bettering those lives with its service.

^ A poster design I see around campus a lot


On that point, ads -- people who complain about ads have really just never experienced real ads. Real ads are great content. It is the role of an advertisement to be entertaining, because that's how you engage your audience. Real ads are things that people actually do want to watch, which is why there is always so much talk about the ads which show during the Superbowl (and we all go and watch them on youtube even tho we supposedly hate ads). Facebook aims to deliver the same quality. Ads are a way for entrepreneurs to let you know about their product -- which, for a lot of companies, is an awesome product that you might actually have a use for (shock horror), which you would otherwise not know about. Think about your friends linking cool Kickstarter projects on Facebook. Proper, quality targeted ads are the exact same thing, and Facebook aims to be able to direct you to that really good niche Italian restaurant a block away when you're wandering around Melbourne at 7pm looking for something to eat. After all, Facebook should know you better than anyone -- creepy as it may be, once you get over the irrational fear of letting the service know more about you, you realize that you're just helping it help you better (more on privacy in a later post, perhaps).

So you can imagine, with such lofty goals and only having reached 1/7 of the world's population, why Facebook needs to be constantly changing. It cannot afford to become stale and settle and fade away like so many others have. It knows its potential and aims to keep going to better its service to you as the user. Cut Facebook a little slack, nobody's ever done this before and of course mistakes are made. They are cautious though and test extensively to make sure the changes they make are good ones, which may be why you feel they are fickle sometimes. Working here has made me realize just how hard these people work to bring the world such an awesome service -- and they're all super awesome people too! They try to move really really fast to bring the future to you ASAP, but sometimes Facebook is a little derpy and leaves things undone which may or may not cause that iOS app to crash unexpectedly; but honestly, what piece of software is perfect? Not that they're satisfied with this, even -- they are constantly aiming to bring you a more polished product and bugs are fixed live around the clock.

I really don't believe that Facebook is a waste of time in any sense, unless you make it so yourself. It's a great service that has managed to connect the world in ways people never expected, and is hungry for even more growth and improvement. Fortunately I think people are now starting to see, after the most recent quarter's financial report (and subsequent 20% rise in stock), that Facebook is not "just another social networking website". It truly has the power to change the way people connect in the world, and make us better off for it. The knowledge economy is non-rival, absolutely sustainable and is just beginning to be grown.

I was actually also going to talk about the Facebook paradox of privacy/making the world more open and connected as well as more about my own experience, but that can wait til another day, I don't want to make this post any more monster haha.

Last piece of food for thought: would you have known about any of this if not for Facebook bringing you to this page in the first place?