Facing the Facebook
Mark Zuckerberg is named Time’s 2010 Person of the
Year:
Lev Grossman
On the afternoon of November 16, 2010, Mark Zuckerberg was leading a
meeting in the Aquarium, one of Facebook’s conference rooms, so named
because it’s in the middle of a huge work space and has glass walls on
three sides so everybody can see in. Conference rooms are a big deal at
Facebook because they’re the only places anybody has any privacy at all,
even the bare minimum of privacy the Aquarium gets you.
Temperature Controlled: The center includes sophisticated
cooling systems and back up power supplies |
Otherwise the space is open plan: no cubicles, no offices, no walls,
just a rolling tundra of office furniture. Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s
COO, who used to be Lawrence Summers’ chief of staff at the Treasury
Department, doesn’t have an office. Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO and
co-founder and presiding visionary, doesn’t have an office.
The team was going over the launch of Facebook’s revamped Messages
service, which had happened the day before and gone off without a hitch
or rather without more than the usual number of hitches. Zuckerberg kept
the meeting on track, pushing briskly through his points — no notes or
whiteboard, just talking with his hands — but the tone was relaxed.
Much has been made of Zuckerberg’s legendarily awkward social manner,
but in a room like this, he’s the Silicon Valley equivalent of George
Plimpton.
He bantered with Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, a director of engineering who
ran the project. (Boz was Zuckerberg’s instructor in a course on
artificial intelligence when they were at Harvard. He says his future
boss didn’t do very well.
Lines of Communication: Cables connect servers in the center
with each other and the entire facility with the outside world |
Though, in fairness, Zuckerberg did invent Facebook that semester.)
Apart from a journalist sitting in the corner, no one in the room looked
over 30, and apart from the journalist’s public relations escort, it was
boys only.
The door opened, and a distinguished-looking gray-haired man burst in
— it’s the only way to describe his entrance — trailed by a couple of
deputies. He was both the oldest person in the room by 20 years and the
only one wearing a suit. He was in the building, he explained with the
delighted air of a man about to secure ironclad bragging rights forever,
and he just had to stop in and introduce himself to Zuckerberg: Robert
Mueller, director of the FBI, pleased to meet you.
They shook hands and chatted about nothing for a couple of minutes,
and then Mueller left. There was a giddy silence while everybody just
looked at one another as if to say, What the hell just happened?
It’s a fair question. Almost seven years ago, in February 2004, when
Zuckerberg was a 19-year-old sophomore at Harvard, he started a Web
service from his dorm. It was called Thefacebook.com, and it was billed
as “an online directory that connects people through social networks at
colleges.” This year, Facebook — now minus the the — added its 550
millionth member. One out of every dozen people on the planet has a
Facebook account. They speak 75 languages and collectively lavish more
than 700 billion minutes on Facebook every month. Last month the site
accounted for 1 out of 4 American page views. Its membership is
currently growing at a rate of about 700,000 people a day. (See a
Zuckerberg family photo album.)
Contained: These rows of servers are set up to minimize the
energy required to keep the data center running. |
What just happened? In less than seven years, Zuckerberg wired
together a twelfth of humanity into a single network, thereby creating a
social entity almost twice as large as the US If Facebook were a country
it would be the third largest, behind only China and India. It started
out as a lark, a diversion, but it has turned into something real,
something that has changed the way human beings relate to one another on
a species-wide scale. We are now running our social lives through a
for-profit network that, on paper at least, has made Zuckerberg a
billionaire six times over.
Facebook has merged with the social fabric of American life, and not
just American but human life: nearly half of all Americans have a
Facebook account, but 70 percent of Facebook users live outside the US
It’s a permanent fact of our global social reality. We have entered the
Facebook age, and Mark Zuckerberg is the man who brought us here.
Time.com
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