Speaker 1: Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
Speaker 1: It's ready. Are you get in touch with technology? With
Speaker 1: tech Stuff from how stuff works dot com. Hello again, everyone,
Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff. My name is Chris Polette, and
Speaker 1: I am an editor at how stuff works dot com.
Speaker 1: Sitting across from me, as always, his senior writer, Jonathan Strickland,
Speaker 1: better face the facts. It seems you can't get enough. Ah, Yes,
Speaker 1: hundreds of millions of people can't get enough of our
Speaker 1: tot Well, yeah, I would say hundreds of millions. In fact,
Speaker 1: well I was gonna say, I'm sure a few hundred
Speaker 1: million of them are fed up with it because they
Speaker 1: did a design change probably in between the time we
Speaker 1: record this and the time that this actually goes live.
Speaker 1: But we're talking about Facebook, Yes, we have. We've recorded
Speaker 1: several podcasts about various aspects of Facebook, including Facebook and
Speaker 1: its stands on privacy or lack thereof, and uh and
Speaker 1: other other related topics, uh, Facebook apps. We did one
Speaker 1: on the Facebook redesign a couple of years ago, which
Speaker 1: is funny because they've been going to say several of
Speaker 1: them after that. Yes, there's been more redesigns since then,
Speaker 1: but we've never really talked about the actual history of
Speaker 1: Facebook and and how it developed into what it is today.
Speaker 1: And um, one of the things I'm really grateful about
Speaker 1: for this topic is that there was one definitive timeline
Speaker 1: that told us everything we needed to know. That no
Speaker 1: one was arguing about about how Facebook got started and
Speaker 1: who was responsible for it. Right, there's no controversy whatsoever,
Speaker 1: nothing in dispute except everything unless your name is Winklevoss. Yeah, ah,
Speaker 1: the Winklevosses. It's you know. On a side note before
Speaker 1: we get into this, it's hard for me to feel
Speaker 1: sympathy towards them. It's hard for many, many, many people
Speaker 1: to feel sympathy for that. When when you're known as
Speaker 1: being a handsome, wealthy young person who was on the
Speaker 1: Harvard rowing team, extremely athletic olympians exactly, you get to
Speaker 1: that point where you're thinking, okay, fine, but yes, the
Speaker 1: story of Facebook is um is mired in controversy. Actually,
Speaker 1: what you may know if you saw the film and
Speaker 1: I am not calling it a documentary because some people
Speaker 1: did think of it as a documentary, not the comedy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Social Network, which and believe it or not, this is
Speaker 1: a film that I have seen and Jonathan, but but
Speaker 1: Sorkin himself was very he very specifically pointed out, this
Speaker 1: is not a documentary. It was a dramatization based upon
Speaker 1: one account of the origins of Facebook, and it took
Speaker 1: a lot of liberties with the story for dramatic purposes,
Speaker 1: which is, you know, that's what movies do. So that's
Speaker 1: why I'm not going to call it. I jokingly call
Speaker 1: things documentaries when this case I definitely don't want to
Speaker 1: do like that. It is not a documentary. But there
Speaker 1: is some truth in it. Yeah, there's there's some truth,
Speaker 1: and some of it is still kind of ripped from
Speaker 1: the headlines. Yeah, I'll ripped from the headlines, but some
Speaker 1: of it is still kind of in that weird, nebulous
Speaker 1: realm of where does you know who's at fault and
Speaker 1: what exactly happened. But let's let's let's look back to
Speaker 1: the very beginnings. Um, we're talking about around two thousand two,
Speaker 1: one Harvard student named Divya Narinda had kind of come
Speaker 1: up with an idea for a platform for Harvard students
Speaker 1: to use that would allow them to connect socially with
Speaker 1: one another online, perhaps some sort of online social network
Speaker 1: for example, but that was back in two thousand two
Speaker 1: when He's first started getting the idea. Then he he
Speaker 1: met up with the Winklevoss twins Cameron Cameron and Tyler
Speaker 1: Winklevoss uh and together around in two thousand three. In
Speaker 1: the fall of two thousand three, they started to seriously
Speaker 1: discuss this and try and come up with a way
Speaker 1: of creating it, and their idea was going to be
Speaker 1: called Harvard Connections dot com. UH. It eventually would evolve
Speaker 1: into connect you dot com the letter letter you, which
Speaker 1: could mean connect you as in you the person, or
Speaker 1: connect you as in university because they had they had
Speaker 1: envisioned this as being a social network for college students.
Speaker 1: They were originally going to launch it on Harvard's servers
Speaker 1: and just to have Harvard students be involved, and then
Speaker 1: we're eventually planning to opening opening this up to students
Speaker 1: at other universities. So they start working on this this
Speaker 1: project and they hire They are not developers. They they've
Speaker 1: got the idea, but they don't have the expertise. So
Speaker 1: first they hire a guy named Victor gau g a
Speaker 1: o UH. They hire him, but Victor eventually decides he
Speaker 1: needs to leave the project. It's just two time consuming
Speaker 1: and he doesn't have the time and effort to be
Speaker 1: able to pour into it. But he comes up with
Speaker 1: a name of a guy that he thinks would be
Speaker 1: perfect to help them develop this project. That guy was
Speaker 1: a nineteen year old by the name of Mark Zuckerberg.
Speaker 1: I feel like I've heard that name, but I don't.
Speaker 1: I don't. Yeah, I'm sure I'll think of where I
Speaker 1: heard it before. Well, at this point, Winkle, the Winklevoss twins,
Speaker 1: and Nerenda are all seniors at Harvard. Zuckerberg at the
Speaker 1: time was a sophomore. So Zuckerberg comes onto the project
Speaker 1: and takes a look at what, talks to them about
Speaker 1: what they want, and says, yeah, this is a great idea.
Speaker 1: I'm going to help you build this out and I
Speaker 1: will um, I'll put the functionality in and we'll have
Speaker 1: more meetings about this. So this is all taking place
Speaker 1: in the fall of two thousand three. Yeah. Now, now,
Speaker 1: Zuckerberg had been working on other similar types of projects. Yeah.
Speaker 1: In fact, the reason why Victor suggested Zuckerberg in the
Speaker 1: first place is Zuckerberg was had launched a very high profile,
Speaker 1: controversial site at Harvard called face mash. Yes. And the
Speaker 1: reason why this was controversial was that what Zuckerberg did, Zuckerberg,
Speaker 1: as it turns out, seems to have a a fast
Speaker 1: and loose approach when it comes to things like privacy
Speaker 1: and rules that was more evident in the past than
Speaker 1: it is now. Arguably he's well, he's because now he's incorporated,
Speaker 1: he's been more careful about his personal views. His messaging
Speaker 1: is a little is maybe a little more careful, I think,
Speaker 1: probably because his lawyers have told him to be right.
Speaker 1: So what he did with face mash was that he
Speaker 1: used it was it was brilliant and it was brazen.
Speaker 1: At the same time, he created a site that what
Speaker 1: it would do is it would collect images of Harvard
Speaker 1: students from other from databases on at Harvard. He essentially
Speaker 1: hacked into these systems like the directories. Yeah, I guess
Speaker 1: hacked is probably too strong a term. He created code
Speaker 1: that would access these directories and pull information from them.
Speaker 1: So it wasn't so much as this is a closed
Speaker 1: system that he was trying to get access to. He
Speaker 1: was just grabbing information that was available and putting it
Speaker 1: on a new platform. Right. In this case, the information
Speaker 1: were photos would pull photos names of various students at Harvard, Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: And what face mesh would do is it would pair
Speaker 1: two people on a site and you would vote which
Speaker 1: person was more attractive, and it kept a tally of
Speaker 1: the people who were being voted the most attractive over
Speaker 1: and over again. So that part of the site was
Speaker 1: just this fun thing where you would go on and say, oh, well, uh,
Speaker 1: she's more attractive than than than she is, or or
Speaker 1: she and him or he and he whatever. He would
Speaker 1: vote and vote and vote and vote, and they would
Speaker 1: keep this tally. And then you could also go and
Speaker 1: look at the most attractive students at Harvard University. Um.
Speaker 1: This kind of upset the college board, the student board
Speaker 1: at Harvard, not to mention a few of the students
Speaker 1: who didn't want their pictures being judged up there. Yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: it Harvard's a little conservative, as it turns out. Um,
Speaker 1: so the students, uh, student board kind of brought Mark
Speaker 1: Mark Zuckerberg up on the you know, saying that this
Speaker 1: was not a very smart thing to do, that it
Speaker 1: was a violated privacy dude. Yeah, and uh he was not. Um,
Speaker 1: he was not expelled for this, but he was reprimanded
Speaker 1: for it, yes, and said that he was charged specifically
Speaker 1: with breaching security, violating copyrights, and violating individual privacy. So
Speaker 1: face mash gets shut down, but he had. He was
Speaker 1: fairly notorious on campus already because of this, and it
Speaker 1: was such a successful site. So he was thought of
Speaker 1: as a guy who could develop not just stuff that worked,
Speaker 1: but stuff that appealed to people. And that's why Victor
Speaker 1: had said, this is the guy you should get to
Speaker 1: help develop your connect you project. Now I didn't run
Speaker 1: across this in my actual research, but on the in
Speaker 1: the movie. Uh And again I don't know whether or
Speaker 1: not it's actual fact or that was gussied up for
Speaker 1: the script, but they said that one of the other
Speaker 1: problems that they had with it was that the it
Speaker 1: texts the university's network because it was very very popular.
Speaker 1: Um it was. It was definitely popular. Though whether or
Speaker 1: not it actually texts their broad band is yeah, I
Speaker 1: don't know about that, but yeah, the fact that it
Speaker 1: was very popular attracted that that would have attracted interest. Yes,
Speaker 1: so uh So anyway, Mark Zuckerberg joins the connect You team,
Speaker 1: and again this is taking place in the fall of
Speaker 1: two thousand three, fall and winter of two thousand three
Speaker 1: could possibly go. He's he starts sending the messages. When
Speaker 1: they're asking him, Hey, what's the status on this project,
Speaker 1: he starts sending back messages saying, Oh, I'm really busy.
Speaker 1: I've got a lot of schoolwork. But don't worry. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna be working on this. It's just I'm gonna have
Speaker 1: to put it off a little bit longer, but we'll
Speaker 1: be able to launch. We're just gonna probably launch a
Speaker 1: little later than we had planned. Uh, skip ahead into
Speaker 1: two thousand four and then uh, specifically, February four, two
Speaker 1: thousand four, Zuckerberg launches a an online site called the
Speaker 1: Facebook dot com for Harvard students, and it's a social
Speaker 1: site where people can create profiles and connect with other students,
Speaker 1: which might sound a little similar to something that the
Speaker 1: Winklevosses were working on. In fact, the Winklevosses loot so
Speaker 1: and within six days of Facebook being launched, the Winklevosses
Speaker 1: and Nearinda said, Dude, you're working for us, and this
Speaker 1: thing that you just launched looks an awful lot like
Speaker 1: the thing we want to launch. What's up with that?
Speaker 1: And you were telling us this whole time that you
Speaker 1: didn't have the time to work on our project that
Speaker 1: we thought you were a part of. And in fact,
Speaker 1: this later developed into a very serious lawsuit against Facebook,
Speaker 1: which stretched on for several years and it um In fact,
Speaker 1: it went on until two thousand eight, when there was
Speaker 1: a settlement and settlement for sixty five million dollars, and
Speaker 1: then the Winklevosses decided to um appeal that settlement, saying
Speaker 1: that really doesn't reflect the enormity of the problem here,
Speaker 1: whereas the judges in the cases I was reviewing, we're
Speaker 1: essentially saying, hey, this wasn't Zuckerberg was not under a contract.
Speaker 1: This was like just people chatting in a dorm room.
Speaker 1: It wasn't. It wasn't like a legally binding thing. And
Speaker 1: and you haven't really proved than that, Uh, Zuckerberg stole
Speaker 1: information from connect You, And in fact, most of the
Speaker 1: reports I read suggests that the way he implemented things
Speaker 1: on the Facebook dot com was not the way they
Speaker 1: were trying to implement things for connect You. In fact,
Speaker 1: that they us Zuckerberg himself referred to Connect You as
Speaker 1: more or less a dating site, which to him was
Speaker 1: too narrow a view. He didn't want to create a
Speaker 1: site just to try and find a date. He wanted
Speaker 1: to create a site that would allow people to connect
Speaker 1: with one another on multiple levels, not just trying to
Speaker 1: find a relationship. So, uh, it may very well be
Speaker 1: that the Facebook dot com and connect you dot com
Speaker 1: we're not identical. Like, it wasn't that that Zuckerberg was
Speaker 1: stealing stuff to implement into Facebook. It's just that the
Speaker 1: two platforms were at least similar, they were going after
Speaker 1: a similar population. The fact that were going across the
Speaker 1: identical population originally because it was going to be the
Speaker 1: Harvard students, right, and that Zuckerberg was purposefully holding back
Speaker 1: the connect you projects so that he would have a
Speaker 1: favorable launch for Facebook, which again you might say it's unethical,
Speaker 1: but it's different. It's a different kind of unethical than
Speaker 1: stealing intellectual property. So I can't I don't think Zuckerberg's
Speaker 1: hands are clean in this, not fully clean, but I
Speaker 1: don't necessarily believe he was lifting ideas from the wink
Speaker 1: of voss is. But he certainly wasn't helping their cause
Speaker 1: at all. And in fact, um that's really evident now
Speaker 1: because Facebook is huge and connect You is not. It
Speaker 1: doesn't exist. Yeah, And then there's Ah, then there is
Speaker 1: a person named Aaron Greenspan, uh who who was working
Speaker 1: on his own site, which he was calling House System. Um.
Speaker 1: And in two thousand and three he now he's at
Speaker 1: Harvard student And in two thousand three he was promoting
Speaker 1: his site with the brand new feature called the Facebook,
Speaker 1: which showed up before the Facebook dot com. And uh,
Speaker 1: you know, so there are several people who would like
Speaker 1: to disagree with Zuckerberg's assertion that he was the one
Speaker 1: who came up with the entire thing himself, right, And
Speaker 1: then there's there's some other problems too. Um, there's some
Speaker 1: other controversies in this these early days of Facebook. So
Speaker 1: six days after Facebook launches, there's the complaint from the
Speaker 1: Winklevoss twins um and uh. And Zuckerberg starts to worry
Speaker 1: that that the college is going to get involved in
Speaker 1: this dispute, and in fact is worried about um, the
Speaker 1: folks from connect you at connecting with the the university newspaper.
Speaker 1: So uh, Harvard crimson is one of the problems. So
Speaker 1: so he starts to it starts to really get complicated. Now,
Speaker 1: at one point there were allegations of Zuckerberg hacking into
Speaker 1: connect you profiles to make them less useful, and that
Speaker 1: he was supposedly um accessing connect you profiles and changing
Speaker 1: a setting to turn profiles invisible to other people. So
Speaker 1: if you log into your profile, you might say, why
Speaker 1: is no one interacting with me? And it's because no
Speaker 1: one can find you because he had gone in there
Speaker 1: and reset your your settings so that it was a
Speaker 1: private profile. Uh. And so it was essentially a case
Speaker 1: of sabotage if those allegations are indeed true. But beyond that, uh,
Speaker 1: there was the point of worrying about the Winkle bosses
Speaker 1: going to the Crimson and saying Zuckerberg ripped us off.
Speaker 1: And so the Crimson reporters, for their part, were doing
Speaker 1: their due diligence and reporting the news and trying to
Speaker 1: research this before they ran a story. So they went
Speaker 1: to Zuckerberg and they asked him, you know, about the allegations,
Speaker 1: and he said, look, the stuff on the Facebook dot
Speaker 1: com the platform is totally different and the implementation is
Speaker 1: totally different from connect you. And he said I can
Speaker 1: even prove it. And originally he wanted them to sign
Speaker 1: a non disclosure agreement. Uh, while he showed them that
Speaker 1: the two systems were totally different, but they're reporters, and
Speaker 1: they said, uh, we don't do that because then we
Speaker 1: couldn't report on it. What would be the point. So
Speaker 1: eventually Zuckerberg agrees to show them without the use of
Speaker 1: an NDIA, and they also come to the same conclusion.
Speaker 1: They say, no, these two systems are different enough so that, uh,
Speaker 1: we don't see that there's really any allegation that could
Speaker 1: be supported by this. We don't really think there's a
Speaker 1: story here. So they kind of back off, but the
Speaker 1: story doesn't in there. The Winklevoz continue. The wink Winklevoss
Speaker 1: twins continue to pressure the Crimson reporters, saying, look, there's
Speaker 1: something more here and we need you to really look
Speaker 1: into this, and so the story keeps on moving. Zuckerberg
Speaker 1: doesn't know what's going on and allegedly decides to access
Speaker 1: the reporter's email to hack the reporter's email, although it's
Speaker 1: not really hacking because here's what he did. He looked
Speaker 1: at the servers for the Facebook dot com. He looked
Speaker 1: for profiles of people who were reporters or worked for
Speaker 1: the Crimson, and then he looked for any records of
Speaker 1: failed lugin attempts and looked at the failed passwords to
Speaker 1: guess the real password, and then assumed that the real
Speaker 1: password for the Facebook dot Com account would likely be
Speaker 1: the same one used for the email, then logged into
Speaker 1: the email. Yeah, so not really hacking, because hacking would involve,
Speaker 1: you know, some sort of guesswork or decrypt ing or No.
Speaker 1: He was just taking a list of passwords that he
Speaker 1: had available to him because he was the one running
Speaker 1: the show at the Facebook dot Com and using the
Speaker 1: logic that most people don't bother with creating different passwords
Speaker 1: for different accounts. This, by the way, is where we
Speaker 1: tell you make different passwords for your various accounts. It's
Speaker 1: a pain in the butt, but it prevents stuff like
Speaker 1: this from happening where someone you know, you never know.
Speaker 1: There may be a service that you connect to and
Speaker 1: everyone but one person in that company is on the
Speaker 1: up and up, but that one person is kind of
Speaker 1: a jerk, and then they use that information to try
Speaker 1: and access your your stuff elsewhere. That's why you need
Speaker 1: to have different passwords, unique passwords for each place. So
Speaker 1: he starts to try and access email. The ironic thing
Speaker 1: here was that the reporters had come again come to
Speaker 1: the conclusion that there isn't really a story there, and
Speaker 1: so they weren't really moving on stuff. They were going
Speaker 1: to report the story, but they weren't going to come
Speaker 1: down on uh. You know, this is a legitimate, uh allegation. Um,
Speaker 1: so that that's also kind of interesting. Uh. And again
Speaker 1: I have to say, all of these are allegations that
Speaker 1: have been leveled. There's no definitive yes he did or
Speaker 1: no he did not. There are the nials from Facebook
Speaker 1: essentially come down to we don't comment on that because
Speaker 1: we don't want to give more uh publicity to people
Speaker 1: who are dragging up mud and just slinging it at Zuckerberg.
Speaker 1: We stand by the success of Facebook dot com. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think there's really only one person who knows everything
Speaker 1: for sure. Yeah, and he's incredibly rich, so uh Yeah.
Speaker 1: Then in that same year, in two thousand four, in
Speaker 1: September two thoour he at the first round of of
Speaker 1: real investment money, which came from the former PayPal CEO
Speaker 1: Peter Thiel, who poured in half a million into Facebook.
Speaker 1: That's pretty impressive, although at the time before that, the
Speaker 1: man who was funding the Facebook servers was another Harvard
Speaker 1: student Eduardo Severin, Yes, and he was. He was a
Speaker 1: big part of the company for quite some time. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think he owned like a share of Facebook dot com,
Speaker 1: which seven or fifty million active users, multibillion dollar company.
Speaker 1: That's that's some that's some hard cash right there. So yeah,
Speaker 1: that's uh, that's the that's the really controversial part of
Speaker 1: the beginning of Facebook. And like we said, you know,
Speaker 1: there was the whole the whole lawsuit, the settlement, the
Speaker 1: appeal of the settlement, but there are other um parts
Speaker 1: of Facebook that had some controversy that same year. Uh
Speaker 1: for example, Well, first of all, before I jump ahead there,
Speaker 1: it launched in February, and March it opened up to
Speaker 1: not just Harvard, but to Stanford and Columbia and Yale
Speaker 1: as well. So March of two thousand four, now it's
Speaker 1: up open to four universities. Um. In June, that's when
Speaker 1: Zuckerberg's like, this is this is what I'm doing. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna be I'm gonna make a ment, this is my
Speaker 1: this is my meal ticket and he high tails it
Speaker 1: out to Palo Alto, California. That becomes the headquarters for Facebook.
Speaker 1: So Harvard no longer uh. In September two four, they
Speaker 1: add the application of groups so that you can create
Speaker 1: groups within Facebook, so that you've got your own like
Speaker 1: group of folks who have a similar interest or are
Speaker 1: from a similar place. Uh, and they add the wall
Speaker 1: to the profile because before we gotta remember, you know,
Speaker 1: today it's easy to forget that. When Facebook first launched,
Speaker 1: it was incredibly basic. You had a profile page. It
Speaker 1: was a profile page where people could find out more
Speaker 1: information about you. That was pretty much it. So if
Speaker 1: you wanted to have Jonathan on your list of people,
Speaker 1: basically you would bookmark the page and go back there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it would just really like a directory. It would
Speaker 1: be almost like an online business card, but a little
Speaker 1: more personal than that. And then, uh, but in September
Speaker 1: that's when they have two thousand four US when they
Speaker 1: added the wall feature where you could update little status
Speaker 1: is and that's where you got the whole you know, tonight,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna go out to blah blah blah. However, no education. However,
Speaker 1: to see what your friends were talking about, you still
Speaker 1: had to visit their profile. So in other words, if
Speaker 1: I wanted to know what Chris was up to, I
Speaker 1: would go to Chris's profile and read it on his page.
Speaker 1: It wouldn't show up on my page at all. We'll
Speaker 1: get into that because that's another thing, is that it's
Speaker 1: easy to forget when the features of Facebook got introduced. Yeah.
Speaker 1: As a matter of fact, I think a lot of
Speaker 1: people since um, since it was originally aimed at college
Speaker 1: students U, it may be difficult for the majority of
Speaker 1: the rest of us who didn't have accounts until Facebook
Speaker 1: went public um. And I don't mean I p O,
Speaker 1: I mean opened up to opened up to the public.
Speaker 1: Um that that we realized that and a lot of
Speaker 1: these features had already been implemented, the very basics had
Speaker 1: been implemented. Will be getting into one of those in
Speaker 1: a minute. But yeah, Uh, back then it was you
Speaker 1: had to be a college student or to be able
Speaker 1: to access Facebook at that point, and it before two
Speaker 1: thousand four was over, they had switched from the Facebook
Speaker 1: to Facebook. Uh. Also, in fall of two thousand four
Speaker 1: they tried to launch, in fact, they do launch another
Speaker 1: service that connects to Facebook. This should sound familiar to
Speaker 1: anyone who's used any sort of application which requires you
Speaker 1: to connect through Facebook. First, they called it wire Hog.
Speaker 1: Do you remember wire Hog? No, I don't wire Hog.
Speaker 1: I mean I've heard of it, but I don't remember it.
Speaker 1: So wire Hog launched in two thousand four, fall of
Speaker 1: two thousand four, and the idea was that it was
Speaker 1: going to be a sharing platform that would allow you
Speaker 1: to share things like photos or music from your computer
Speaker 1: with other people, so almost like a peer to peer thing.
Speaker 1: But it used Facebook's log in system as a connector.
Speaker 1: So it was a precursor to a lot of the
Speaker 1: other websites and applications that you know, you you log
Speaker 1: in through Facebook and then you can interact more with
Speaker 1: that site. It kind of was a predecessor to that
Speaker 1: now because of the file to file sort of relationship
Speaker 1: with you know, the fact that the whole peer to
Speaker 1: peer networks and file sharing got a super bad name
Speaker 1: because of piracy, rampant piracy. Uh, Facebook dropped wire Hog,
Speaker 1: and they do not really refer to that at all anymore.
Speaker 1: But that originally was going to be a huge platform,
Speaker 1: and Zuckerberg and and Facebook had poured a lot of
Speaker 1: of time and effort into creating a and all indications
Speaker 1: early on seemed to be that wire Hogg was going
Speaker 1: to be just as big, if not bigger than Facebook itself.
Speaker 1: It's just that because of all the heat, they decided
Speaker 1: to drop it. Yeah. Some people have said that it
Speaker 1: was because it wasn't taking off as fast as they
Speaker 1: had hoped, and it was sort of distracting them from
Speaker 1: the possibility that, uh, they could promote Facebook more thoroughly.
Speaker 1: But I think it's more that they didn't want the
Speaker 1: legal headaches, legal head Yeah, no, I think I totally
Speaker 1: agree with you. So, but it did it did provide some, uh,
Speaker 1: some clues as to what Facebook could do because and
Speaker 1: I speaking of the connecting other parts of the web
Speaker 1: to Facebook and vice versa, which we see a lot
Speaker 1: of now. Yeah, well by December of two thousand four,
Speaker 1: so it's not even quite a year old, yet they
Speaker 1: had almost hit a million active users, and uh it's
Speaker 1: big news. I mean now, granted, at this point, my
Speaker 1: Space is already up and running as well and is
Speaker 1: way ahead of Facebook because my Space did not limit
Speaker 1: itself to just college students. What about friends? Friends Store
Speaker 1: was never well, Friendster was. Friendster was big because there
Speaker 1: was nothing else to do to use at that point,
Speaker 1: so Friendster was not. Friendster would later come into the
Speaker 1: story again, but was not not not as big a
Speaker 1: player well, I guess it was a little larger at
Speaker 1: that time, but not not from very much longer. Yea,
Speaker 1: it was something ork. It was also out, but orch It,
Speaker 1: which was Google's social network, didn't really take off except
Speaker 1: in other countries like Brazil and India, never really took
Speaker 1: off in the United States or anywhere else in North America.
Speaker 1: Considering though the head start that some of these other
Speaker 1: sites had, um it is it is almost shocking in
Speaker 1: in uh in hindsight to see how Facebook out maneuvered
Speaker 1: them and so many different and there's so many they
Speaker 1: were there. There was a lot of hubris on the
Speaker 1: part of the other companies as well. There's no we're
Speaker 1: too big to fail. There's no way this little upstart
Speaker 1: company is gonna cause problems for us. I should also
Speaker 1: add now that I misspoke earlier. I said that the
Speaker 1: Facebook dot com became Facebook, and two thousand four it
Speaker 1: did not. It was August two thousand five. Was looking
Speaker 1: at the wrong section of my notes. So for all
Speaker 1: those people who wrote in to tell me I was wrong,
Speaker 1: you were right, um But I did correct myself before
Speaker 1: the end of the podcast, So shame on you for
Speaker 1: pausing it and writing to me before you finished. Um.
Speaker 1: Moving on. By September of two thousand five, that's when
Speaker 1: Facebook opens up to high school students. So now it's
Speaker 1: colleges and high schools. And by the end of two
Speaker 1: thousand five they're up to five point five and a
Speaker 1: half million users active users. They also in that year
Speaker 1: added uh, folks Photos as an application, so you can
Speaker 1: have a photo book inside a photo album inside your
Speaker 1: Facebook profile. Now, I think when I first joined Facebook, uh,
Speaker 1: the there was a limit to how many photos you
Speaker 1: could have within an album, and it was sixty. So
Speaker 1: if you want to upload, if you had more than
Speaker 1: sixty photos for an event, you had to actually create
Speaker 1: two albums at least to be able to house them all.
Speaker 1: It's different now, um, but yeah, back then that was
Speaker 1: that was it was still really cool. I mean the
Speaker 1: fact that you know, people could actually have a place
Speaker 1: where they interacted and they could share photos. It wasn't
Speaker 1: just a photo sharing site uh meant that it had
Speaker 1: some added value. By April of two thousand and six,
Speaker 1: they had raised more than more than twenty seven million
Speaker 1: dollars in invent your capital. Uh. Every year, essentially Facebook
Speaker 1: was getting more and more investments. Uh. It took a
Speaker 1: while for Facebook to find a business model that was
Speaker 1: going to work out for them. Now, of course, today
Speaker 1: we know that they use a lot of advertising to
Speaker 1: generate revenue. And this would be a good time to mention.
Speaker 1: If you ever see a message on Facebook that says
Speaker 1: be aware that Facebook is going to start creating premium
Speaker 1: accounts or charging people to use Facebook, that's just a hoax.
Speaker 1: It doesn't if you think about it for a second,
Speaker 1: it makes no sense for Facebook to do that. You
Speaker 1: could argue, Facebook has seven million users. If it charged
Speaker 1: for access, think of all the money they can make. Well,
Speaker 1: that assumes that the seven million people wouldn't immediately say no,
Speaker 1: I'm out. Uh yeah, yeah, I imagine a lot of
Speaker 1: people would bail on that. And they already have a
Speaker 1: very lucrative position because they have chosen to partner with
Speaker 1: pretty much everybody and they are working you know, people
Speaker 1: are working with Facebook on revenue opportunities, so there's no
Speaker 1: need to charge for and if yeah, and if face,
Speaker 1: if Facebook makes a lot of its money through advertising,
Speaker 1: well it would it would put those relationships with its
Speaker 1: advertisers in jeopardy because the advertisers would say, hey, wait
Speaker 1: a minute, you're driving away our audience. That's what we're
Speaker 1: paying you for. We're paying you for access to these people.
Speaker 1: If you drive those people away, then why are we
Speaker 1: paying you. So it makes no financial sense at all
Speaker 1: from Facebook's perspective, to create a premium account or start
Speaker 1: charging people. It makes way more sense to keep it
Speaker 1: as open as possible because ultimately the product that Facebook
Speaker 1: is selling is you. Your information is what is valuable
Speaker 1: to Facebook's advertisers, and so it makes way more sense
Speaker 1: for Facebook to try and gather as many of us
Speaker 1: as there as it possibly can, and it makes no
Speaker 1: sense to try and limit that. So if you ever
Speaker 1: do see that making the rounds at Facebook, just know
Speaker 1: that it's a hoax. Also, most of them say paste
Speaker 1: this in your status update to prevent it from happening
Speaker 1: to you. How does that make sense anytime anybody? And
Speaker 1: that goes for email too, When people say share this
Speaker 1: with all of your friends, that's usually a signal or
Speaker 1: some sort of chain letter or something. Yeah, I just
Speaker 1: don't understand. I don't understand because there's someone at Facebook
Speaker 1: who says, no, we shall turn on the premium account setting.
Speaker 1: Oh eight. He posted that in his status update last Wednesday,
Speaker 1: trat you escape my defarious plan. I like to think
Speaker 1: they do that, but I doubt it. I have no
Speaker 1: follow up to that. Yeah, I've had a lot of
Speaker 1: coffee this morning, all right, So tangent aside. Back back
Speaker 1: to the story of Facebook. So moving through two thousand six,
Speaker 1: they start to work to to flesh out Facebook even more, uh,
Speaker 1: and they start to create something that in September two
Speaker 1: thousand six made a big thud in Facebook. Today it's
Speaker 1: instrumental in the way we use Facebook. But at the
Speaker 1: time people saw it and said, whoa which was the
Speaker 1: news feed and the mini feed? Yeah, the news feed
Speaker 1: the mini feed, but the news feed, you know, this
Speaker 1: is where you would log onto your Facebook account and
Speaker 1: suddenly you had a centralized view of what your friends
Speaker 1: were up to. And it wasn't like that before. Remember before,
Speaker 1: if you wanted to find out what your friends were
Speaker 1: up to, you had to visit their profile to find out.
Speaker 1: But now you had a place that was funneling their
Speaker 1: activities into your news feed. And some people really I
Speaker 1: thought this was terrible. And then they did something else
Speaker 1: that was very controversial. What they sold out man, Well,
Speaker 1: yeah they did that too. They allowed the regular guy
Speaker 1: two and and and you know lady to join. They
Speaker 1: no longer had to be a student to join. Same Yeah,
Speaker 1: the same month that they opened up the news feeds.
Speaker 1: So for most of us who joined Facebook once we could,
Speaker 1: we only knew Facebook using the news feeds. So for
Speaker 1: us it was not a big deal. But to the
Speaker 1: people who had been there before, it was a very
Speaker 1: big deal. And uh, and admittedly there were some missteps,
Speaker 1: and in fact, Zuckerberg apologized for the way the news
Speaker 1: feed was implemented. This would not be the first time
Speaker 1: that Zuckerberg or the last time that Zuckerberg would offer
Speaker 1: an apology based upon what Facebook had done the last No,
Speaker 1: it will not be. But the the problem was that
Speaker 1: a lot of the activities were showing up in news feeds,
Speaker 1: whether people wanted them to or not, and so Facebook
Speaker 1: eventually had to, you know, they had to tweak the
Speaker 1: privacy settings behind the scenes so that not everything would
Speaker 1: publish all the time. So for example, the poke feature,
Speaker 1: where yeah, all it is just a little thing where
Speaker 1: it sends a message to someone saying that they've been poked.
Speaker 1: That's all it is. That's it. But some people use
Speaker 1: as a way of flirting or whatever, or or irritating
Speaker 1: someone they did. They did not want it publishing on
Speaker 1: everyone's news feed that they had poked someone else, especially
Speaker 1: if they were a pathological poker, if they were poking
Speaker 1: lots of pe bowl. They didn't want people to see that, like,
Speaker 1: especially if you're using it as flirtation, right, pathological. Let's
Speaker 1: say that I want to send a poke to some
Speaker 1: dreamy gal um. I'll say, Candice, I want to poke
Speaker 1: Candice uh formerly of stuff you missed in history class,
Speaker 1: and I send a poke to her. But then I think,
Speaker 1: you know what, Doblina, who is now on stuff you
Speaker 1: missed in history class, I want to I'm gonna send
Speaker 1: her a poke too. Well. I definitely don't want Cannison
Speaker 1: Deablina to see that I've poked both of them. That's
Speaker 1: just gonna be awkward. They don't listen to tech stuff,
Speaker 1: do they. I have no idea. All right, listeners, I
Speaker 1: need you all to raise your right hands and repeat
Speaker 1: after me. I promise I will not tell Candice or
Speaker 1: Debilina that Jonathan talked about them on text stuff. Okay, now,
Speaker 1: but that's an example of the sort of stuff that
Speaker 1: people were upset about. And of course they tweaked at
Speaker 1: Facebook tweak these things so that not everything would pop up.
Speaker 1: But yeah, it's kind of interest seem to think that
Speaker 1: the news feed was such a controversial, uh feature, when
Speaker 1: today it is like the central place people go to
Speaker 1: when there are using Facebook. Uh. By the end of
Speaker 1: two thousand six, Facebook had hit twelve million active users,
Speaker 1: so more than doubling in size from the previous year. Uh.
Speaker 1: And then in two thousand seven, you start getting into
Speaker 1: things like they had. They they start opening up and
Speaker 1: getting popular in Canada the United Kingdom, they launched the
Speaker 1: Virtual Gift Shop, which lasted for a while. Well less
Speaker 1: than six months later in April of two thousand seven,
Speaker 1: they had twenty million active users. It was starting to
Speaker 1: grow really really quickly. At this point that was almost again,
Speaker 1: that was almost doubled from just a few months previous.
Speaker 1: And in May two thousand seven, that's when they launched
Speaker 1: the Facebook platform. Now this was where people could develop, uh,
Speaker 1: develop sort of extensions or games or other features using
Speaker 1: Facebook as its own platform. Yeah. Yeah, this is this
Speaker 1: is what allows this is what allows all those games
Speaker 1: like Farmville and Mafia Wars and the zombie games and
Speaker 1: the pirate games and all of those different variations. Uh,
Speaker 1: they're using Facebook as a platform now. When it first launched,
Speaker 1: there was something like applications, but now there are thousands
Speaker 1: of them. And if you have the kind of friends
Speaker 1: who like to play lots of games and you yourself
Speaker 1: are not that kind of person, you know how irritating
Speaker 1: that could be. Although the hide feature is fantastic. Um,
Speaker 1: So then you go on a little bit further. We
Speaker 1: should also mention that Facebook, uh, in two thousand seven
Speaker 1: launched and then eventually buried something else that caused a
Speaker 1: lot of controversy. Beacons Beacon. I knew you could. I
Speaker 1: was like, I knew he was going to do that.
Speaker 1: I knew it. I almost said that before we started recording.
Speaker 1: I was gonna put money down, Um and I would
Speaker 1: have won. But yeah, So Beacon was this idea of
Speaker 1: Facebook being involved in transactions, like if you're starting to
Speaker 1: shop through Facebook, so that Facebook can market your shopping
Speaker 1: habits and your preferences to advertisers to target advertising specifically
Speaker 1: to you so that you would continue to shop online
Speaker 1: and spend more money so that more advertisers could be
Speaker 1: targeted to you. And um, the way it was implemented.
Speaker 1: People freaked out and said this is a terrible, gross
Speaker 1: violation of privacy, and Zuckerberg said, whoops, sorry, and they
Speaker 1: quietly killed it. Actually, I guess quietly is not really true.
Speaker 1: They publicly killed it. However, one could argue that today
Speaker 1: what Facebook is doing is essentially the same thing that
Speaker 1: Beacon was doing, is just not branded Beacon Beacan. As
Speaker 1: a matter of fact, in two thousand six, they had
Speaker 1: already begun partnering with other companies um to work together
Speaker 1: to uh share information um and and to share uh
Speaker 1: different stories and things on Facebook. UM. So this was
Speaker 1: sort of a logical extension of that. They've realized that
Speaker 1: their their customer base is an important source of revenue
Speaker 1: for the company. Um and as a matter of fact,
Speaker 1: Facebook and Microsoft we're working together before the end of
Speaker 1: two thousand seven to reach out to foreign markets. So
Speaker 1: um and then you know, the Facebook adds you know,
Speaker 1: funny they don't they don't. Facebook's official timeline doesn't mention
Speaker 1: Beacon by name. That's strange. I wonder why that is.
Speaker 1: It was a it was a black eye for the company. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it was definitely becoming something a very public uh
Speaker 1: publicly popular site they had the featured their presidential debates
Speaker 1: with ABC News in uh January two UM. They started
Speaker 1: releasing in foreign languages also in that year, with Spanish, French, German.
Speaker 1: UM launched the Facebook Chat application in April of two
Speaker 1: UM and got to a hundred million active users, which is,
Speaker 1: you have to think about it among the most popular
Speaker 1: sites on the Internet already by August two eight. And
Speaker 1: then there was Facebook Connect, yes, by the end of
Speaker 1: that and that Facebook Connect that's the one we've been
Speaker 1: talking about obliquely throughout this podcast, the one that allows
Speaker 1: you to create some sort of Facebook interaction on your
Speaker 1: site and have people log in through their Facebook log
Speaker 1: in account to create a profile on your site, so
Speaker 1: you don't have to log in create a user name
Speaker 1: and password on multiple sites. They will allow you to
Speaker 1: log in on other sites with your Facebook. It keeps
Speaker 1: you in Facebook's ecosystem. It's good for the consumer and
Speaker 1: that it simplifies how many you know accounts you have.
Speaker 1: It's good for Facebook because it means that they get
Speaker 1: even more information about you. UM, and it's good for
Speaker 1: the sites that you log into because it gives them
Speaker 1: a higher profile. Facebook being so incredibly popular by the
Speaker 1: way in two thousand nines, removing over to that. That
Speaker 1: was when Beacon was officially shut down. It was launched
Speaker 1: in two thousand seven. It was not officially shut down
Speaker 1: till two thousand nine. And by the way, the reason,
Speaker 1: you know, we talked about how it gives off gave
Speaker 1: away a lot of your personal information. One of the
Speaker 1: big reasons why people hated Beacon was that it would
Speaker 1: post things to your wall based upon your actual shopping habits. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you remember all those partners that they had. So if
Speaker 1: you went shopping at you know, I like toys dot
Speaker 1: Com and you bought a whole box of um construction toys,
Speaker 1: and all of a sudden, you went back to your
Speaker 1: Facebook while I went, wait a minute, how they know
Speaker 1: that I just spent two dollars on plastic bricks? Yeah.
Speaker 1: Or let's say that you went to some site and
Speaker 1: bought some jewelry for, uh, for your sweetheart, and your
Speaker 1: sweetheart is on for for a gift. Yeah, then your
Speaker 1: sweetheart suddenly knows that you bought this jewelry because it's
Speaker 1: it's posted right there in your Facebook. Or let's say
Speaker 1: you bought some uh, some jewelry for someone who's not
Speaker 1: your sweetheart, because you're sweetheart, says honey, you know I
Speaker 1: don't like amethysts, and then you said, but I didn't
Speaker 1: buy it, I mean, and then it goes to your relationships.
Speaker 1: That goes from from either either married or in a
Speaker 1: relationship to either single or it's complicated. Um. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: that's why people fought felt it was a real gross
Speaker 1: violation of privacy, was that it was posting all this
Speaker 1: stuff about you. So in two thousand nine probably took
Speaker 1: more time than you would expect. September twenty one, two
Speaker 1: thousand nine, Facebook shuts down Beacon. Yes, now check this out.
Speaker 1: Just some January two thine, Facebook gets to a hundred
Speaker 1: fifty million active users, February hundred seventy million active users.
Speaker 1: And if you like that, you can now click the
Speaker 1: like button because that's when that showed up April two million. Yeah,
Speaker 1: which is which is funny because that means it March
Speaker 1: slowed things down. Yes, and when it went up twenty
Speaker 1: five million from January to February and then up million
Speaker 1: from February to April. They'll catch up because in July
Speaker 1: they got two million, in September three million, in December
Speaker 1: three fifty million, which means they started the year at
Speaker 1: one fifty million and ended in three fifty million, So
Speaker 1: they more than doubled over the course of twelve months,
Speaker 1: and that was pretty incredible, especially when you consider how
Speaker 1: large it was already in August two thousand nine, that's
Speaker 1: when they um when Facebook purchased acquired a friend feed. Yes, uh,
Speaker 1: and then you started to see some of friend feeds
Speaker 1: kind of functionality implemented in the Facebook UI. Yes. So yeah,
Speaker 1: friend feed goes by by and becomes one with Facebook.
Speaker 1: I remember a lot of people being a not a
Speaker 1: lot of people, well yes, but I remember there were
Speaker 1: people who were upset, which kind of interested because canceled
Speaker 1: their friend feed accounts. But then friend feed wasn't that huge,
Speaker 1: but the people who were using it were upset are
Speaker 1: some passionate users. So then h February you get up
Speaker 1: to over four million, and then by July you get
Speaker 1: over to over five million active users. And in August
Speaker 1: they launch Places, which is a yet another location based
Speaker 1: service which we've seen throughout the Internet in various applications,
Speaker 1: and you can check in and you can check other
Speaker 1: people in, which that was a problem for a while too. Uh.
Speaker 1: Facebook had again had to tweak some privacy settings because
Speaker 1: the idea was that you could check people into places
Speaker 1: that you were at, and who's to say that you
Speaker 1: were to be honest about that. You know, maybe maybe
Speaker 1: I'm the kind of guy who wants to go to
Speaker 1: some sort of seed joint and uh, and I don't
Speaker 1: mind that I'm there, and I check in, and I'm like,
Speaker 1: I don't care if people know that I'm in, you know,
Speaker 1: this this biker bar. Then uh, which, by the way,
Speaker 1: I actually to go to biker bar, so hey, there's that.
Speaker 1: But then I think, hey, you know what would be funny.
Speaker 1: Chris is totally not the kind of guy who would
Speaker 1: go to this biker bar, but I'm gonna check him
Speaker 1: in anyway, and then everyone's gonna see that Chris is
Speaker 1: at a biker bar even though he's actually at home
Speaker 1: with his family. Yeah. I could have done that. Um,
Speaker 1: they've since tweaked that, so it's not like that anymore.
Speaker 1: But uh, yeah, that was what are you thinking? You
Speaker 1: kind of have some sort of verification process so that
Speaker 1: the person who's being checked in can say, dude, I
Speaker 1: am totally not there, or dude, I totally don't want
Speaker 1: people to know I'm there. What if I'm at the
Speaker 1: person who's not my sweetheart giving her this amethyst necklace
Speaker 1: I bought. Do you know how much trouble I got
Speaker 1: in when I bought the necklace? I am going to
Speaker 1: remove the soapbox from this room. Um so Yes, And
Speaker 1: by July eleven, the year in which we are recording this,
Speaker 1: they reached seven hundred fifty million users. Yeah. Also in
Speaker 1: twenty eleven, that's when they launched the timeline feature, which
Speaker 1: um arranges your your profile page, arranges your wall in
Speaker 1: a interactive time line, with the most recent posts to
Speaker 1: your wall being at the top and the oldest ones
Speaker 1: being at the bottom, with with a certain ones called
Speaker 1: out based upon mostly how many people liked or commented
Speaker 1: on that particular status update. So you might have one
Speaker 1: month where you updated your Facebook page a lot, but
Speaker 1: you're not going to see every single one of those
Speaker 1: entries necessarily represented in your timeline. It will just be
Speaker 1: the ones that got the most response. Uh. And because
Speaker 1: Facebook says, well, the algorithm guesses that those have to
Speaker 1: be the most important ones because they had the most activity.
Speaker 1: So then you look at your Facebook profile page now
Speaker 1: and it's a reverse timeline. Not everyone has implemented that.
Speaker 1: I've noticed because that's some of my friends have yet
Speaker 1: to activate that feature. I activated it during the developer
Speaker 1: phase to see what it was all about, and I
Speaker 1: actually kind of think it's neat. It definitely does post
Speaker 1: some privacy issues, but you have to remember that everything
Speaker 1: that shows up in that timeline is stuff you have
Speaker 1: chosen to share on Facebook. It's not like Facebook is
Speaker 1: graping data about you and inserting it into the timeline.
Speaker 1: It's just putting the stuff you've already inserted into the
Speaker 1: the system, uh, and putting it into the timeline itself.
Speaker 1: So if you're careful about what you and put in Facebook,
Speaker 1: then you shouldn't have any nasty surprises there. And you
Speaker 1: can tweak that too. You can change the setting so
Speaker 1: that not everyone can see it. Facebook also ended up
Speaker 1: implementing a lot of changes that seemed to um bear
Speaker 1: some resemblance to another social network that launched in Yeah,
Speaker 1: Google Plus. You know Google Plus? Head this I think Yeah.
Speaker 1: Facebook ended up doing a lot of making a lot
Speaker 1: of changes that some people have said was a direct
Speaker 1: response to Google Plus, including allowing you to subscribe to
Speaker 1: someone without being their friend. So that you would see
Speaker 1: public updates, kind of like you do on Google Plus
Speaker 1: or on Twitter. Also, they created lists that made it
Speaker 1: easier to filter people out so that you can publish
Speaker 1: updates to specific groups in a very stream line fashion.
Speaker 1: You could already do that for a while, but it
Speaker 1: wasn't the easiest thing in the world to do. You
Speaker 1: kind of had to know the system pretty well to
Speaker 1: be able to to post to the specific group of
Speaker 1: people you wanted to. Now it's a little bit more intuitive.
Speaker 1: They also included the the little uh was it called
Speaker 1: like the little timeline kicker thing? The name of it
Speaker 1: as escape ticker, the ticker timeline kicker. There you go,
Speaker 1: the ticker, the ticker on the side the right rail
Speaker 1: where you can see the the live updates that are
Speaker 1: going on amongst your friends, which may or may not
Speaker 1: have anything at all to do with you. That can
Speaker 1: sometimes get a little irritating because you can sometimes see
Speaker 1: that your friend or your friend is commenting on someone
Speaker 1: else's page and you don't know that other persons, so
Speaker 1: you're like, why do I care about that somebody's going
Speaker 1: to post this on our Facebook feed and go kind
Speaker 1: of annoying. Well, again, you can change the settings on
Speaker 1: your Facebook profile so that the the amount of information
Speaker 1: that will pop up in someone else's ticker is very limited. Now. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but if you don't know that, then that means that
Speaker 1: pretty much everything everyone interacts with is going to be
Speaker 1: popping up on tickers of all your friends. That gets
Speaker 1: really pretty irritating. So anyway, that kind of brings us
Speaker 1: up to speed. Now, there's lots of other stuff that's
Speaker 1: going on with Facebook. It's still not a public company.
Speaker 1: It's still a private company. There's a lot of you know,
Speaker 1: there's always conjecture about when it will go public if ever. Yep,
Speaker 1: there used to be conjecture about who would buy them.
Speaker 1: It's more of a conjecture about who who will they buy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because Facebook has purchased, has acquired several companies over it's
Speaker 1: in its past, so it's um and you know, we've
Speaker 1: seen it partner with other companies like Spotify. We haven't
Speaker 1: really seen full integration of Spotify. We've seen it integrated
Speaker 1: so that you can see what people are listening to
Speaker 1: if they have their settings uh set to public for
Speaker 1: their Spotify accounts. And of course in the United States anyway,
Speaker 1: you now have to log in to Spotify through Facebook
Speaker 1: if you were to create a new account. So that's
Speaker 1: irritated some people who said I wanted to use Spotify,
Speaker 1: but I don't want to use Facebook, and now you're
Speaker 1: forcing me to do that. So um, yeah, there's still
Speaker 1: some controversy there, and I'm sure there will continue to
Speaker 1: be controversy, especially since Zuckerberg himself has on past occasions
Speaker 1: made comments that essentially say he believes privacy is a
Speaker 1: thing of the past and that people who make a
Speaker 1: fuss over um features that violate privacy are really kind
Speaker 1: of out of date, like that's it's no privacy. Since
Speaker 1: privacy doesn't matter, then these complaints don't really matter. Although
Speaker 1: he'll still go and fine, if it will be it
Speaker 1: will make it be quiet. I'll stop violating a privacy
Speaker 1: so rampantly, or at least so so visibly. Um I
Speaker 1: am out of date? Yeah, yeah, no, I'm right there
Speaker 1: with you, Pillett. I personally think that some sense of
Speaker 1: privacy should be maintained. It doesn't necessarily mean that you
Speaker 1: shouldn't have any uh any presence online, but I don't
Speaker 1: think that we should just um feel compelled to share
Speaker 1: everything about us all the time. So it's too easy
Speaker 1: for someone to take advantage of you that way. I mean,
Speaker 1: we've the both of the guys in this room have
Speaker 1: had bitter experience of folks taking advantage of stuff and
Speaker 1: or you know, just unscrupulous people being unscrupulous and you
Speaker 1: don't want to give them more material to work with.
Speaker 1: So anyway, that's the story of Facebook. We're gonna wrap
Speaker 1: this up so it doesn't become the longest episode ever.
Speaker 1: If you have anything you would like this talk about,
Speaker 1: you can email us all right just sys Tech Stuff
Speaker 1: and How Stuff Work dot com, or you can drop
Speaker 1: us a line on Facebook or Twitter. The handle there
Speaker 1: is Tech Stuff hs W and Christna. I will talk
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