Facebook’s Founding Mythology
In Cambridge, Massachusetts, my home turf, there is a good-natured intramural rivalry between Harvard and MIT. Each may be a bastion of higher learning but they are very different places with different cultures. The rival taunts go something like this: Harvard people are good with letters but not so much with numbers. The engineers down […]
Facebook IPO Lessons
Like most people, I had the opportunity to review Facebook’s IPO filing yesterday and admit that, like Apple’s recent earnings announcement, this is pretty damn impressive. Here are a couple of lessons worth reinforcing: 1) People’s view of what is normal and acceptable in emergent online activities is constantly evolving. What Facebook deserves a lot […]
Birth of the Social
My favorite scene in The Social Network is when Mark Zuckerberg’s character has an epiphany that Facebook’s screen should have a field to designate a user’s status, as in relationship status or availability. Wait, I didn’t give something away did I? You’ve seen the movie, right? No? Go see it. I’ll wait. There. Zuckerberg, Facebook’s […]
The Face of Facebook
There’s an interesting article in the September 20 issue of The New Yorker on Mark Zuckerberg, CEO and founder of Facebook. Written by Jose Antonio Vargas it is a synopsis of a short life that includes a partial Harvard education — Zuckerberg dropped out a la Gates to run Facebook — and a whirlwind thereafter. […]
