Facebook Effect 2

One of the things that separate Facebook from many other websites is the rate of growth. Before, when Facebook used to be exclusive to colleges, every time a new college was introduced to Facebook it spread like a virus. Something about it intrigued students and when their friends had it they had to have it. It was a networking effect that was also seen when things such as the internet and cell phones were created. Mark had created tool for communication that was not replicated by any other means, and as more users joined it became more useful.

“His central thought was that kids have a deep-seated desire to have certain kinds of social interactions in college and that what drives them is their extreme interest in their friends-what they are doing, what they are thinking, and where they are going“ (150).

It is a form of mass communication with a limited audience set by the user. It gives the user the opportunity to express themselves any way they want at a large scale with no repercussions. They are not judged by teachers or parents and only their friends see what they have to say. This is what drives facebooks enormous growth rate and the addiction of the users.  

Mark Zuckerberg still has control over Facebook to this day. Usually when that large of an investment (80 million) is made by a venture capitalist a large portion of the shares are taken by the company and eventually the founder of the company is reduced and his roles are given to other people. Mark needed a lot of money to sustain the amount of growth his site was getting. He constantly needed new servers and technicians to troubleshoot and expand the site. In order to get this funding he looked for outside investors who were looking to make an investment and earn some money. After facebook began to grow into the millions companies were eager to invest, and Mark took advantage of this to find the best deal possible. He ended up being funded by a company called “Accel” which valued his company at 98 million dollars. For a company founded by a 20 year old college student and 6 of his friends this was remarkable.

Other managerial issues he ran into was finding employees. Now that he had over 12 million dollars to put into the company he began to create growth. He was competing for some of the most talented programmers and engineers in the world with companies such as google. Facebook preferred young workers, and even persuaded students to drop out of college to work for them. “Why learn about it when you can just do it?” (165). After all this spending on computers, servers and employees he now had to begin to start creating a revenue for the site. He did not want the ads to interfere with any of the sites normal use and only cared about making enough to sustain the company. He began to make deals with advertising companies and individual companies who wanted to promote their products. This proved to be extremely effective, especially because the website consisted of mostly college students. The other tool they used for advertising is the information provided on the user’s profile. They could determine gender, age, interests and many other things through the Facebook profile. They can market products that the people viewing them might actually want. This is very useful for advertisers but seems like too much power for a single company to have over such a large amount of people. We can be never be sure what is actually being done with this information and who has access to it.