i be naija

At a thanksgiving party hosted by a friend recently, there was a noticeable frenzy to take, and be in, photographs. Apparently, everyone knew that the pictures would inevitably end up on Facebook and it seemed everyone wanted to ensure that they were properly represented. True enough, while the photographing was going on, one of our other friends was on … Facebook. Such was the fever that our host remarked, “Facebook will soon consume everybody’s life.” We all laughed.

Of course, this is no laughter matter… I’m still grappling with the Facebook phenomenon myself:

2004

• Three Harvard nerds (led by Mark Zukerberg) found “The Facebook”
• 09/ the owners of ConnectU file suit against FB, alleging that Zukerberg stole source code from them
• FB receives ~ $0.5M from PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel in an angel round
• 12/ FB’s user base exceeds one million

2005

• 05/ FB raises $12.8M in venture capital from Accel Partners
• 08/ FB buys the domain name facebook.com from the Aboutface Corporation for  $0.2M
• 10/ FB’s expansion trickles down to most small universities and junior colleges in the United States, Canada, and the UK

2006

• 03/ BusinessWeek reports a potential acquisition of FB. FB reportedly declines an offer of $750M; it is rumored the asking price was as high as $2B
• 04/ Peter Thiel, Greylock Partners, and Meritech Capital Partners invest an additional $25M in FB
• FB launches an API that allows the development of applications to be used on the site, known as FB Platform
• 07/ FB announced its first acquisition, purchasing Parakey, Inc. from Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt
• 08/ FB is featured in a Newsweek cover story by Steven Levy in the magazine’s annual college edition

 2007

• 08/ FB hires YouTube’s former CFO Gideon Yu
• 10/ AP reports Microsoft has bought a 1.6% share of the company for $240 million (valuing FB at about $15B)
• 11/ FB announces FB Ads; a marketing initiative which includes:
  •  a system for websites to allow users to share chosen information about their activities on the sites with their FB friends (FB Beacon);
  • the capability of businesses to host pages on FB for various brands, products and services (FB Pages)
  • a targeted ad serving program based on user and friend profile and activity data (FB Social Ads)
  • a service for providing businesses with advertisement analytic data including performance metrics (FB Insights).

Source: Wikipedia

On a personal level, the impact of Facebook has been profound. I have found friends from primary and secondary school, that I would likely have never seen again (in fact, one of such friends whose mother was my pediatrician, currently lives in Sweden! What are the odds I’d have ever run into him ever again?). Facebook has also provided numerous insights into the interrelationships among the people I know. The theme is recurrent: I discover that my secondary school classmate (in Lagos, Nigeria) is in fact the cousin of a Chicago acquaintance… or that a former neighbor is in fact the room mate of one of my buddy’s girlfriend—who is, by the way, the sister of another friend!

Of course, like everyone else, I have deep privacy concerns… do I really want my personal information (name, photos, e-mail address, up-to-the-minute statuses) so available? Do I really want the inter-relationships among my friends so clearly discernable? Are the benefits (finding old friends, gaining insights into interrelationships, keeping in touch, etc.) worth the risks (the biggest of which is related to privacy).

For now, I continue to be enamored of FB, yet leery of its potentials… I expect I will continue to enjoy FB (forging new friendships and relationships, rediscovering old friends, gaining insights into interrelationships), but will make an effort to mitigate potential risks by tightening my privacy options.

My biggest admiration for Facebook, through, rest with how extraordinarily innovative they’ve been (for example, their API offering turns out to be a game changer in the web app development space), how astonishingly responsive they’ve been to customer needs and yearnings, and how brutally on-point their execution of their business strategy has been.

Anyone with the slightest sliver of entrepreneurial aspirations better be taking notes.

Postscript: For whatever reason, here’s the Facebook that never came to be: ConnectU.