Good evening dear followers. This week we were asked to read the second section of Kirkpatrick's book, "The Facebook Effect". Kirkpatrick starts this section off by speaking of the investors who were willing to invest in thefacebook.com. At this end of this chapter I found it quite interesting as to what happened to Mark Zuckerberg the day he had signed the papers with Accel as the investor. While on his way in the wee hours of the morning to visit his girlfriend who was a Berkeley student, Zuckerberg was gettting gas when a man approached him with gun in hand ready to shoot Mark. Luckily, the man was so drunk or high that Zuckerberg took a chance and was able to jump into his shiny new Infiniti "the Warthog" (p. 127) and get away. He took a calculated risk by doing this, just as he did when he created thefacebook.com.
In 2005, the company dropped The from its name after purchasing the domain name facebook.com for $200,000. On September 20, 2005 the company officially became just, Facebook. What to do next? Zuckerberg and his cohorts wanted to broaden the membership of Facebook but which demographic should they turn to next. Facebook launched a high school version in September 2005, which Zuckerberg called the next logical step. At that time, high school networks required an invitation to join. Facebook later expanded membership eligibility to employees of several companies, including Apple Inc. and Microsoft. Facebook was then opened on September 26, 2006 to everyone of ages 13 and older with a valid email address.
Even though Facebook kept growing and growing Mark never for a second thought like a CEO of a million dollar company. He didn't think if profit or advertising venues in the least. He also didn't dress like a CEO as he was still wearing his college garb of a t-shirt, shorts and of course his trademark Adidas flip-flops. As time went on Facebook started seeing problems getting the "adult" demographic to join Facebook. People lead and start a bandwagon once someone else has, so adults didn't want to join until other adults were already there (p. 173). Perhaps facebook was all about students and the adult population didn't need to concern themselves with such a website; yeah right! Many advertisers started getting onboard and used Facebook to get college and high school students interested in their products; for example Chase, Apple and P&G.
In 2006, Facebook saw that its users wanted to know what was happening with their friends, what happened last night at a party, was "so and so" still single; but the clicks were endless for users to find out this information. Facebook became the page that one can turn to find out, "How are the people doing that I care about?" (p. 181) By the end of 2006, "Facebook had 12 million active users" (p. 198). It had come so far; from a dorm room at Harvard to a billion dollar business.
Until next time my dear followers when I conclude my thoughts and insight on, "The Facebook Effect".
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