mark-zuckerberg

Correct out-of-touch New York style rag's Internet gossip!

Melissa Gira Grant · 10/01/08 03:20PM

It's complicated. God, is it ever. The same October Details story that follows around New York's "Internet playboys" and their bicoastal hangers-on runs with this chart of who dated, funded, or hated in this overdocumented side of the Web scene. So sweet to know we're not the only ones keeping a scorecard, but one of its subjects, Caroline McCarthy, claims there's inaccuracies! Let's do Details and the kids recently fanning their fameballs from the coverage a favor and fix it up then. Ready? Let loose in the comments with your errata.

Facebook still facing existential legal threat

Owen Thomas · 09/29/08 03:20PM

New Facebook lawyer Ted Ullyot will have his hands full. Before Mark Zuckerberg came along, every college had a facebook — a collection of pictures of the incoming freshman class, distributed in print. But now, there's only one Facebook. Aaron Greenspan, a Harvard student who came up with an online facebook called HouseSystem prior to the creation of Facebook, has long disputed Zuckerberg's claim to the idea — and he's been disputing the company's name, too. Records from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office now show that Greenspan's suit to cancel Facebook's trademark has resumed, having survived two motions to dismiss. The most probable outcome here: Like Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the twins who claim they hired Zuckerberg to work on their college social network, ConnectU, Greenspan will get paid off with a piece of Facebook, too.

3 ways Facebook could impress Madison Avenue

Nicholas Carlson · 09/24/08 05:00PM

NEW YORK — Facebook is making a huge push during Advertising Week, an industrywide series of events for media buyers and publishers taking place now. Mark Zuckerberg's marketing minions bought a full-page ad in the program; sponsored sessions on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday mornings; and put Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg on a panel. They're throwing a party Thursday night; Bob Marley's kid, Ziggy Marley, will be the entertainment. "We're finally sponsoring something!" I overhead one Facebook employee gush to another on Monday. It's all a big effort to reintroduce Facebook to the New York ad agencies after Zuckerberg botched last year's first try.Judging by Sandberg's panel appearence Monday, Facebook particularly wants to push its new Engagement Ads — the ones which allow users to comment on advertiser's banners. Yesterday, I sat down with a top executive from one of the major interactive agencies and asked him what he made of Facebook's showy efforts. Engagement Ads? "Eh, those aren't what I want," he said. Then he suggested three things Facebook needs to do right now to win Madison Avenue's money faster than a week's worth of sessions, panels and Ziggy Marley parties ever could. Build a toll booth. Everyone knows banner ads don't do it for big-budget advertisers anymore— not even ones that allow users to comment on them and share with their friends, like Facebook's new ads. Instead of creating gimmicky features that users don't want, Facebook needs to come up with ways for advertisers to be seen as providing new functionality on Facebook itself. By way of analogy, my source told me to imagine American Express sponsoring a normally congested toll road for a day. Drivers approaching the toll booths would see them empty and maybe billboard that read: "No toll today. Drive on through and see what it's like to be an American Express cardholder." That's the kind of branded experiences Facebook needs to create for users and advertisers, my source told me. Not gimmicky ones like asking users to design Mazda's new cars or come up with new Ben and Jerry's flavors. Facebook should encourage users to feel like a site improvement was brought to them by a brand. Maybe Facebook's Video application should have been sponsored by Sony's CyberShot line, for example. The challenge: Facebook's site developers work separately from the group which comes up with ad products, a divide Facebook needs to erase. Facebook needs to stop imagining it will ever reach Google's size. One reason Facebook hasn't come up with these kinds of advertising arrangements already is that they require lots of creativity, planning and customization. They're one-offs, and Mark Zuckerberg can't simply program a computer to sell them over and over. It's a terrifying reality for Facebook because its investors put money into it expecting it would become the next Google, which is an automated moneymaking machine. (Only 3,000 out of its 18,000 employees are required to run its advertising operations.) The sooner Facebook management and its investors realize that the company will not be the next Google — which, let's face it, lucked into a ridiculously simple way of making money — the sooner it can take advantage of its massive, desirable user base. Zuckerberg and Sandberg need to hire Madison Avenue insiders. My source says Madison Avenue avoids spending money on MySpace because no one in New York knows its ad salespeople. Facebook needs to put Madison Avenue insiders in positions where they have Mark Zuckerberg's ear. For example: Zuckerberg could have used someone with advertising experience to challenge him with the baby-name test before the company went forward with its Beacon ads. The baby-name test? "You know," he said, "The one where you take the name and think of all the terrible things it rhymes with and then decide if you still like it."

Million-member march begs for old Facebook back

Paul Boutin · 09/22/08 10:40AM

The surprise isn't that someone created a Facebook group to demand that Mark "Zomberg" — a pun on Zuckerberg and Facebook's famous Zombie app — bring back the old Facebook. What's surprising is that nearly 800,000 members have found and joined the group as of this morning. The probability of Facebook's old look and feel coming back are exactly zero, but the group serves a purpose: It proves that people who claim to be cutting-edge and ahead of the curve hate change just as much as the rest of us.

Drunken Economist

Alaska Miller · 09/19/08 06:40PM

As Facebook grows up with the help of its adult chaperones, the changes are starting to manifest themselves. The site has been redesigned; advertising schemes, experimented with. Most importantly, CEO Mark Zuckerberg's voice has been neutered to soothe investors instead of reminding them that he's CEO, bitch. Today's featured commenter, Drunken Economist, comes to us with a joke to explain what's really going on:

How the Googlers have changed Mark Zuckerberg

Nicholas Carlson · 09/19/08 10:40AM

When users revolted against a Facebook redesign in 2006, CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote a post in response titled "Calm down. Breathe. We hear you." In it, Zuck came off defensive and condescending. "We're not oblivious of the Facebook groups popping up about this (by the way, Ruchi is not the devil)," he wrote. Now, Zuckerberg's written another post defending the site's latest redesign, which more users — though a far smaller percentage of them — also don't like. It's titled "Thoughts on the Evolution of Facebook." It reads like the inoffensive pablum you'd read on, say, the Official Google Blog. Why is that?No surprise there: Besides top flack Elliot Schrage, Facebook has hired at least three PR people from Google in recent months — Debbie Frost, Barry Schnitt, and Larry Yu. Zuckerberg's preprocessed blog post predictably mentions "Facebook's mission," which Zuck tells us "is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected." That sounds exactly like the talking points Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg — also an ex-Googler, trained in the delivery of political messages from her time in the Clinton White House. For his investors, an uncontroversial Zuckerberg is a profitable Zuckerberg. If he's to stay CEO through an IPO and beyond, he'll have to practice putting shareholders and analysts to sleep with similar language. We sure will miss the clumsy honesty of Zuck's original post, though. Compare the old versus the new, below. Mark Zuckerberg before the Googlers came — defensive, condescending and honest:

Zuckerberg's paper wealth puts him ahead of backer Peter Thiel on Forbes list

Nicholas Carlson · 09/18/08 10:40AM

Forbes is out with its annual list of the 400 Richest Americans again and thanks to Microsoft, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is on it at number 321 with an estimated net worth of $1.5 billion. What's kind of ridiculous is that according to the list, Zuckerberg has more money than his original backer, founder of the Clarium Capital hedge fund and PayPal, Peter Thiel.Zuckerberg lives in an unfurnished one bedroom apartment and Facebook, which Zuckerberg doesn't even entirely own, will earn revenues of only $300 million this year. Meanwhile, Thiel — who rents a mansion, not an apartment — runs a $5.5 billion hedge fund, which though it lost $1 billion in August is still up 27 percent so far this year and is on target for its usual annual return of over 30 percent. Sure, given Facebook's popularity among the normals, Zuckerberg could someday possess much more actual wealth than Thiel. But that'll only happen if Zuckerberg's continues to obey Thiel's infamous command — "don't blow it" — an outcome key Zuckerberg hires have made far from certain.

Top Yahoo brain snubs Facebook for Microsoft

Owen Thomas · 09/17/08 06:20PM

Qi Lu, Yahoo's top search scientist, has been rumored to be leaving the company since June. But he's only just recently disappeared from Yahoo's list of top executives. We hear he's taking a job at Microsoft. Microsoft, the land where Web talent goes to die?Yes, Microsoft. The software house is desperate to catch up with Google, and Lu was one of Yahoo's few standout talents. Nevertheless, Lu's rumored choice of employer is surprising. Kara Swisher spotted Lu dining with David Sze, a partner at Facebook investor Greylock Capital. At the time, she speculated that Lu might take a cushy entrepreneur-in-residence gig at Greylock — or fill the empty CTO spot at Facebook. The fact that Facebook has yet to name a new CTO suggests they were holding out hope of landing Lu. For Lu to pass on the job would be telling. A year ago, Facebook could hire anyone it wanted, and they wouldn't have spent months dithering. if Lu takes Microsoft's job offer, it will show that Mark Zuckerberg's engineers-first culture at Facebook is fading fast.

Dr. Ruth warns parents away from "Facelift" social network

Owen Thomas · 09/17/08 03:00PM

Ruth Westheimer, the pundit who brought frank sex talk to middle America, stumbles in a discussion on NBC of the dangers of frank sex talk on social networks, calling Facebook "Facelift." Actually, that sounds like a great spinoff site for Mark Zuckerberg to target the over-40 set.

Zuckerberg wants Facebook to look like Windows

Nicholas Carlson · 09/12/08 07:00PM

Shortly after Facebook bought Parakey, the Web-desktop startup cofounded by star engineers Joe Hewitt and Blake Ross, Mark Zuckerberg talked about making his goof-off site the "social operating system of the Web." It was just one of a series of failed big-picture metaphors for the tongue-tied young entrepreneur. Facebook may never be an operating system. But is it such a terrible idea to make it look like one? The latest redesign is a virtual copycat of Windows.As Silicon Alley Insider's Dan Frommer first pointed out, Facebook has removed its applications dropdown menu from the top of the screen and put it down in the bottom-left corner — you know, right where Windows keeps its "Start" button. Just like Windows, alerts pop up in the lower right-hand corner of the screen. Microsoft Windows isn't deemed sexy by San Francisco's Web-designer crowd, who brag about having to launch VMware to test out Google Chrome. But, like Facebook, Microsoft has a user base in the nine digits. Zuckerberg shows he hasn't just taken Microsoft's money — he's picked up some of the software giant's mass-market, commonsense design.

How do you feel about Facebook's redesign?

Nicholas Carlson · 09/10/08 02:40PM

Facebook users have to migrate to the site's new redesign starting today. I reached out to a friend of mine completely outside the tech industry — like most of Facebook's users — to see what he thinks. His answer: "The new profiles are very bad." Then I tried to tell him that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's goal is to turn Facebook into a social operating system. "Awful idea," he said. Personally, I like the new design and figure that people are whining about it because nobody likes change. But maybe you disagree? Take our poll below and let Zuckerberg know how you feel.

Israeli army says Hezbollah uses Facebook to kidnap soldiers

Nicholas Carlson · 09/09/08 12:20PM

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg likes to delude himself into thinking his site can bring peace to the middle east. The Israeli Army would like to say thanks, but no thanks. An Israeli intelligence officer says Facebook has "become a major resource for terrorists, seeking to gather information on soldiers." Officials told Yeshiva World News that Palestinian terrorist group Hezbollah monitors specific Israeli soldiers' activities on Facebook, cultivating online friendships in order to learn classified information and arrange kidnappings. (Photo by AP/Malla)

700,000 Facebook users join "I Hate The New Facebook" group

Nicholas Carlson · 09/09/08 11:20AM

Facebook has 100 million users and around 0.7 percent of them have joined a group called "I Hate The New Facebook" in order to protest a site redesign which will be made permanent sometime this month. The group, founded by a high schooler named Nick Wagner exhorts users to do something, do anything: "THE NEW FACEBOOK WILL PERMANENTLY BE THE ONLY FACEBOOK. THIS IS A PETITION TO STOP IT. PLZ JOIN AND INVITE. Will be changed in a COUPLE OF DAYS!!!" Wagner also uploaded a screen shot of the site's new redesign, annotating it: "The New Facebook is Retared [sic]."Facebook will ignore this petition, just like it largely ignored users when a far greater percentage of them revolted when the Facebook News Feed came out. Why? Because that feature soon proved to be a crucial and useful element of the site, proving again that while Mark Zuckerberg may not know how to talk to other humans, he knows how people want to use his product better than those people themselves. Even you, Nick Wagner of Laval Catholic High School.

Mark Zuckerberg pokes Ev Williams by copying Twitter

Owen Thomas · 08/29/08 05:00PM

Imitation is the soul of flattery, and the engine of Silicon Valley. Whatever can be copied, will be — especially when the copiers are pals. After a redesign, Facebook has made its status-update feature more prominent. It now asks users, "What are you doing right now? A sharp-eyed reader notes that those words are eerily similar to Twitter's "What are you doing?" We wonder if this will pose any problems for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's newfound friendship with Twitter founder Ev Williams.It shouldn't. Copycat wording aside, no one actually uses Twitter to tell their friends what they're doing. If Twitter updated its site to match user behavior, the question would be: "What are you complaining about? What aspect of your business do you wish to promote? Which URL do you wish to send? What jejune utterance do you wish to share with people who aren't actually your friends?"

Facebook movie to be based on Ben Mezrich's controversial tell-all

Nicholas Carlson · 08/29/08 10:20AM

Aaron Sorkin is indeed working on a Facebook movie — which Valleywag readers think should star Superbad's Michael Cera — but not with Facebook's permission, says a company flack. "We are routinely approached by writers and filmmakers interested in telling the Facebook story. We are certainly flattered by the attention and interest, but at this point, have not agreed to cooperate with any film project." Probably the main reason Facebook wants no part of Sorkin's movie is because he's basing his screenplay on author Ben Mezrich's forthcoming book, which according to published excerpts, seems to be about as sympathetic to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg as Thunderball was to Adolpho Celi. (Photo by Getty Images)

Aaron Sorkin admits he's working on "The Facebook Movie"

Nicholas Carlson · 08/28/08 03:00PM

Why would anyone not think Aaron Sorkin is working on a movie about Facebook? "You can't handle the truth!" That's the line Sorkin penned for Jack Nicholson in 1992's A Few Good Men. Nicholson might well have been speaking to some of our readers, who reacted poorly to the news that the West Wing writer was working on a movie about Mark Zuckerberg's creation. One begged us to uncover the fraud: "The BBC, the Guardian and New York Magazine are all over the totally fake-seeming Aaron Sorkin movie about Facebook. Please get to the bottom of this horrible joke." Sorry, you'll have to handle this: Sorkin himself confirmed that he is indeed planning a movie about how Zuckerberg and his Harvard classmates created Facebook.Rather, Sorkin's publicist, Joy Fehily, tells us, on his behalf. Or whoever answers her email. With all the layers of secretaries and managers and representatives in Hollywood, you can never tell. Yesterday, Sorkin's agent's assistant issued a nondenial, before politely informing us, "I have to hang up on you now." Likewise, the skeptics will have to hang up on any remaining doubts that Sorkin is behind this movie. Really, could anyone else do the movie? Sorkin is the master of the office drama, picking up on the details that make an inside-baseball story at once believable to insiders and entertaining to outsiders. If it had been anyone but Sorkin, we would have scoffed, too.

Facebook security a laughing matter for cofounder

Owen Thomas · 08/28/08 10:40AM

Officially, Facebook is treating the onslaught of viruses piggybacking on the social network's popularity as a very, very serious matter. We're talking Sheryl Sandberg serious. Facebook's press statement reads: "We are investigating every report, removing false content, blocking bogus links and addressing the concerns of our users. These efforts have limited the affected users to a small percentage of those on Facebook.” The unofficial response from cofounder Dustin Moskovitz, posted on CEO Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook profile, is much more fun:

Who should play Zuckerberg in a Facebook movie?

Nicholas Carlson · 08/27/08 08:00PM

"West Wing" creator Aaron Sorkin is still in the research phase of his Facebook: The Movie project, but we thought Valleywag's readers could help cast the lead role. Take your pick from our list, below.

The Facebook toga party according to Fake Sheryl Sandberg

FakeSherylSandberg · 08/26/08 09:00PM

PALO ALTO — (Ed.'s note: Please welcome Fake Sheryl Sandberg, Valleywag's newest contributor.) I left Google for this. What was I thinking? Sure, Larry and Sergey were adolescents who built themselves a candy-colored playground. But Zuck makes them look like old men. Mr. Adidas rolled into the office around 10 this morning — early for him — and asked, "So, are we throwing a party?" "What for?" I asked. "Sheryl, didn't you see my status update?" You know, I used to give status updates to Larry Summers when I was his chief of staff. In Washington. The other Washington.Anyway, Zuck starts gushing about how great it is Facebook now has 100 million users. I'm thinking, "Yeah, great, we're buying unlimited photo storage for 100 million freeloaders. Have you ever done the bandwidth bill on that, kid?" But he won't shut up. I close my eyes, breathe, put on my happy face, and reply, "Yes, Mark, that's an amazing milestone. We really should celebrate it appropriately. What do you think of Joe putting on a wine-and-cheese reception this evening, like he used to do for me at Google?" Zuckerberg's face darkens. "No!" he shouts like a toddler. "We're doing a toga party!" My smile stays pasted on. I calculate the risks. "Of course, Mark! This is your company. I understand how important the culture is." I get on the phone to Joe Desimone and tell him — surprise! — we're throwing a party. He can cater for 500 on no notice, right? Mark leads his children's crusade out to the park. I stay behind to rework the Q3 spreadsheets. After he's done cheering them with a megaphone about how they're changing the world, they head straight to the cafeteria building. There's a keg of beer there. No, there are three kegs. No, five. I can't dodge them anymore, so I walk in and survey the roomful of kids in bedsheets that came from God knows where. They're all 23. They're all dating each other. They're all hopped up on beer and Red Bull that our shareholders paid for. Suddenly, I feel claustrophobic. I can't face these brats. I glide to the bathroom, lock the door, and do the deep-breathing exercises my yoga master Kellison taught me. I steel myself and walk back out. Next thing I know, that joker Dave Morin is wrapping me in a toga. At last, I laugh, while making mental notes about which of these overrated twentysomethings I'm going to fire, in which order.