At work, Mark Zuckerberg is the one trying, and often failing, to meet the demands of his 800 million users. But on vacation in Uruguay for eight days, the Facebook CEO gets to be the one issuing requests. And he's a rather insane customer.
Mark Zuckerberg, who personally kills all his food, is ominously proud of his escalating slaughters. Here's the bison he recently shot and devoured, mounted at Facebook headquarters as a "prank" on a less predatory executive.
A well-placed mole has forwarded us the Silicon Valley equivalent of hard-core pornography: an explicit look at Facebook's finances. They're even more staggering than we expected. A gusher of profits has left the social network with a cash hoard to rival established companies like 3M, eBay and Yahoo.
Wikileaks unveiled a mysterious social network today on Twitter, called Friends of Wikileaks. It's the social network for people who think their personal information is too safe in the hands of Mark Zuckerberg.
Last week, national experts traveled to Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto, California, to convey hotly anticipated knowledge to the social network's engineers. The computer programmers "listened intently," according to a reporter who was present, to explanations of compassion, tact, sensitivity, and the psychological differences between children and adults. So it was that, nearly eight years after the world's biggest social network began, Facebook learned some basic social skills.
Priscilla Chan has always taken her relationship with Mark Zuckerberg seriously; she famously sealed a contract of dating rules before moving to be near him in California. But the medical school student just got more serious than ever before, listing Zuckerberg as her "partner" on Facebook - and adopting Zuck's mother as her own.
When Facebook isn't intentionally destroying your privacy, it's doing so unintentionally. That even goes for Mark Zuckerberg: Two years ago, the Facebook CEO's once-private pictures were exposed to the world after the social network changed its privacy defaults. Now his once-private photos are again exposed to the world, this time thanks to a security flaw.
If you were responsible for the world's largest trove of sensitive personal information, what would you name your headquarters address? "4 Trust Lane?" "2 Careful Way?" "1 Gentle Drive?" Those would all be very reasonable branding choices! Instead, the world's most powerful social network, Facebook, went with "1 Hacker Way." Really?
Facebook wants you to trust it to live in your pocket wherever you go, to get inside your GPS-enabled cell phone. That's a bold request from a company famous for its flagrant privacy violations. But Facebook is charging ahead.
Mark Zuckerberg was once so obsessed with programming his girlfriend demanded a written contract guaranteeing alone time. But the Facebook CEO and ranking Borg commander on Planet Earth has, apparently, softened, telling Charlie Rose he spends long stretches with his girl, his dog, and their massive, empty mansion.
Silicon Valley warps the mind. In the real world, your health, family, and friends are most important. In the Valley, they're what you trade for speed, buzz, and valuation, as illustrated in a heartbreaking scene from the Facebook-Google war.
More and more people are hating Facebook in increasingly effective ways, and for increasingly better reasons. Good times. Too bad it will probably do nothing to keep Facebook from transforming the internet into an unbearably bland prison-mall.
Last month, we started hearing scuttlebutt that Mark Zuckerberg was on the outs with sisters Randi and Arielle. So we approached today's New York Times profile of Randi Zuckerberg with a jaded eye. But we didn't have to read too closely between the lines to find the tension between Facebook's CEO and his older sibling.
