How the website mastered “Social Publishing”:
To understand some of the principles underlying BuzzFeed’s strategy, he recommends reading The Individual in a Social World, a 1977 book by Stanley Milgram, who is known, among other things, for his experiments leading to the six degrees of separation theory. “When some cute kitten video goes viral,” says [Jonah] Peretti, “you know a Stanley Milgram experiment is happening thousands of times a day.”
TheFacebook, as it was then called, had just reached 1.5 million users:
In the end, Zuckerberg says, quarrels over money rarely come up because money is not their priority. “We’re in a really interesting place because if you look at the assets we have, we’re fucking rich,” Zuckerberg adds. “But if you look at like the cash and the amount of money we have to live with, we’re dirt poor. All the stuff we own is tied up in random assets” like servers and the company itself. “Living like we do now, it’s, like, not that big of a deal for us. We’re not like, Aw man, I wish I had a million dollars now. Because, like, we kind of like living like college students and being dirty. It’s fun."
Apple vs. Google vs. Facebook vs. Amazon.
In Silicon Valley, up all night coding in the dorms with the aspiring Mark Zuckerbergs of tomorrow.
On Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg and the gender dynamics of Silicon Valley.
“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.”
An insider history of the fall of Myspace; from Rupert Murdoch calling Facebook a mere “communications utility” to the disastrous 2006 deal with Google that demanded huge pageviews and ads everywhere, and finally the present day ruins of a titan.
An artifact from the era when MySpace was king.
How the social networks that popped up in Facebook’s absence—the site is not available behind the Great Firewall—are changing Chinese culture.
A profile of the director, written from the set of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.
A tech neophyte looks for answers in Silicon Valley, “the last place in America where people are this optimistic.”
The difference between a social network and a movie about a social network, and what it says about the Facebook generation.
A profile of Sorkin, who wrote The Social Network. “I don’t feel like a nerd,” he says, “but I think I understand them.”
A 2006 profile of Mark Zuckerberg as Facebook opened from a college-only site to a public social network.
The writer (Aaron Sorkin), director (David Fincher), and actors (Jesse Eisenberg & Justin Timberlake) of The Social Network on dramatizing the real story of a 20 year old into “the Citizen Kane of John Hughes movies.”
Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, on the eve of the release of The Social Network, believed to be a deeply unflattering portrait of him and the genesis of his company.
