Facebook had blown up far beyond anyone had ever expected in its early stages. Facebook was now being valued at over a billion dollars. Zuckerberg continually tried to come up with new and innovative ideas to expand Facebooks social connection. His next endeavor was to create a platform for third party developers to create applications that would expand Facebook’s features. It was announced at the f8 convention and was an immediate success. Entire companies were based around creating applications for Facebook and made enough money to survive. Today, it is its own industry.
Facebook’s “social” applications had an automatic advantage over similar applications that were on external sites, a huge built in user base. As Kirpatrick writes of an interview with CEO Mark Zuckerberg, “ Our photo site lacks features that anyone would built,” Zuckerberg told me in early May 2007, “ We don’t store high resolution photos. The printing function is down right bad. And until recently you couldn’t even change the order of photos in an album. And yet somehow, this application became the most trafficked photo site on the Internet by far,” (216). They also had created an online invitation application called Events, that developers put almost no effort into and yet, it became much larger than similar website Evite.com. They even allowed you to log into other site with your Facebook account log-in, which many of the executives advised against, but Zuckerberg pushed it through to create a greater social experiene. Finally, Zuckerberg didn’t want to make it the site like a cable TV commercial, so they devised a way to integrate information from the user’s profile to target the advertisements towards their interests.
Facebook has become one of the most highly visited websites on the Internet. Mark Zuckerberg started the site out of his dorm room and now it has become a billion dollar company. Much of Facebook’s success could be attributed to Zuckerberg’s continued involvement in decision-making and new developments. He was quoted as saying that he would not sell Facebook unless he could stay involved with the company. Facebook will continue to grow and expand with the ever changing society.
No comments:
Post a Comment