Facebook social pivot: moving strategies or providing future material

Facebook has multiple pivots in its growing process, according to an article in the online edition of FastCompany, a business magazine called "Fortune" and "Business Weekly", published today in the Adam Pannamberg of Adam L. Penenberg. Who joins this social network, news-feed feature, a mature platform for other companies to build their business, and future mobile strategies. The following is the full text of this article: while in real life, Mark Zuckerberg has been obsessed with the intersection of software and social connections, at least until he was a freshman at Harvard University. An early application called Coursematch allows students to find out who else is enrolled in their class, and another application can parse the campus newspaper to locate the person mentioned on the newspaper page and link it to different articles. At the time, his most sensational product was the Facemash Web site, which was inspired by the American dating site, or not, inviting students to upload photos to grade other students. Zuckerberg ransacked an online cache of Harvard University student identity photos, taped them to the Web site, invited users to vote on who was prettier, and then made a tabular list of the top ten figures. Facemash was eventually proved popular, but at the same time controversial, the school administration accused him of violating the student's privacy (he was warned). Then Facebook was born, and he and the Winklevosses Brothers (Winklevoss) and others run the site-as they say, it's a geek's history. While Zuckerberg prefers to use the term iteration to describe the changes that have taken place since the birth of Facebook, in the process, Facebook has multiple pivots, the first of which has to do with who joins the social network. When thefacebook.com on the night of February 4, 2004, users need to use the Harvard e-mail address to register. Within less than 24 hours after the site was online, more than 1200 Harvard students had enrolled in the site; five days later, the Harvard student newspaper published an article on Thefacebook.com, and by the end of the month three-fourths of Harvard undergraduates--about 7,000 students-- -have joined the network. Zuckerberg once told me that he was surprised by how quickly Facebook took off. Although he had thought that the momentum we were digging was very common, he was still amazed at the efficiency of the execution. Not long after, students at other schools asked Thefacebook.com if he could open outside Harvard, and Zuckerberg then put the netThe coverage extends to Yale University, Stanford University and Columbia University. Thefacebook.com's swift adoption encouraged Zuckerberg to continue extending the site's coverage to 25 other universities during the semester. He and his roommate are plastered with S-shaped graphs on the walls of the dorm, which represent the adoption rate of the Thefacebook.com website on various university campuses. The greater the size of the school, the longer it takes for the curve to reach a fully curved shape. At Cornell University, the thefacebook.com website began to show exponential growth after two weeks, but, as in smaller schools, it eventually reached critical material levels, and then there was a social expectation that everyone would have to log into the site. Thefacebook.comi has exploited a pent-up demand that students want to communicate with students at other universities, and that is why campus newspapers have responded well to the arrival of thefacebook.com. This has pushed the site through its early stages, when the site's scenes were dull and early adopters had little to say. If thefacebook.com had been in the safety Zone of the university, it would probably have become a good niche business. But the site expanded into high school in September 2005 and then turned to large companies such as Apple. It is the kind of move that opens the door to Facebook, making it the biggest social network on the planet. There are other pivots in the process of all these iterations. This feature quickly became the focus of Facebook after the introduction of news Feeds (Newsfeed), which is likely to be as simple as an iteration. Facebook's transformation from a user-growing engine to a full-fledged platform that allows other companies to build their own business on the platform is a pivot and a key one. And on the road ahead, Facebook's mobile strategy may provide other pivot material. If you want, imagine a picture of a Friday night in the near future--five years or 10 years from now--and you're wearing a Google-amplified reality glasses with voice-recognition software (framed by Prada) going to bars. You've logged on to Facebook, because that's the default setting, and who's going to bother to change this setting? You scanned the room because Facebook has a huge face-recognition database-the fact that almost everyone on the planet has a Facebook account-and then you can identify everyone in the room and how they relate to you and your social profile. So is this going to be a pivot or an iteration? I'm not sure. But whatever it is, the prospect is no longer far away. Real problemIs whether the future of a comprehensive social network with a sense of location will make the future of Mark Zuckerberg or anyone else less social. Sarah Lacy, founder of PandoDaily, a technology blog site, has made a profound statement about the people behind Facebook, Twitter and even the entire social network Sala Lessy. One of the ironies of the social media age, she writes, is that the times were created by the world's least socially adept people.