Category Archives: Social software

Why people are wrong about Mark Zuckerberg

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Party Time

Photo by Stuart Glendinning Hall

It seems a lot of people have got it wrong about Mark Zuckerberg.They scoff at his suggestion that with the impending $5bn Facebook IPO [er, it turned out to be a bit more than that:-] that he’s not in it for the money:

“We don’t build services in order to make money, we make money in order to build better services. Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission–to make the world open and more connected.”

But as the recent BBC documentary ‘Mark Zuckerberg: Inside Facebook’ got right (and the film ‘The Social Network’ got wrong – cute screen-grab above) a billion dollars ain’t cool, turning down $1bn is cool. Which is what Mr Zuckerberg did when Yahoo made an offer of close to $1bn for the global social networking site (Facebook record 11 companies with 14 offers in total) in 2006.

Logically then if he was ‘in it for the money’ wouldn’t he have cashed in his ‘cash cow’ there and then? So now he’s both cool and soon-to-be-be very, very rich. What’s not to be jealous of?

Revolution 2.0 is coming soon to a store near you

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Check out this event at the journo-driven Frontline Club on the 1st of Feb:

“Named one of Time magazine’s top 100 most influential people, Wael Ghonim, is credited with having sparked Egypt’s revolution with a Facebook page he dedicated to a victim of the regime’s violence.

“The ‘We are all Khaled Said’ Facebook page that he created after the young man’s brutal murder and torture by police in Alexandria became such a focal point of the uprising that Ghonim was imprisoned for 11 days. The former Google executive will be talking to Ben Hammersley, Wired UK’s, editor at large about the revolution and the role of technology in mobilising people to take to the streets.

“He will also be bringing us up to date with what’s been happening since the jubilant celebrations a year ago and his work since he left Google in April this year. Wael Ghonim’s new book Revolution 2.0 is published by Fourth Estate on 17 January.”

As side note I saw someone tweet that the 2011 crop of revolutions were not especially significant, or words to that effect. However, political changes in the Middle East over the ages can be disproportionately influential, imho.