Posts Tagged ‘Mark Zuckerberg’
Movie Review: The Social Network
I was looking forward to seeing the movie The Social Network. I read Accidental Billionaires: The founding of Facebook A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal by Ben Mezrich. I have seen Mark Zuckerberg in various interviews and have read his blog. I was halfway through reading The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That is Connecting the World by David Kirkpatrick when I saw The Social Network.
I was entertained and disappointed by the movie. I realize that Hollywood makes movies to make money and to make money the movie has to have those elements that make it compelling, entertaining, provocative, and everything else that sells movie tickets – no matter how much those aspects depart from the truth or the real history of Facebook.
The nature of movies
So, there is the truth and there is the story telling. There is the fact and the fiction. Ben Mezrich says that the story of Facebook in his book is a construction from hundreds of interviews with people close to the story of the founding of Facebook. The Social Network is based on the book. Neither the Ben Mezrick book nor the movie was made with any consultation from Mark Zuckerberg. Sean Parker, short time president of Facebook said the movie was a work of fiction. (more)
Picking and choosing
However, The Facebook Effect written by David Kirkpatrick was done from the inside. David Kirkpatrick is a respected journalist who writes for Fortune magazine. Mark Zuckerberg invited Kirkpatrick to write the story of Facebook. Kirkpatrick travelled with Zuckerberg and was given inside access to the employees of Facebook. So, if there is access to any semblance to the truth about the story of Facebook it’s in The Facebook Effect.
The running time of a typical movie is 2 hours. So, the story of Facebook told in movie form had to be dissected and compressed to fill this 2 hr duration. What do you pick and choose? What part of the story do you tell and what do you leave out? This is the challenge of any movie based on historical events.
Books generally so not have this challenge. Books can be as long as they need to be to tell the story. The “running time” of The Facebook Effect is 15 hours – if you listen to the unabridged audio version. (There will soon be a movie of Atlas Shrugged. The audio book running time of this work is 55 hours. What sort of devestation will the movie industry make of this book?)
What you are missing
The Social Network picks and chooses the worst of Zuckerberg and perhaps Sean Parker and leaves out some of the entrepreneurial genius of both Zuckerberg and Parker that made Facebook a successful company in the real world.
The significant role of Sean Parker
What I told Mark was that I would try to be for him what no one had been for me – a person who sort of shepherds his rear and puts him in a position of power so he’d have the opportunity to make his own mistakes and learn from them. – Sean Parker
It was really beneficial for us that Sean had been a founder who had been burned. We didn’t know anything about how to incorporate a company or take financing, but we had one of the most conservative people figuring it out for us and trying to protect us – Moskovitz
In the Social Network you will not hear about the significant role that Sean Parker (co-founder of Napster and founder of Plaxo) played in the success of Facebook. Not only did Sean have extensive experience dealing with Venture Capital firms but also ensured that, through the complex negotiations with VC’s, Mark did not lose control of the company. Sean kept Marks vision on the long view against others trying to persuade Mark to monetize (generate revenue through advertising) the company early or sell it. Sean’s vision was that Facebook was not a 10 million dollar company, or a 100 million dollar company but a billion dollar company. With Sean Parker, the young Zuckerberg had an experienced advisor and mentor at his side. Parker was Facebook’s first President and held a 7% stake in the company. (more on Sean Parker here )
Zuckerbergs judgements on technolgy and product direction
Like this:
The Technical Architecture Behind Facebook
There is a lot of different elements behind the success of Facebook. Of course it’s mostly about vision, timing, the right people, venture capital, good judgements at critical points in the history of Facebook, and so on. It’s also about the availability of readily available technology and excellent technical architecture and engineering by talented people – Mark Zuckerberg playing a major role in the original programming and technical design of (the)Facebook.com from the beginning.
(the)Facebook.com also benefited from a history of the failure of other social networking systems that preceded (the)Facebook.com. One of the failures clearly in the mind of the architects, developers, and technical engineers of (the)Facebook was the failure of the social networking system Friendster. Friendster may have been more successful had it been able to scale properly to meet the demand of the user base. Friendster did not scale.
(the)Facebook.com was careful to ensure that before another segment of users was invited to register for the service (at the beginning they added schools in a very controlled process) there was sufficient capacity to handle the projected number of new users.
The Scale of Facebook
At the time of this writing there are about 400 million active users Facebook. Facebook delivers 200 billion page views per month and the service is distributed across 30,000 servers.
So, from a technology perspective, how do you architect such a system? What is the technology and architecture behind Facebook that can deliver 200 billion pages per month to 400 million active users with good response time?
The success of Open Source
There are many success cases that can be developed from Facebook. The Open Source community is a clear beneficiary of the success of Facebook. Facebook is written in open source software. Enhancements, extensions, and innovations that Facebook made to improve performance and scalability of this open source software has been given back by Facebook to the Open Source Community.
The Facebook presentation layer is written in PHP – 3 million lines of code. The database tier is MySQL. If anything validates the Open Source community its the ability of these open source tools to be able to deliver a high performance massively scalable system like Facebook.
The Technical Architecture behind Facebook
Jeff Rothschild is Vice President of Technology at Facebook. He gave a presentation to the UC San Diego Center for Networked Systems. In this webcast Jeff goes into detail about the technology behind Facebook – the architecture, the challenges they faced in building a high performance massively scalable system, how they solved these problems, the innovations and extensions they made to Open Source code (and gave back to the community), and those challenges for the Facebook technology that still exist and for which they are seeking solutions.
Abstract: Facebook has grown into one of the largest sites on the Internet today serving over 200 billion pages per month. The nature of social data makes engineering a site for this level of scale a particularly challenging proposition. In this presentation, I will discuss the aspects of social data that present challenges for scalability and will describe the core architectural components and design principles that Facebook has used to address these challenges. In addition, I will discuss emerging technologies that offer new opportunities for building cost-effective high performance web architectures.
You can find the links to this webcast, and a summary of the technology at the links below
The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal
“The girls were both Asian, pretty, and a little overly made up for a lecture like this. The tallest of the two had long sable hair pulled back in a high pony tail and was wearing a short skirt and a white shirt open one button too far down the front. Eduardo could see wisps of her red lace bra wonderfully offset by her tan, smooth skin. The other girl was in an equally short skirt, with a black leggings combo that showed off some impressively sculpted calves.
Both had bright red lipstick and too much eye shadow, but they were damn cute – and they were smiling and pointing right at him.
Well, at him and Mark. The taller of the girls leaned forward over the empty seat and whispered in his ear.
“Your friend – isn’t that Mark Zuckerberg?”
Eduardo raised his eyebrows.
“You know Mark?” There was a first time for everything.
“No, but didn’t he make Facebook?”
Eduardo felt a tingle of excitement move through him, as he felt the warmth of her breath against his ear, as he breathed in her perfume.
“Yeah. I mean, Facebook, it’s both of ours – mine and his.”
“Wow that’s really cool,” the girl said. “My name is Kelly. This is Alice.”
Other people in the girls’ row were looking now. But they didn’t seem angry that the whispers were interrupting their enjoyment of Bill Gates. Eduardo saw someone pointing, then another kid whisper something to a friend. Then more pointing – but not at him, at Mark.”
