The Facebook Effect - Part 2

After Accel invested in Facebook, it was finally a real company, and could now afford to build a real staff. In 2005, from June to October alone, Facebook's users went from 3 million to 5 million. With the increasing number of people using the website, the company had to find ways to maintain the servers for the huge influx of users coming in everyday and the more that were to come in the future. Now that Facebook was a legitimate company, Zuckerberg faced the many challenging tasks of hiring people to work for the company, but also keeping it a fun and hip place to work. Facebook was initially biased toward the youth of today's generation, but as we see today, it has become a social network for all ages. There were many innovative features and ideas that Facebook implemented over the years, which helped in keeping its users interacting with the site. One of the many features that Facebook had that I believe a lot of people enjoy, including myself, is the photo tagging. The idea seems so simple, allowing users to put pictures on a website, and then "tagging" their friends in the photos so it would show up on their pages as well. However, the Facebook team made an important decision, in that to see the next picture all you had to do was click anywhere on the photo you were looking at. "They were attempting to encourage that 'Facebook trance' that kept people clicking through pages on the service. It made looking at photos simple and addictive" (pg. 155). Simple and addictive is definitely the right way to put it. I can't even fathom how many hours I might have spent looking through pictures and photo albums, sometimes of people that I barely even know. Although, what's interesting to note is that while reading, Kirkpatrick mentions how  Zuckerberg was not interested in increasing the company's revenue or making money with advertisements on the website. I personally don't know if I believe that completely, but I'm sure Zuckerberg had good intentions when starting the site and wanting to create a social network. However, after some time I'm sure there was pressure and somewhat of a desire to keep the success of Facebook going strong, and soon advertisements were put into effect, along with other programs as well. The "News Feed" was also another program that Facebook decided to try out. At first, users did not like it all, and there was a high negative feedback. Although, ever since the News Feed was put into effect, there was an increase in the use of the website, clearly showing that people did use it. Therefore it stayed, people became used to it, and Facebook increased its use of the service. What I enjoyed most about reading this section of The Facebook Effect was that it gave you a slight inside story on what and how the programs that we use on Facebook came into play. I always seem to forget that someone had to come up with these ideas over time, and lots of work and hardship was put into making something so successful.