Introduction

Hello all and welcome to my blog on the book The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal by Ben Mezrich. You probably have all heard of the award winning movie, The Social Network, starring Jesse Eisenberg. Well, this terrific movie was based off the book, The Accidental Billionaires.

There are many topics in the book that relate to the information society so my blog posts will focus around different aspects of the information society.

Summary of Book

The Accidental Billionaires is about the founding of Facebook, and all of the issues, struggles, and controversies that surrounded the creation of Facebook. These issues include who had the rightful idea of Facebook, the expansion of Facebook, how/when to create revenue for Facebook, and stock distributions of Facebook.

Before the creation of Facebook
Mark Zuckerberg is a computer programming genius, and was able to hack into the Harvard network just to create a website for fun. Mark created Facemash, a website that allowed people to rate the "hotness" of undergraduate girls at Harvard. Facemash became so popular that in under 2 hours, the site had already logged 22,000 votes. Eventually, the Harvard network crashed due to the influx of usage on the network.
This stunt gained attention in the Harvard newspaper, The Crimson, where Zuckerberg gained the reputation of a computer genius. 
Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss and Divya Narendra had an idea for a social networking site called “Harvard Connection.” The central idea was simple: Put Harvard’s social life online, so guys could meet up with girls without all of the inefficient, time wasting wandering around campus that real life usually necessitated. They had the idea, and they knew Zuckerberg had the computer programming skills to make this idea a reality.

Divya Narendra sent Mark an e-mail expressing interest in using Mark as their computer programmer for Harvard Connection. Mark's initial reaction was "it might be interesting."

The Harvard Connection crew officially thought Mark was on their team however, after 52 e-mails, half a dozen calls and no progress, it appeared Mark was not being responsive and would most likely not be working for them. Instead,  Mark went to his best friend, Eduardo Saverin with an idea for a website where "people put their own pictures up-and not just pictures, but also profiles. where they'd grown up, how old they were, what they were interested in. Maybe the classes they were taking. what they were looking for online- friendship, love interests, whatever."

 The book claims that Zuckerberg stole the initial idea of a social networking site throughout a college network when he created Facebook.

A Message From Ben Mezrich

Exclusivity/Internet Privacy

What made the Harvard Connection idea and Facebook so similar is the idea of exclusivity. In order to create a Facebook account, initially, one needed a Harvard.edu e-mail address. Although this feature does not allow many people to use the website, it created more of a real life social circle feel. Exclusivity would make the site more popular; it would also enhance the idea that your info would remain in a closed system. Privacy online is important; people want to have control over what they put on the web.
According to the article Trending: The Promises and Challenges of Big Social Data by Lev Manovich, with the rise of social networking and public data, people are able to see and comment on images, videos, and read blogs posts and tweets without asking for anyone's permission. Facebook's exclusivity allows for somewhat more privacy in a very public, big data online world.

Information Labor

Zuckerberg's best friend and CFO of Facebook, Eduardo Saverin initially owned 30% of the company. As more investors came in, his percentage of the company naturally decreased. Facebook was diluting him out of the company. This entire issue over the ownership of Facebook and who exactly is the rightful owner and creator of this multi billion dollar company deals with the topic of information labor: the work that goes behind the creating and accessing information, particularly on the web. Now put this in the context of Facebook. As of 2011, there are 500,000,000 active facebook users in the world. But out of all of these users, how many of them ever think about the work, the money, and the controversy put into the creation of Facebook? In fact, "social networking sites like Facebook demand constant human content moderation and censorship of photos, videos.."(Downey, Pg. 4) Due to the high amount of work required to run facebook, facebook currently has around 4,300 employees.

Labor Distribution

The reason Savarin’s stock ownership declined is because he was not active for a lot of the production and maintenance of Facebook. Eduardo was never fully involved in the working and action in Silicon Valley because he was too busy finding advertising and working in New York. This shows the controversy that comes with information labor. When distribution of labor is unequal, stock shares change (possibly in an unfair manner), and this can potentially lead to law suits. Due to this unfair change of stocks, Savarin went from owning 30% of Facebook to owning .03% of Facebook. Because of this, Savarin sued Zuckerberg.

Advertising

Another topic this book brings up is the idea of advertising. From the beginning, Eduardo wanted to make money through advertising where as mark was only concerned with how cool the site was. The tension between having advertisements while making money and appealing to users was a prominent issue in the initial stages of facebook.