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"You can barely hear the hollers and applause over Weezer&amp;#39;s &amp;quot;Say It Ain&amp;#39;t So&amp;quot; as Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, strolls onto the San Francisco Design Center&amp;#39;s stage. It&amp;#39;s July 23, 2008, and Zuckerberg is delivering the keynote for Facebook&amp;#39;s second annual f8 gathering, a conference for the software developers who have helped his site become the most popular social network in the world. The room is lit deep blue, like an aquarium. Pacing the stage in his brown hoodie and slouchy jeans, Zuckerberg looks like an ersatz Steve Jobs\u2014turning at the shoulders as he greets his audience, talking with his hands,projecting a highly rehearsed gravitas. He begins by discussing his recent vacation, a trip that took him to Nepal, India, Turkey, and Tokyo\u2014and to a moment of spiritual awakening. Facebook, he realized while dining at a caf\u00E9 in Istanbul, shouldn&amp;#39;t just be a tool bringingpeople together. It should be &amp;quot;a product that allows you to really feel a person and understand what&amp;#39;s going on with them and feel present with them.\u2026 What we&amp;#39;re talking about is the most important and interesting information, which isn&amp;#39;t written down anywhere.\u2026 It&amp;#39;s only available if the people choose to share it.&amp;quot;\n\nZuckerberg speaks with awkward pauses, and while his delivery isn&amp;#39;t exactly confidence-inspiring, it certainly comes across as sincere\u2014at times, painfully so. (&amp;quot;Mark is a very smart person, but he&amp;#39;s not necessarily the strongest communicator,&amp;quot; says Sean Parker, the Napster co-founder who served as Facebook&amp;#39;s founding president, from 2004 to 2005, and is a major shareholder. &amp;quot;He&amp;#39;s like Bill Gates. If you go back to early videos of Gates in the &amp;#39;80s, he comes across as high-functioning autistic.&amp;quot;) As he goes on\u2014with his talk of &amp;quot;movements&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;the virtuous cycle of sharing&amp;quot;\u2014the address is downright New Agey at times. Sure, it&amp;#39;s weird stuff to hear from a CEO, but the crowd loves it. And why wouldn&amp;#39;t they At last year&amp;#39;s event, Zuckerberg announced that he&amp;#39;d give application developers free access to his site&amp;#39;s 115 million users, and many of the audience members are now making millions off of them.\n\nBut outside the echo chamber of the auditorium, one thing is glaringly absent from Zuckerberg&amp;#39;s talk: any mention at all about how it is that Facebook itself is actually going to make money. Because while the cheering crowd may be getting rich off Zuckerberg&amp;#39;s site, his company isn&amp;#39;t doing so well. Facebook takes in no more than a few hundred million dollars in advertising each year\u2014this despite that Zuckerberg possesses what is quite possibly the most valuable database of consumer information in the history of man: everything that is, and ever has been, posted to Facebook by its users. That trove of private user information is the site&amp;#39;s greatest asset\u2014it prompted Microsoft to pay $240 million for a stake in Facebook at the end of 2007, making Zuckerberg&amp;#39;s enterprise worth as much as $15 billion\u2014but it&amp;#39;s also something of a curse. Facebook is only worth those billions if Zuckerberg and his team can come up with some way to profit from its users.\n\nFrom initial impressions of the f8 conference, there&amp;#39;s no apparent evidence that Zuckerberg has found that answer. And in the weeks that follow his address, Zuckerberg&amp;#39;s critics will mock him mercilessly for all the airy talk about togetherness. They&amp;#39;ll point to the exodus of ecutives from his company, say he has no business plan, and call on Zuckerberg to yield control to a more experienced CEO. Maybe they&amp;#39;re right: Maybe this kid is just a dreamer who doesn&amp;#39;t get the business stuff, and the smartest thing he could do is step aside or, even better, sell as quickly as he can to the highest bidder and leave them to figure out how to bring in the big profits.\n\nBut there&amp;#39;s another possibility worth considering. About a half hour into his address, tucked into the middle of all that prattle about how Zuckerberg really, truly wants his company to feel you, he demonstrates a new feature, Facebook Connect, which is designed to allow Facebook users to share their account information with other sites. It&amp;#39;s a revolutionary, Internet-spanning idea, one that could make Facebook the dominant portal on the Web: Wherever you browsed, Zuckerberg&amp;#39;s company would be with you.\n\nThe presentation of Connect does not include a word about money, and its details are muddled by a clumsy PowerPoint and Zuckerberg&amp;#39;s forced attempts at humor (&amp;quot;The Kite Runner: a powerful story about friendship\u2014and kites!&amp;quot; he quips at one point), but when you hear the zeal in his voice and his boundless passion for his product, it&amp;#39;s hard to avoid thinking that maybe Zuckerberg&amp;#39;s failure to post big profits isn&amp;#39;t a sign of immaturity or of lousy business sense. Maybe it&amp;#39;s a sign that Mark Zuckerberg has an even bigger idea for how to profit from all those names, ages, genders, sexual orientations, photos, e-mails, musical preferences, and friendships that you and millions of others have posted to his site.\n\nThe only thing standing in his way is changing how you think about privacy.\n\nIt wasn&amp;#39;t all that long ago that Mark Zuckerberg was just that dorky kid with the red, Brillo-coarse hair, the gangly limbs, and the business cards that read i&amp;#39;m ceo\u2026bitch\u2014the child prodigy best known for having been too cocky to take advantage of his one chance to make it rich. As Business 2.0 explained when naming Zuckerberg to its 2006 &amp;quot;10 People Who Don&amp;#39;t Matter&amp;quot; list: &amp;quot;Last spring, Facebook reportedly turned down a $750 million buyout offer [from Yahoo!]. Bad move.\u2026 Given that My-Space has quickly grown into the industry&amp;#39;s 80-million-user gorilla, it&amp;#39;s hard to imagine who would pay billions for an also-ran.&amp;quot;\n\nBut this year, as the company he founded in his Harvard dorm has surged from just a few million users to become one of the most trafficked sites on the Internet, Zuckerberg has emerged as a legitimate Silicon Valley phenomenon. People now routinely mention him in the same breath as Bill Gates and the Google guys; Aaron Sorkin is writing a Hollywood screenplay about his company&amp;#39;s early days. By some estimates, Zuckerberg could be worth as much as $3billion, making him the richest person in the world under the age of 25. In two years, he&amp;#39;s gone from being called an also-ran to breakfasting with heads of state at Davos\u2014and Business 2.0 no longer exists.\n\nTo understand Facebook&amp;#39;s dramatic growth\u2014and the pressure Zuckerberg is now under to make something of it\u2014it&amp;#39;s useful to start with the site&amp;#39;s fundamental insight: Social networking is most effective when it mirrors the real world. Prior to Face-book, social-networking sites (MySpace, the now moribund Friendster) were primarily conceived of as places for strangers to mingle, and there was no guaranteeing that people were who they said they were. &amp;quot;With MySpace, for example, a lot of people on it are fictitious. If they live in L.A., they&amp;#39;re all 21 and movie stars,&amp;quot; says Peter Thiel, PayPal co-founder and an early investor in Facebook. &amp;quot;But Facebook is about concrete people, living in actual places. It&amp;#39;s the bridge between the actual physical world and the virtual world of the Internet.&amp;quot;\n\nWhen Zuckerberg started Facebook, he wanted to re-create, as accurately as possible, something he calls the &amp;quot;social graph&amp;quot;\u2014a mathematical term describing all of the people in a given community and the connections among them. The site began as a social graph of Zuckerberg&amp;#39;s fellow Harvard students, and to keep it exclusive and ensure that people weren&amp;#39;t misrepresenting themselves, he insisted that every user provide a valid Harvard e-mail address. With this simple requirement, he was also able to make his users feel secure enough to provide private information\u2014phone numbers, IM screen names, their physical addresses\u2014that people don&amp;#39;t typically post on the Internet. Even as Facebook grew to include other colleges and eventually the general public, this culture of trust continued: Today, nearly a quarter of users have posted their personal cell-phone numbers on the site, along with reams of other private identification and preference information.\n\nSean Parker, the Napster co-founder who eventually helped bring nearly $15 million in early venture-capital investment to Facebook, met Zuckerberg during his sophomore year, 2004, just as Facebook was beginning to spread to other colleges. Parker had been an early booster of other social-networking sites\u2014advising the creators of Friendster and co-founding the professional-networking site Plaxo\u2014believing that they had greater potential than most others in Silicon Valley thought. But with everything he had worked on, he kept running into the same problem: making sure that users were accurately representing themselves. Or, in other words, how to establish identity online.\n\n&amp;quot;In Web 1.0, community was virtual,&amp;quot; Parker says. &amp;quot;People did represent themselves as themselves, but there was no commitment to that. There was no guarantee. And there were a lot of efforts to bring some accountability and verification to the Internet\u2014Microsoft Passport, AOL Magic Carpet\u2014but they were all top-down and, as a result, failures. Without identity, you can&amp;#39;t do all of the interesting things that we do in the real world that involve trust and accountability and social pressure and social obligation. If one or two companies could control that identity layer, then it could conceivably be the most valuable thing that any company can own on the Internet.&amp;quot;\n\nWhat Parker saw in Zuckerberg&amp;#39;s site was a way to create identity from the bottom up: Facebook users were already volunteering the kinds of information\u2014age, contact information, gender, sexual orientation, friendships, photos, favorite music, books, movies, and television programs\u2014that Microsoft and AOL had failed to obtain. After their initial 2004 meeting, Parker ran into Zuckerberg again in Palo Alto that summer. &amp;quot;I was loading bos into my car, and this group of kids wearing these little hoodies pulled over their heads was walking toward me,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;There were five or six of them, and I thought, Oh, these kids are going to give me a hard time. And then I look up and realize that they&amp;#39;re calling my name, and one of them is Mark.&amp;quot; Parker soon began lining up investors, who flocked to Zuckerberg&amp;#39;s growing cache of user-identity information.\n\nHow valuable, exactly, is Zuckerberg&amp;#39;s -database Answering that question has lately become one of Silicon Valley&amp;#39;s favorite parlor games. A recent internal estimate put the company&amp;#39;s value at $3.75 billion. Some say it could be higher, but not as high as\n\n$15 billion\u2014the number often bandied about after Microsoft&amp;#39;s investment last year. To many tech insiders, that deal smacked of hubris: In order to justify Microsoft&amp;#39;s investment, Facebook would have to drastically increase its revenue over the next few years. And everything Zuckerberg has tried so far to pump up revenue has been a fiasco. One such effort, a 2007 project called Beacon that charged companies fees for letting a Facebook user&amp;#39;s friends know whenever that user made a purchase online, caused an uproar when it alerted 700 of one user&amp;#39;s friends, including his wife, that &amp;quot;Sean Lane bought 14K White Gold 1/5 ct Diamond Eternity Flower Ring from overstock.com.&amp;quot; (The alert also included a link saying that the ring had been 51 percent off.) The problem with trying to profit from user information, it turned out, was that doing so seemed to violate the trust that allowed users to share their information in the first place. Users revolted, and the Beacon trial run ended with Sean Lane publicly accusing Zuckerberg of ruining Christmas, Zuckerberg massively scaling back Beacon, and nineteen Facebook users filing a lawsuit claiming that the site had violated federal privacy regulations.\n\nFor now, Facebook mostly makes its money through targeted banner ads, the kind you see all over the Internet. But while outside observers may fret that the clock is ticking for the company to figure things out, Zuckerberg insists that he intends to just keep plugging along, doing what he&amp;#39;s doing. When asked about Facebook&amp;#39;s financial situation, he typically recites the old dot-com clich\u00E9 about building a great product first and worrying about the money later. He just wants to grow the company further, he says, and then, someday, take it public, with himself still at the helm. If he sold or relinquished any control, he may never be as significant as he is right now.\n\n&amp;quot;That&amp;#39;s one way to look at it,&amp;quot; says prominent Silicon Valley gadfly Kara Swisher, editor of the influential tech blog All Things Digital. &amp;quot;Or would you rather be the guy who started Friendster&amp;quot;\n\n\n\nThe most vexing thing about trying to understand where Facebook is heading is Zuckerberg himself: When he speaks about his vision, it&amp;#39;s often hard to tell whether his vagueness is the result of naive idealism or calculated misdirection. I met him for the first time earlier this year, in a glass-walled conference room at Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto. Sitting at the head of the conference table with ramrod-straight posture, he wore jeans, a long-sleeve crewneck, and what looked to be some sort of moccasins. Zuckerberg tends to observe interviewers with an unblinking stare\u2014as if he&amp;#39;s seeing a human for the first time\u2014and gives them nothing. You find yourself tripping over words, stumbling over phrases, having to rephrase and re-ask questions that are invariably longer than his answers. Trying to pin him down on specifics can be maddening. When I asked him how he and his team had celebrated the Microsoft investment, he responded with a question of his own:\n\n&amp;quot;Celebrate&amp;quot;\n\n&amp;quot;Well, that was a big deal, no? You didn&amp;#39;t even celebrate at all?&amp;quot;\n\n&amp;quot;We didn&amp;#39;t celebrate.&amp;quot;\n\nIn the media, Zuckerberg has been portrayed as a sort of nerd king\u2014the kid with the brains and the moxie to take a pet project and turn it into a phenomenon. He&amp;#39;s famous for his Star Wars\u2013themed bar mitzvah, for wearing Adidas sandals to important meetings and public events, for reportedly refusing a weekend meeting with Yahoo! ecutives because his girlfriend was in town. But any talk of his own personal life clearly made Zuckerberg uncomfortable.\n\n&amp;quot;The reason I&amp;#39;m finding it kind of awkward to answer these questions,&amp;quot; he said, grimacing in response to one about people comparing him to Bill Gates, &amp;quot;is because this isn&amp;#39;t the type of thing that we really spend a lot of time talking about.&amp;quot;\n\n&amp;quot;So you&amp;#39;re just thinking about Facebook, the product, twenty-four hours a day&amp;quot;\n\n&amp;quot;Right. Most of the ideas that come from the company and all the work that&amp;#39;s being done, it&amp;#39;s not me. The media likes to point to the person at the top. But I&amp;#39;m just the person who sets the frame. This isn&amp;#39;t about me doing crazy things.&amp;quot;\n\nOur meeting took place a few months after the user rebellion over Beacon, and I asked Zuckerberg how he saw user privacy affecting the future of Facebook.\n\n&amp;quot;People have an innate desire to connect with other people and share information,&amp;quot; he replied. &amp;quot;But they only want to share certain pieces of information. So if you&amp;#39;re coming at it purely from the problem of How do I enable people to share as much information as they want, then privacy is really the only tool for that. Otherwise, there are all these pieces of information that they aren&amp;#39;t able to share with anyone.&amp;quot;\n\nZuckerberg and those who surround him tend to be relentlessly forward-looking on privacy: The issue for them is not how to protect users&amp;#39; current sense of privacy but to shape their willingness to share in the future. They often cite Facebook&amp;#39;s News Feed feature, which broadcasts users&amp;#39; activity on their friends&amp;#39; home pages, as an example of how privacy concerns are often overblown. (News Feed initially met with widespread user protest but is now one of the most popular aspects of the site.) Such talk sends privacy-watchdog groups into fits. &amp;quot;Zuckerberg&amp;#39;s argument seems to often be that information wants to be free and he&amp;#39;s just trying to facilitate that,&amp;quot; says Michael Zimmer, a technology and privacy scholar at the University of Wisconsin\u2013Milwaukee. &amp;quot;But that ignores the notion of what happens when you make information available to everyone\u2014you need to be able to understand the subtleties, contexts, and implications.&amp;quot;\n\nJeff Chester, of the Center for Digital Democracy, says most Facebook users have no idea that their personal information is being commercially harvested and sent out to the thousands of third-party developers whose applications populate the site. He and other privacy advocates worry that rogue developers might profit from that information by selling it to marketers (who would then flood your in-box with spam) or by committing illegal acts, such as identity fraud. At bottom, for critics like Chester, the issue is whether or not users have complete control of where their information winds up: You should have the right to opt out of targeted advertising, and if you choose to opt in, you should know which companies are getting your information and what they plan to do with it. The worst case is an Orwellian scenario in which all Web content is fully determined by user targeting. &amp;quot;We are going to live in a world completely dominated by advertising,&amp;quot; says Chester, &amp;quot;where advertising plays the key role in the creation of most of what we see.&amp;quot;\n\nFacebook is gradually rolling out Connect, the product previewed in Zuckerberg&amp;#39;s July f8 keynote speech. (It currently works with CNN, MoveOn.org, and CBS, among others.) But the technology is clearly an attempt at seizing control of digital identity in the way that caused Sean Parker to see dollar signs when he first met Zuckerberg. Connect will essentially work like this: You log in once, to Facebook, and then everywhere you travel on the Web, that log-in travels with you. Such a system has potential advantages for users. Web sites will use your Facebook data to create new features\u2014e.g., if you visit Citysearch, you&amp;#39;ll be able to click a tab and see which restaurants your friends have recommended. &amp;quot;You&amp;#39;ll have a seamless sign-on process and seamless access to your data everywhere you go,&amp;quot; says Parker. &amp;quot;And you&amp;#39;ll control who has access to your data. I don&amp;#39;t think Microsoft would&amp;#39;ve been trusted to perform that role, but Facebook has earned that trust.&amp;quot;\n\nThese new conveniences will likely come at some cost. Presumably, Connect will eventually offer sites other tidbits of information\u2014your age; gender; music, movie, book preferences\u2014that the site could then use to target content and advertising directly to you. Some degree of targeted advertising is often welcome\u2014most people, for example, have no problem with Amazon.com&amp;#39;s reading recommendations. The question for Connect is: How much control will users have over what gets shared with these outside sites Zuckerberg has repeatedly said that he intends to provide his users granular control over their information, but in the past, with Beacon, for example, he&amp;#39;s displayed a tendency to interpret privacy as he chooses to\u2014and ask questions later.\n\n&amp;quot;Facebook pushed the boundaries of privacy a bit further and, when public outcry took place, retreated just a wee bit to make people feel more comfortable,&amp;quot; wrote social-media expert Danah Boyd in response to Beacon. &amp;quot;In other words, this is &amp;#39;slippery slope&amp;#39; software development.\u2026 [Most people] will still believe that Facebook is far more private than other social-network sites (even though this is patently untrue).&amp;quot;\n\nSo far, Connect has not sparked protests similar to those that Beacon faced. The question is whether Zuckerberg will be able to continue bringing his users around as Connect spreads to other parts of the Web. It may just be a matter of waiting them out. &amp;quot;There really is a generational divide,&amp;quot; says Facebook investor Thiel, &amp;quot;where younger people in the U.S. are generally more open to putting themselves out there. My hope is that we&amp;#39;re going to end up with a far more tolerant society, where the erosion of privacy, to the extent it erodes, will be offset by increased tolerance.&amp;quot;\n\n\n\nThere&amp;#39;s a myth in Silicon Valley that you get only one Big Idea and that your future is determined by what you make of it: If you miss your opportunity to make it rich, something else will come along and pass you by. This, in part, explains why Zuckerberg has had such a hard time relinquishing control of Facebook\u2014if he&amp;#39;s only going to get one run at becoming a Bill Gates or a Sergey Brin, why not let things run their course\n\n&amp;quot;I think Mark is quite adamant about not selling Facebook,&amp;quot; Kara Swisher says. &amp;quot;But I think a lot of his employees are quite adamant that he do. He needs to prove to them that they&amp;#39;re going to get paid. At this point, though, they can&amp;#39;t possibly have an IPO, because their results just aren&amp;#39;t good enough. A lot of high-ranking [Facebook] employees are biting their nails.&amp;quot; If Zuckerberg were to turn down an offer of, say, $10 billion or more, havoc would ensue at\n\nFacebook headquarters. Zuckerberg would face enormous pressure from investors and employees scared that an IPO would never capture the same kind of payday. Earlier this spring, rumors of a $20 billion offer from Microsoft were floating around, but nothing ever materialized. At the time, Swisher and her tech-industry sources thought that if and when Zuckerberg got a $10 billion or $15 billion offer, he should sell and walk away a Mark Cuban\u2013esque legend. But with the global economy in crisis, it&amp;#39;s no longer likely that Zuckerberg will get an offer anywhere near that range. The IPO market has virtually disappeared, the venture-capital market is soft, and tech stocks are tanking\u2014but Facebook still has Microsoft&amp;#39;s $240 million investment to live off of for now. Zuckerberg&amp;#39;s answer to the financial crisis came in a recent e-mail to his employees, the gist of which was: Keep building great products that help make the world more open and connected; continue to provide value to all of our users, developers, and advertisers.\n\nAfter Facebook added its new Chat service in April, I started sending Mark occasional instant messages. Last summer while he was in Japan, I encouraged him to risk his life eating fugu testicles. Other times we&amp;#39;d discuss ideas\u2014information flow or how he thought Facebook could play a pivotal role in democratizing media. This September, while watching a replay of his Connect presentation, I noticed he was online:\n\n(12:25 p.m.) Alex: How&amp;#39;s things\n\n (12:25 p.m.) Mark: There&amp;#39;s this definite evolution happening. Where the first part of the social web was mapping out the social graph. And the second phase is now mapping out the stream of everything that everyone does. All of human consciousness and communication.\n\n (12:29 p.m.) Alex: Imagine if you could broadcast people&amp;#39;s emotions into a feed\n\n (12:30 p.m.) Mark: I think we&amp;#39;ll get there.\n\n (12:30 p.m.) Alex: So how are you going to map all of human consciousness and communication\n\n (12:30 p.m.) Mark: We don&amp;#39;t map it directly. We give people tools so they can share as much as they want, but increasingly people share more and more things, and there&amp;#39;s this trend toward sharing a greater number of smaller things like status updates, wall posts, mobile photos, etc. A status update can approach being a projection of an emotion.\n\n (12:31 p.m.) Alex: That&amp;#39;s what I use it for.\n\n (12:31 p.m.) Mark: So it&amp;#39;s not so crazy to say that in a few years people will be doing a lot more of that. It takes time for people to be comfortable sharing more and for the social norms to change.\n\nZuckerberg is convinced that with his accurate map of the social world, he has created an irreplaceable tool for people to stay in touch with, share with\u2014hell, even feel each other. Eventually, he thinks, if he gathers enough users and persuades them to share enough, he&amp;#39;ll have a site that no new rival could ever catch up with. One that\u2014whether it&amp;#39;s through Connect or some other technology\u2014will bring with it the kinds of profits everyone expects from him. But can we be sure that whatever that technology is will not feel like a violation of our trust\n\n That&amp;#39;s a question Zuckerberg refuses to answer\u2014mostly because he doesn&amp;#39;t quite see things that way. &amp;quot;All that is interesting,&amp;quot; he told me, &amp;quot;but we believe that what we&amp;#39;re doing is a good thing in the world.&amp;quot;\n\n\n\nAlex French (@FrecnhAlexM) is a  GQ  researcher and writer living in New York."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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