You Would Unfriend Mark Zuckerberg

Facebook made history in April when it briefly passed Google as the most visited website in the world. On one hand, this is discouraging. Our appetite for all knowledge on Earth is exceeded by our lust for mundane status updates and boozy party pictures. But on the other, this is uplifting. It shows how much we crave a manicured, gated-online picture-sharing party where you’re the real you. Leave MySpace to the creepy uncle or Indie band. Ironic because:

You Would Unfriend Mark Zuckerberg
You wouldn’t like Mark Zuckerberg in person. At Harvard, he was brash, obnoxious, and wont to quote lines from the Iliad. As he tells it, he thought up Facebook in his Harvard dorm room, buzzed, and dejected after a girl broke up with him. Zuckerberg wanted a way to compare ugly Harvard student pictures to barnyard animals.

Ask Harvard classmates and they have a slightly different version: Mark Zuckerberg stole the idea entirely. Three classmates offered to pay Zuckerberg to build a dating site for them called HarvardConnections.com. So Zuckerberg took the idea, stalled on that project, and churned out theFacebook.com. There’s even an instant message conversation where Zuckerberg boasts to a friend he would “f--- them, probably in the ear”. Zuckerberg later paid $65 million to settle.

There’s more. Zuckerberg may have committed a felony. When he caught wind that the Harvard Crimson planned to write about his HarvardConnections.com imbroglio, Zuckerberg hacked into reporters’ email accounts back in 2004. Or, in 2010 terms, he pulled a China.

Thief, felon, ear-violator, whatever you want to call Mark Zuckerberg, you also have to call him the youngest self-made billionaire in human history. He’s our generation’s Bill Gates, except much raunchier. Gates gave us Windows, a stable platform for computers. But he completely whiffed at the Internet: Do you know anyone that uses Hotmail anymore? Mark Zuckerberg gave us Facebook, the stable platform for the Internet. He chalks Facebook’s exponential growth up to the “social graph” phenomenon. Basically, the longest you’re in a social network, the more you will want to share with your friends. You get more social. Some would say too much…

Dear Girls With The Intensely Personal Facebook Status Updates,
Stop! You have 642 friends, and you really only know 50 of them. The rest are of the random, met-you-at-a-party-once variety. I see a girl rant about some boy or betrayed by a friend in the News Feed and all I can think is: you realize other people can read this right? Become A Fan of: “Wanna not say that in front of everyone? Kay, thanks.” (nearly 600,000 strong). We don’t want to read this. It’s uncomfortable, awkward, but unavoidable when it’s right there at the top of the News Feed.

Mark Zuckerberg raised the ire of many when he said the Millenial Generation doesn’t care about privacy. He’s largely right though. I love the “Jersey Shore” and occasionally drinking with my friends. You really got me! I’ve heard the argument: Facebook has already extinguished every American’s political prospects born between 1981 and 1992. Every potential 2032 Senate run is undermined by Spring Break pictures. These fears are unfounded. Barring seething racial diatribes or “For All In Favor Of Clubbing Baby Seals” membership, we probably won’t care by then. We almost already don’t. Barack Obama admitted he inhaled weed (“That was the point!”) and snorted coke at Columbia.

Obama sobered up, hired Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes to revolutionize his social media campaign, and raised over half a billion dollars online. Over 5.4 million (mostly college age) users ticked the "I Voted" button on Election Day. Our more audacious parents stormed school buildings and marched on Washington. Facebook is ideal for Generation Y’s sleepy political activism. We can just click the “Like” button, join the “1,000,000 Strong For Same Sex Marriage” group, give money, and don’t even have to leave bed.

We have mostly snoozed since Election Day, but Sarah Palin has rabble-roused Republicans to “not retreat, reload” on the heels of health care reform. The half-term-former- governor-of-Alaska-turned-wanna-be-White-Oprah posted a map with vulnerable Democrat seats circled in cross-hairs. The grandmother has refused to apologize for the loaded gun analogy.




Our Parents Took Facebook From Us
Our parents used to make fun of us for Facebook. “Quit spending so much time on that picture-thingey!” is an exact quote. But then they wouldn’t get off it. Our parents took it over. The 35-54 user demographic exploded by 276% in 2009. They got over high school grudges, didn’t get Twitter, and loved to share our embarrassing baby pictures (Thanks Aunt Ellie. Those Cape Cod beach pictures of five-year old me are quite the conversation-starter.) Scan the NewsFeed and your Tiger Woods spoof may have 2-3 comments and a like. Your dad’s girlfriend’s biking picture? It only racked up 17 comments and 20 likes. Having your mom on Facebook has created some disconcerting run-ins:

What’s the quickest way to turn us off of something? Turn our parents onto it. It hasn’t happened yet. But Facebook has been a lightning rod of pop culture riffs. South Park pilloried not so much Facebook but our addiction to it in last week’s episode: “Your friends shouldn't be a commodity for status.” Seth Rogen ranted “F--- Facebook … in the face!” in Judd Apatow’s unheralded movie “Funny People”. The site Lamebook.com attracts nearly a million Facebook foes a day hilariously compiling our worst Facebook moments.

Cartman tirades are more testament to Facebook’s sheer scale than any veritable threat. Twitter is not the next Facebook. Teens don’t tweet and 60% of Twitter users burn out within the first month .Meanwhile, Facebook hosts 400 million people, or the combined population of the US and Mexico. Recent valuations peg Facebook between $11 and 17 billion. The Oxford Dictionary named “unfriend” the 2009 Word of the Year. Entertainment Weekly rated Facebook as one of the best inventions of the 2000s, asking: "How on earth did we stalk our exes, remember our co-workers' birthdays, bug our friends, and play a rousing game of Scrabulous before Facebook?”

Facebook is our collective fridge door to magnet birthday reminders and what’s for dinner. It’s our constantly-updating reminder that our friends and families care. The genius of Facebook is not so much that we like the “That’s What She Said” group or adorable dog videos. It’s that our friends like that we like them.