The Boy Kings

Angeles, MySpace initially gained traction among aspiring Hollywood actors and musicians, thus cloaking it temporarily in an aura of artistic cool, but it did very little to develop itself as a product after that point. Thus, MySpace was not technical, and Facebook was. As far as Mark was concerned, Facebook was the first social network devoted to technology first, and he wanted to stake this claim within the tech community. Thus, Facebook planned and arranged its first F8 conference in downtown San Francisco, which was where Facebook would publicly announce its commitment to technology.
    As May 2007 approached, the company prepared furiously for F8. The proof of the company’s technical nature, which would be unveiled at F8, was the Facebook Platform, a new product or set of tools that would permit a Web application like Facebook to interface with external code written by outside developers. This would enable engineers who were not employees to build applications that run on the site. Users could then interact with friends on the site in a wide range of applications beyond the ones, like Photos and Groups, which were created by Facebook.
    We were all so aligned in our sense that Facebook woulddominate the world that none of us really questioned the hubris involved in naming our conference “Fate.” Platforms are the ultimate technology for a Web site with global ambitions because they are a way of bringing every developer to play on your turf, even if they aren’t playing on your company’s team, and we were the first social network to build one. Moreover, as far as Face-book was concerned, we were the first social network committed to technical innovation at all.
    However, because I was not technical, I was not actually invited to attend F8, despite being employee number fifty-one at a company that now had over two hundred employees. In the push for technical dominance, Mark had been engaged throughout spring 2007 in a shift that a few women in the company began referring to as the “technical purge,” in which everyone without a technical background suddenly found their positions in question. Mark began to insist that new positions be occupied by technical people. I wasn’t particularly surprised, since, as customer-support employees, we always had questionable status anyway.
    The customer-support reps who wanted to go to F8 could only attend on the condition that they serve as coat checkers. Perhaps I was as guilty as the engineers of feeling starworthy and VIP, but I wouldn’t accept being treated like the second-class help, and this would serve me well. While the engineers were huddled in a room at San Francisco’s W Hotel, where they could concentrate away from the crowds of press and developers swarming the conference, furiously preparing for F8, I left the Bay Area to spend the weekend with my parents in Huntington Beach. At the beach house my parents rented, I had to sleep onthe couch, but it was better than checking coats at a conference called “Fate.”
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    The following weekend, I was lying on a futon in Thrax’s apartment late one night, listening to Sam, Justin, and Emile rehash F8. Thrax told a story about the night of the conference, hours before the Facebook platform was announced. The engineers were all holed up at the W, coding as quickly as their fingers could type. The problem was that the revolutionary platform, which Mark had announced in his keynote with the words, “Today, together, we’re gonna start a movement,” wasn’t ready. The boys were still writing code and patching bugs to make it work at all.
    Even though Thrax and Ariston began building Facebook Video in defiance of Mark’s orders (as Video gained traction in the company and all employees were using it, Mark came to accept it) it turned out to be a boon, as it gave him a Facebook application built on the platform to announce as part of the launch. But at the eleventh hour, the platform and video were still unfinished, so even as Mark announced them, Thrax was writing furiously to code. As he told us the story, he had been coding for three days, and his body and vision were starting to fail. When he fixed the last bug to make video work, he left his laptop on the bed and went to the bathroom to get a glass of water. He didn’t make it to the sink. He collapsed on the marble floor, exhausted, and fell asleep. Later he woke up and, in a half-dreaming state, tried to move but couldn’t. His exhaustion