The Boy Kings

world could produce that.

CHAPTER 7
I’D RATHER BE CONQUERING
    T he Facebook Platform that was launched at F8 was, already within weeks and months of launch, winning. In fact, the platform grew exponentially overnight, to Mark’s and many of the engineers’ surprise and satisfaction. Application developers signed up by the thousands and built applications like Farmville and Scrabulous, as users’ increasingly cluttered walls showed, soon gained wide distribution. By November 2007, over seven thousand applications had been created and each day a hundred new ones were being launched. In Mark’s and some engineers’ views, the rapid and unrestricted growth of the platform was good because it proved that at Facebook, technical development, not the desires of marketers or users, was king.
    Not everyone was convinced that the rapid growth of theplatform was such a good thing: for the company, maybe; for the users, not necessarily. As customer-support reps, our job had always been to keep the site clean, monitoring for spam and aggression from individual users, doing our best to keep the virtual neighborhood tidy, and, we hoped, meaningful—a true “place for friends.” We painstakingly and manually deleted accounts that we thought were fake, and warned people whom we thought were contacting users en masse, rather than communicating in a personal way. Though paid very little compared to the engineers, we were in a sense the defenders of authenticity on Facebook, at least until engineers could figure out a way to approximate our labor with algorithms, which they eventually did, to some user consternation as accounts came to be easily erroneously flagged and deleted.
    But now, developers, who could sign up to develop on the Facebook Platform from all over the world, were pumping thousands of apps and millions of formulaic News Feed stories into our carefully walled and defended network. As far as external developers were concerned, the sole purpose of the platform was to generate more users for their app and, therefore, more money for themselves. In a sense, they were simply mirroring the engineering ideology of Facebook itself: Scaling and growth are everything, individuals and their experiences are secondary to what is necessary to maximize the system. Facebook, as we learned early in the case of the group titled “If this group gets 100,000 members my girlfriend will have a threesome,” is the world’s most efficient viral marketing platform, a way to turn automated word of mouth into gold.
    The idea of providing developers with a massive platform forapplication promotion didn’t exactly accord, I thought, with the site’s stated mission of connecting people. To me, connection with another person required intention: They have to personally signal that they want to talk to me, and vice versa. Platform developers, though, went at human connection from a more automated angle: They churned out applications that promised to tell you who had a crush on you if you would just send an invitation to the application to all of your friends. The idea was that, after the application had a list of your contacts, it would begin the automated work of inquiring about people’s interests and matching people who were interested in each other.
    Soon, developers didn’t even ask you if you wanted to send invitations to your friends. Simply adding the application would automatically notify all of your Facebook friends that you had added it and invite them to add it, too, using each user as a vessel through which invitations would flow, virally, without the user’s consent. In this way, users’ need for friendship and connection became a powerful engine of spam, as it already was with email and on the Internet long before Facebook. The same “We’ll tell you who has a crush on you if you just send this email to your address book” ploys were familiar to me from Hopkins, when spammers could blanket the entire email server with such emails in a matter of hours, spread virally by students gullibly entering the names of their crushes and their crushes’ email addresses.
    When I first started working at Facebook, I wanted to believe that my experience there could have been a love story. That is, I thought, in some sense, that Facebook could be what we all—the employees, the users—sometimes wanted: A network through which we could connect and love each other more readilyand more easily and with more permanence, a place in