The future of facebook: Mark Zuckerberg talked to TIME

Caption: Facebook hype

Caption: Mark Zuckerberg speaking.

-by Laura Locke


In his first interview with TIME, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg sat down with reporter Laura Locke to talk about Facebook's rapid growth spurt, IPO rumors, future plans and the pressures of being a 23-year-old CEO in Silicon Valley.

TIME: Facebook is undergoing a huge period of growth. With more than 150,000 new users signing up daily, it is growing three times as fast as rival MySpace. What do you attribute that spike to?

Zuckerberg: For a while we actually constrained our growth. We made it so that only people in college could sign up. Initially it was only available to people at Harvard, where I was at college. We rolled it out to all the colleges, all the high schools, then a bunch of companies could sign up, and now everyone can sign up. It may seem like the growth is really accelerating at a crazy rate, but it's actually been growing and doubling about once every six months for quite a while.

TIME: Is Facebook's popularity connected to its focus on authenticity? On your site, misrepresentation of your real self is a violation of company policy.

Zuckerberg: That's the critical part of it. Our whole theory is that people have real connections in the world. People communicate most naturally and effectively with their friends and the people around them. What we figured is that if we could model what those connections were, [we could] provide that information to a set of applications through which people want to share information, photos or videos or events. But that only works if those relationships are real. That's a really big difference between Facebook and a lot of other sites. We're not thinking about ourselves as a community — we're not trying to build a community — we're not trying to make new connections.

TIME: Why do you describe Facebook as a "social utility" rather than a "social network?"

Zuckerberg: I think there's confusion around what the point of social networks is. A lot of different companies characterized as social networks have different goals — some serve the function of business networking, some are media portals. What we're trying to do is just make it really efficient for people to communicate, get information and share information. We always try to emphasize the utility component.

TIME: In September you rebuffed Yahoo's offer to buy Facebook for nearly $1 billion. Before that, Viacom put up a $750 million bid. And about two months ago you clearly said Facebook would stay independent. Is that still the plan?

Zuckerberg: That has always been the plan. As a company we're very focused on what we're building and not as focused on the exit. We just believe that we're adding a certain amount of value to people's lives if we build a very good product. That's the reason why more than half of our users use the product every day — it's a more efficient way for them to communicate with their friends and get information about the people around them than anything else they can do. We're not really looking to sell the company. We're not looking to IPO anytime soon. It's just not the core focus of the company.

TIME: So, if Facebook isn't for sale and there's no IPO in the works, how do you intend to satisfy your investors who put a total of $38 million into the company?

Zuckerberg: Well, they're actually really supportive of this. What they want is to build a really great company, too. And if you think about the timeframe over which this has happened — we took our venture round from Accel Partners just about two years ago — they're not in a rush. We have plenty of time to build something good.

TIME: Facebook is looking to hire a stock administrator, isn't that a signal you're preparing for an IPO?

Zuckerberg: Well, no. [Pause.] I mean, we grant options to all of our employees. At this point we have more than 250. It's a core part of compensation, so you want to make sure you get it right for people. At some point in the future, if we get a chance to go down that [IPO] path, it will be valuable to have that — it's a part of building out the company. I think it's funny that people are paying so much attention to that.

TIME: The frenzy surrounding Facebook seems to have intensified quite dramatically over the past several months. What do you think is behind the company's newfound cachet?

Zuckerberg: I think the most recent surge, at least in the press, is around the launch of Facebook Platform. For the first time we're allowing developers who don't work at Facebook to develop applications just as if they were. That's a big deal because it means that all developers have a new way of doing business if they choose to take advantage of it. There are whole companies that are forming whose only product is a Facebook Platform application. That provides an opportunity for them, it provides an opportunity for people who want to make money by investing in those companies, and I think that's something that's pretty exciting to the business community. It's also really exciting to our users because it means that a whole new variety of services are going to be made available.

TIME: What's your grand plan for the company? How do you see it evolving over the next three to five years?

Zuckerberg: It's tough to say, exactly, what things will look like in three to five years, but there's a lot of work to do in just moving along the path that we've already set out. Right now we have 30 million active users on Facebook. There's a lot more to go. And there a lot of different applications that are going to be developed to allow people to share information in different ways. I would expect the user base will grow [and there will be] more ways for advertisers to reach people and communicate in a very natural way, just like users communicate with each other. All these things will just get more and more evolved.

TIME: Beyond Facebook's exclusive advertising deal with Microsoft, which gives the software giant the right to sell ads on the site, what are some of your ideas about monetizing your 30 million users?

Zuckerberg: Advertising works most effectively when it's in line with what people are already trying to do. And people are trying to communicate in a certain way on Facebook — they share information with their friends, they learn about what their friends are doing —so there's really a whole new opportunity for a new type of advertising model within that. And I think we'll see more in the next couple months or years on that.

TIME: With more than 40 billion page views every month, Facebook is the sixth most trafficked site in the U.S., and the top photo-sharing site. What are your international expansion plans?

Zuckerberg: Right now a lot of our growth is happening internationally. We have more than 10% or 15% of the population of Canada on the site. The U.K. has a huge user base. We haven't translated the site yet, but that's something we're working on and it should be done soon. What we're doing is pretty broadly applicable to people in all different age groups and demographics and places around the world.

TIME: You recently took off for a summer vacation, what did you do?
Zuckerberg: Hang out with my family.

TIME: What's a typical day like for the guy who founded Facebook in his Harvard dorm room just three years ago before becoming a full-time entrepreneur?

Zuckerberg: I wake up in the morning, I walk to work because I live four blocks from one of our offices, and I work, meet with people, and discuss things all day, and then I go home and go to sleep. I don't have an alarm clock. If someone needs to wake me up, then I have my BlackBerry next to me.

TIME: You're a 23-year-old Silicon Valley CEO. How do you deal with all pressures that come along with running a hyper-fast paced, high-profile technology company?

Zuckerberg: I was watching an interview with Steve Jobs the other day, in which he said that 'In order to be doing something like this, you have to really, really like what you're doing, because otherwise it just doesn't make sense.' The demands and the amount of work that it takes to put something like [Facebook] into place, it's just so much that if you weren't completely into what you were doing and you didn't think it was an important thing, then it would be irrational to spend that much time on it. Part of the reason why this is fun is because we've managed to build a team of really smart people who come from different backgrounds and have different experiences and think in different ways. People constantly try to put us in a bucket: are we trying to sell the company? What are we trying to do? What is the business strategy? People are often more interested in why we're hiring a stock-options administrator. Whereas for me and a lot of people around me, that's not really what we focus on. We're just focused on building things.

Global warming: Losing Bangladesh, by degrees

Caption:
My country Bangladesh's Map, India is around three sides, Burma is in East South corner, Bay of Bengal is in South. One of the new 7 wonders 'Cox's Bazar' the largest sea beach of the universe is seen in the map.

-by Tahmima Anam
Tahmima Anam is the author of the novel 'A Golden Age'. This piece was first published in The New York Times.




Imagine, if you will, a country marooned between a snowy mountain range and a churning sea. The country is small, a thumbprint on a vast continent. It holds the youngest and largest delta in the world. This means the landscape is fickle, the rivers often shifting and swallowing giant swaths of land.
It is cleaved by two of the world's mightiest rivers, the Ganges and the Brahmaputra. They perform vanishing acts and conjuring tricks. One day your house is dry and the chilies are airing in the courtyard. The next it has disappeared altogether. You do not want to rebuild so close to the river, but you do: there is no space; the country is full.
For whatever else it strains to hold, it is the crush of humanity that makes Bangladesh what it is: a calamitous country, a country so full of people that every slight shift in circumstance has dire consequences. The weather does not have to be extreme. It has only to be intemperate, and the country does the rest.
How does such a small place hold so much? You worry that it will burst. But your worry is misplaced. You should worry that it will sink. For as the sea level rises, its waters will flow upward like fingers into a glove, turning the sweet river water into salt. The salt will destroy the crops and kill the fish and raze the forests. At the same time, the Himalayan peaks will melt, and they, too, will flow into the country.
The rising sea and the melting mountains will meet on this tiny patch of the world, and the people who strain at its seams will drown with it, or be blown away to distant shores, casualties and refugees by the millions.
Here in the capital, winter is a festive season. The cool weather allows women to wear their heaviest saris and wrap thick twists of gold around their necks. There is little rain; the ground is solid -- good for high heels. Buildings across the city are draped with strings of lights. You can buy hot, crunchy jilapis by the roadside; the markets are full of winter vegetables.
One day this winter, I landed at Dhaka airport just before dawn. The fog that had delayed my flight clung to the ground and looked like snow; as it lifted, a milky haze took its place. On the way home I saw groups of men huddled over coal fires by the side of the road.
They wore puffy jackets and acrylic sweaters, castoffs from the sweatshops that dot the highways between the airport and the city. When they blew on their hands, I saw clouds whistling out of their mouths. Their heads were wrapped in shawls and towels and mosquito nets. The sun did not make an appearance until noon that day, and even then it was only a heatless, watery orb.
In the evening I went to the other side of town, where my uncles live by the long, pencil-shaped Dhanmondi Lake. I watched from the window as the lake appeared to go still, as though deciding whether it was cold enough to freeze over, and there were tiny dots of fish moving toward the shore, not swimming but belly up, drowned.
According to the United Nations, the temperatures this winter in some parts of Bangladesh were the coldest in 38 years. The last time it was this cold, Bangladesh was called East Pakistan. Looked at another way, however, the mean temperature was only two degrees below the average for January.
Yet in a country so precariously balanced, two degrees meant the difference between life and death. In the districts of Rajshahi, Nilphamari, Srimangal and Gaibandha, people died of the cold because they had no protection against the weather, no walls between them and the elements -- not a long sleeve or a sock.
Only two degrees, but instead of enjoying their jilapis and weddings and cauliflower, 134 people died. A mere two-degree rise in the global climate will cause large tracts of the delta to disappear, and two degrees after that, the rivers will be wider than the plains, and two degrees after that, the water will have swallowed Bangladesh.
Two degrees either way for this country is not two degrees: it is catastrophe itself, borne on the waves of our warming world.

MIT study:Maturity brings richer memories

-by Cathryn M. Delude

News Office Correspondent, August 5, 2007

MIT neuroscientists exploring how memory formation differs between children and adults have found that although the two groups have much in common, maturity brings richer memories.
In the August 5 advance online edition of Nature Neuroscience, the MIT team reports that children rival adults in forming basic memories, but adults do better at remembering the rich, contextual details of that information. The MIT study provides new insights into how children learn that are not only theoretically important, but could also inform practical learning in everyday settings.
The ability to remember factual information - who, what, where, when - emerges gradually during childhood, and plays a critical role in education. The brain systems underlying it have been extensively studied in adults, but until now little was known about how they mature during child development.
The MIT study indicates that a more developed prefrontal cortex (PFC) - an area of the brain long associated with higher-order thinking, planning, and reasoning -- may be responsible for creating richer memories in adults.
"Activation in the PFC follows an upward slope with age in contextual memories. The older the subjects, the more powerful the activation in that area," explains senior author John Gabrieli of MIT's McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology.
"That makes sense, because there's been a convergence of evidence that the PFC develops later than other brain regions, both functionally and structurally.... But this is the first study that asks how this area matures and contributes to learning."
For the study, Noa Ofen, a postdoctoral associate in Gabrieli's lab, forewarned 49 healthy volunteers ranging in age from eight to 24 that they would be tested on their recognition of 250 common scenes, such as a kitchen, shown to them as they lay in a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner. She recorded their brain responses as the volunteers tried to commit each picture to memory. Shortly after the volunteers left the scanner, she showed them twice as many scenes. Had they seen each one before, and if so, how vividly did they recall the scene?
Ofen then went back to the brain activation patterns. In both children and adults, several areas in the PFC and the medial temporal lobe (MTL) showed higher activation at the time when subjects studied a scene they would later remember. No age-related differences showed up in the activation patterns of the MTL regions in children and adults, but differences did appear in the PFC when looking at pictures that were later correctly recognized.
Those age-related differences related to the quality of the volunteers' memories. The older the volunteers, the more frequently their correct answers were enriched with contextual detail. Going back to the brain scans, Ofen found that the enriched memories also correlated with more intense activation in a specific region of the PFC.
"We found no change with age for memories without context," Ofen explains. "All the maturation is in memories with context. Our findings suggest that as we mature, we are able to create more contextually rich memories, and that ability evolves with a more mature PFC."
Susan Whitefield-Gabrieli, a research associate at MIT's McGovern Institute, contributed to this research, in addition to scientists from Harvard University, New York University, and the University of California, Berkeley.
"This study takes an important step forward in our understanding of the neural basis of memory development," comments Daniel Schacter, an expert on memory at Harvard University who was not associated with the study.The study was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health.

-End.