Negative Blogs

Shane Richmond and Will Heaven answer the question facing Mark
Zuckerberg at the beginning of 2011.

By Shane Richmond and Will Heaven
11:41PM GMT 04 Jan 2011

Comments

Yes – 500 million members suggest it’s well on the way, says Shane Richmond.

Whichever way you look at it, 2010 was a spectacular year for Facebook. In
America, it overtook Google to become the most visited website; globally,
it’s the third‑largest website, behind Microsoft and Google. Its founder and
chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, was Time magazine’s Person of the Year.

Over the new year weekend, Facebook users uploaded 750 million photos. That’s
more than one picture for each user of the site, which now has a membership
of well over 500 million people. And this week it was announced that Goldman
Sachs will invest $450 million (£288 million) in Facebook, taking the
valuation of the site to $50 billion (£32 billion).

Then consider the fact that Facebook is still growing – at the rate of 700,000
people a day. It’s closing in on 600 million users, and as more join, the
network becomes more powerful. Its members aren’t just chatting and sharing
photos, they are also playing games, reading the news and keeping up with
famous people. Facebook Places lets them share their location with friends;
Facebook Messages aims to replace our email accounts; and the Facebook
experience is now available on more than two million websites.

At the heart of this is Mark Zuckerberg, the 26-year-old Harvard drop-out who
has become the world’s youngest billionaire. According to those around him,
he’s not motivated by money, which is why he has resisted pressure to sell
Facebook. He lives a relatively modest life, by all accounts. His motivation
seems to be to drive Facebook forwards – and his success at doing that has
been staggering. Profiling him last month, Time magazine noted that in
addition to his expertise as a computer programmer, Zuckerberg “understands
a remarkable amount about other people”. His mother was a psychiatrist and
he studied some psychology at Harvard. There is a team of very smart people
around him. The site competes aggressively with its Silicon Valley
competitors to snap up the best talent. But even with the social networking
“think tank” that Facebook has established at its headquarters in Palo Alto,
California, it’s Zuckerberg who remains the leader.

Related Articles

Article extracted from telegraph.co.uk