Mark Zuckerberg's Profile
Mark Zuckerberg was a Harvard freshman with a gift for computer programming. Less than a decade later, he is the baby-faced, multi-billionaire, power broker who rubbed shoulders with the President. He transformed a dorm-room project into the internet's biggest global village. The site now has over 900 million users. But for all that success, Zuckerberg has confronted bitter battles and lawsuits over Facebook's origin. He has waged an all out war on his biggest competitors.
Zuckerberg has come under fire for pushing the limits on user privacy. He is not dealing with just a piece of technology, he is dealing with people and their behavior and in many ways he is doing it on the fly. They have humongous database of information about us because we trusted them, so the question is should we still trust them? We think we know Mark because we have seen his life unfold in the Oscar winning movie, The Social Network. The portrait was unsparing. A super geek, intense, cut throat, brilliant and socially crippled. But was it accurate?
Mark's mission from the beginning was about connecting people and it was clearly based on this theory that if the world were more connected it would be a better place. But there are lots of surprises when you really dig deep into the story of Facebook. The biggest single surprise is the peculiar and tenacious personality of Mark Zuckerberg and the depth of his convictions and his consistency.
Born in 1984, he grew up in the Hudson River town of Dobbs Ferry, a bedroom community north of New York City. David Kirkpatrick spent two years researching a book about Zuckerberg and Facebook called The Facebook Effect. He comes from an unbelievably supportive family in which he is the only son and he has three sisters. This is a guy without any problem of self confidence.
Computer savvy from the start, Zuckerberg taught him the complicated computer language C++ and by ninth grade had created a digital version of the board game 'Risk'. He actually created a thing called Zucknet which is an internal instant messaging system for the family so the computers could talk to each other. That's kind of a kid he was. When he got sort of tired of his local high school, he decided to go to Exeter Prep School really because he just wanted more challenge. It was at the exclusive Exeter academy that Zuckerberg and his friend Adam D'Angelo created a music website called Synapse.
Orwell's Big Brother of Big Tech
What a nazi phaggot, he calls FB users stupid F-ers.
Apart from all the obvious 'thinking with our mouths open' that we too often tend to do, there are a couple of really neat things that pop out here. Zuckerberg had the technical skills and belief to pursue an idea, a very very simple idea, that has made him a billionaire. As did Gates, as did the Google boys and to an extent as did Jobs and Wozniak (Apple). These guys have laid a path for others to follow (if they so wish), and with only a fraction of the effort, millions can be made if you too have the technical skills and belief in a simple idea (Instragram is a good example used here).
I have an original idea, and the belief in it. Get in touch with me if you want to help build something great (I only have one pair of hands).
...There are moments of genius in all of us, I believe, the difference with these folks mentioned is they grab hold of them and run with it.
Most, if not all of these guys, could hardly of dreamed where their ideas would take them. The trick, therefore, is to perhaps try to glimpse where things might be just a few years from now...not 20 or 30 years since so much can change in that time...just 5 or 10 years seems about right. Obviously I don't want to give my ideas away here on a public website, but I think I can safely show you something of the future right now...
Moore's Law, very loosely translated, states that computing power doubles every 18 months or so. Have you ever noticed how your personal storage space seems to do something similar? No matter how much space we have, we always fill it up and need more. When I was studying computer science at college (in 1990) we were given one floppy disk (1.44MB) and mine lasted all year. My 1TB hard disk is currently full and I'm needing another. One Terra Byte approaching a million floppy disks.
Run with it and in several years we will be using astronomical amounts of storage space each. No wonder cloud computing has commercial appeal. So the question becomes, what will we use that space for? In recent years, with the advent of videos, it's been quite easy to fill the space...what will our future space contain? Here's a possible clue...
Remember when the idea of having a 'personal' computer was a wacky dream? Only large corporations like IBM could store such behemoths. Nowadays only large corporations can store and hold our personal data...
What if the future space (that we each hold for personal storage), allows each of us to store and manipulate data on a massive scale - a scale that is currently only accessible to the few large corporations? What might we do with that? What might we build? The only certainty seems to be that we will fill it, and need more.
To think big, really big, is to glimpse new horizons without having any idea what's going to be there in reality (it's only an idea). I like to think of the connected world of information like a big dam of water (data). Facebook and Google etc, are like small outlets tapping in to the dam wall and trickling information in a usable way. The future will be like removing the dam wall altogether and a river of information will flow unheeded around the world, and all of us will have a stake in that. These are yet early days of the information age. I don't mean to suggest this is good or bad, I'm merely suggesting possible ideas emerging from trends.
Don't concern yourself too much with the privacy of your data, or lack of it or the secret motives of entrepreneur misfits. If you too can possibly glimpse where we're heading, you might agree on how futile such apprehensions are. For more insights on this accelerating 'movement' check out the BBC's "Storyville 2013 Google and the World Brain" currently viewable on Youtube!
My concerns about Facebook's privacy policies are why I only had a profile there for about a year. I was happy to keep up with family and friends--until I realized that protecting my privacy from Zuckerberg's monster was turning into a full-time, unpaid job.
Often, updates get made, resetting profiles back to the default, 'open' settings (anyone can see anything, anywhere), and I got very tired of playing cleanup.
I miss the easy interaction with my preferred few, but my time is my own again.