Facebook was not originally created to be a company
It was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected.
Changing how people communicate will always change the world
Changing how ideas spread changes how society functions, changes how people speak, changes how people live, changes how people tell stories, changes how people fall in love, changes who people consider friends, changes who people consider strangers, changes what being alone means.
People sharing more — even if just with their close friends or families — creates a more open culture and leads to a better understanding of the lives and perspectives of others
Connection is the fundamental unit of society. And increasing the number of ways people can connect, and the number of people they can connect to, is a powerful tool for good. It blurs lines. It alters perspectives. It humanizes. Because when everyone is considered an “us”, there’s a lot less “us vs. them”.
Historically, those who controlled the media controlled the message. If you’re the only one with a printing press, you control what people read. Same with radio. Same with TV.
But what happens when everyone can put their message in front of a lot of people? When the playing field is level? When everyone has a printing press, the ones with the best ideas are the ones people listen to. Influence can no longer be owned. It must be earned.
Zuckerberg’s Law
It sounds cool, doesn’t it? Like some sort of vigilante justice for people who take too many pretzels from the micro kitchen. Yeah, it’s not that. It’s about sharing stuff on the internet.
Zuckerberg’s Law: The amount each person shares doubles each year.
That means each year, the amount of information shared by humanity is increasing at an exponential rate. That is massive. That is almost unfathomable.
BUT
As the amount of content is growing wildly, the amount of time people spend consuming content has not changed. There are no more hours in the day. So there’s a lot, lot, lot more content and nowhere for it to go.
That means there are two massive opportunities.
One massive opportunity lies in creating more ways for people to share more things. It stands to reason that the demand for better, easier, and new ways to share will grow proportionally as people share more and more of their daily lives.
We’ve already seen this proven true as mobile phones have become more and more powerful. The sheer amount of things people can share and ways they can share those things is staggering.
The second massive opportunity lies in figuring out how to deliver this huge amount of new information to the right people in the right ways — giving people things they are interested in, in ways they can understand and consume quickly.
And historically, that’s what friends are for. There’s always been way more information in the world than time to consume it. Human networks evolved naturally as a way to help sort through it. That’s why we are drawn to friends with similar interests. Our friends are our news sources, as well as our filters. They bring us stories that interest us because our interests are similar.
The digital world isn’t that much different. There’s just a lot more information to sort through, and a lot more friends talking at once. But we believe that personal connections and social networks will always be the key to both enabling people to share more of their lives and allowing them to get valuable information from this mass of data.
