In 1996, to alert his father, Edward Zuckerberg, that there was a patient in his in-home dental clinic, Mark coded ZuckNet. A proto-Instant Messaging program, it enabled a receptionist to ping a message to a computer upstairs, rather than yelling that a patient had arrived. The four Zuckerberg children quickly began to use it for non-office communication. A year later, AOL debuted its popular IM program, and while it could hardly have been AOL’s intention, its global success probably showed young Mark Zuckerberg that his ideas could reach far beyond his own home and friends.
The second of Zuckerberg’s programs that demonstrated a move toward the opening of the world arrived in 2003. His Facemash website served to compare the attractiveness of Harvard University students. Although Harvard was quick to shut the site down, Facemash’s fast-growing user-base proved that there was an appetite for a website outside of the university’s staid networking “facebooks.” Facemash, in conjunction with the “social study guide” Zuckerberg coded to help pass his Art History class (with notes for each painting, supplied by his classmates), provided the germ of the idea that would become Facebook.
The one element of Zuckerberg’s goal that has received the most push-back (and been the target of the most controversy) is Facebook’s role in changing how people think about their privacy. By definition, an open world would be a less private one, and failed components of Facebook (like Facebook Beacon, an advertising model based on what a user’s friends have purchased on other sites) show that Zuckerberg’s definition of privacy is different than that to which most of his users subscribe.
As Facebook becomes more and more ubiquitous, many major websites now include the option of signing into a Facebook account, for the purpose of either Liking or commenting upon articles. Mark Zuckerberg continues to tinker with the definition of privacy on Facebook. The site’s most recent privacy update occurred on August 25, 2011; while some features come as a response to complaints, others work to make public—sometimes discreetly—that which was private.
Moving forward, Zuckerberg has shown himself to be a tenacious businessman: addressing the problem of opening the world up from different angles until, little by little, it obliges.