Facebook Too Big to Hate, Too Big to Fail: The first billion is just the beginning
Facebook has a billion users. A B I L L I O N. That’s one-seventh of the entire mass of humanity that covers this planet, one-hundredth of the number of human beings to have ever lived, ever. Staggeringly few other cultural experiences have been shared so broadly, so synchronously. It’s a genuine milestone not just for technology, but for humanity (seriously). And that’s exactly how Facebook hopes we’ll see it when we look back in a few years. Facebook is a chair. And a bridge and an airplane:
When Microsoft built Windows, the mission was to put a PC on every desktop in every home. There weren’t a billion PCs in use until just four years ago. And as of the end of last year, roughly one third of the world’s 7 billion people — 2.3 billion, give or take — were using the internet. In other words, nearly half of the internet-using population is on Facebook, and that’s with it officially banned in China.
The mission of Facebook, as Mark Zuckerberg puts it in his profile, is “making the world more open and connected.” The (obvious) subtext of that “let’s all hug together, naked” worldview is that it’s Facebook making the connections. Not on an abstract level — though being a shared cultural touchstone on that scale does provide a kind of mutual emotional infrastructure — but in a concrete way. Facebook wants to be infrastructure in a fundamental way. I mean, Facebook seriously compared itself to chairs. And that’s what’s transformative about hitting a billion users, as Zuckerberg himself explains (emphasis mine):
But even when we were at half a billion people, you got these large-scale services like Skype or Netflix that also had big user bases. And we weren’t yet at the point where the majority of their users were Facebook users, so they couldn’t really rely on us as a piece of critical infrastructure for registration. A lot of startups did, but the bigger companies couldn’t. Now really everyone can start to rely on us as infrastructure. That’s a pretty big shift.