Serendipity35

 

Mark Zuckerberg was testifying recently in a landmark antitrust trial brought by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) against Meta. The FTC alleges that Meta, through its acquisitions of Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014, has unfairly maintained a monopoly in the social networking market. The government claims these purchases were part of a strategy to "neutralize" competitors and stifle innovation

I wrote a post here in 2006 when Facebook first became available to the general public. Initially, it was launched in 2004 as "TheFacebook" and was limited to Harvard students. Over time, it expanded to other universities and eventually opened up to anyone aged 13 or older with a valid email address in 2006. I have repurposed that old post here in an updated version.

I jumped in right away. I was at a university, and I immediately thought this would be big with students, and that the faculty needed to know what it was about. The faculty was not interested in the presentations I offered. I did one on "social media" and where it was headed.

Facebook wasn't the first or the only player.

• MySpace was very popular at the time, and it was the go-to platform for music lovers and personal profiles.
• YouTube launched in 2005 and was gaining traction as the place for video sharing.
• Flickr was the favorite for photo sharing and had amateur as well as professional photographers.
• LinkedIn: Focused on professional networking, it was already carving out its niche.
• Friendster's popularity was waning, but it was still a notable player in the early social media scene.
• The lesser-known Orkut gained popularity in Brazil and India but not in the U.S. It was Google's failed attempt at social networking.

In 2004, the soon-to-be social networking giant was a baby called "The Facebook.” The19-year-old co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg needed to explain the concept behind the site,. Check out this explanation he did in his first-ever television interview with CNBC on April 28, 2004.

In my 2006 post, I wrote about the American fascination with turning nouns into verbs, so for a time people were saying that you could be "facebooked."  That verb meant the action of 1) looking someone up on Facebook or 2) asking someone to be your friend on Facebook.
"I Facebooked that girl I met at the party last night, and she Facebooked me this morning, so now we're friends."

You could also "poke" someone which was a suggestive term for a kind of gentle message without content. You could send an email-style message to them or leave a message on their "wall."

It is interesting to read what Zuckerberg said 19 years ago about the website and consider where it is today. The definition of Facebook, according to founder Mark Zuckerberg in 2006:

"The idea for the website was motivated by a social need at Harvard to be able to identify people in other residential houses. Harvard is a fairly unfriendly place. While each residential house listed directories of their residents, I wanted one online directory where all students could be listed. And I've always enjoyed building things and puttering around with computer code, so I sat down and in about a week I had produced the basic workings of the site. 
We had a launch plan to enter into other colleges based on where friends would be most likely to overlap, so the site spread organically based upon that model, and now we operate on a broad spectrum of campuses. It doesn't make sense to exclude anybody or any college from the resources that Facebook offers. This is a product that should be fun and useful for all college students.
We don't view the site as an online community. We bill it as a directory that is reinforcing a physical community. What exists on the site is a mirror image of what exists in real life.
To a certain extent, the website is unfortunate because it oversimplifies things. Everybody's concept of having a friend is different. It can definitely blur the relationships that exist between people. But in the end, I think that thefacebook can only reinforce preexisting communities. We think we have been particularly successful in strengthening those relationships that exist between people who are only “fringe friends.
It's not unusual for us to receive an email from somebody saying, "I spend all of my time on your website and now I have less of a social life than I had before." We would much rather have people meet people through the website and go out and party than stay at home on a Friday night reading other people's profiles. And it's surprising, but we have actually received far less complaints about stalking than we otherwise would have expected."

Here are some of my 2006 stats about Facebook:
- 12 million users (*MySpace has 54 million users)
- 300 million page views per 24-hour period - page views surpasses Google
- Facebook comes in seventh in terms of overall traffic on the entire Web
- 70% of users use the site every day
- 85% use it once a week
- 93% visit monthly
- The site makes more than a million dollars a month in ad revenue
- Since its start, a high school edition and a photo upload and tagging option were added

I joined Facebook mostly to see what it was all about. I knew that my college-aged sons both used it. (It seemed like my younger son - a freshman in 2005 - met a hundred people at his school through Facebook during orientation and the first weeks, plus all his high school friends at other schools that were added to his friends list, and then their friends who added him.

I felt pretty sad at first because I had no one to add to my list. I started with my sons, who "allowed" me to be their friend list (you do have to approve someone's request to be added), though they made me promise never to put something on their wall. Facebook was not really for mom and dad.

Because early on, parents and adults played no real role in Facebook (though alumni can create accounts for their alma mater) I didn't expect to find any of my classmates there. Faculty could have a profile at their school, but that was rare in 2006.

What really bothered me at first was that my profile said, "You have 0 friends at NJIT." I planned to do a presentation to faculty at NJIT about this new website, so I had to Facebook a few students that I thought would say yes to my request. Then I started searching students I had taught in my former K-12 days. Found a few and sent them a message. And that led to a few of their classmates finding me. Social networking...

When I did my first presentation, I had 37 friends - which by Facebook standards was pretty pathetic. It for younger readers to imagine these early social media ( aterm no one was using) times. I only had 55 people on my AOL AIM buddy list, so 37 seems was about right.

When I showed the site to faculty and academic and non-academic friends, the most common comments were:
Yeah. So what's the point? [Remember, most of my friends are old.]
Why does everyone seem to have an alcoholic drink in their hand in all the pictures? [sad but true]
Many more females than males on Facebook. [True]
Wouldn't it scare you if you had a daughter and she was posting pictures, her dorm room #, email address and other info online? [Yes}
Doesn't it scare you that your sons are doing that? [To a degree - but maintaining a common double standard, not as much.]
What about identity theft? [As with any sitaution where you reveal personal information, facebook could open you up to id theft by giving someone enough information to attempt to create a fake account.]

One comment I heard did turn out to be true later that year. "Don't you think employers will check this kind of site when screening clients?" I had heard that but I doubted it would be widespread. It turned out that employers could get access through employees who were students, faculty and alumni from an applicant's school. I saw a posting that said "Monster.com [a very popular jobs site in 2006] is who you portray you are, but Facebook is who you really are."

In the fall of 2005, North Carolina State University disciplined several students for underage drinking after a resident assistant found party photos of them on Facebook. A few days after students rushed the football field following a Penn State win over Ohio State, campus police found pictures of the incident containing identifiable students on Facebook. Northern Kentucky and the University of Kentucky both have disciplined students they had seen drinking in pictures posted on Facebook. Campus police at George Washington University use Facebook to find underage drinkers. Employers and the career center at the University of Kansas use Facebook to evaluate students being considered for KU jobs.

People commented that "You can't seriously think that these people actually have 345 "friends?" Well, not the way we may have once defined "friend." I'm pretty confident that someone who has 345 friends on Facebook realizes that they are not friends in the same way as their 6 close friends that they see face-to-face regularly.

In 2006, I Facebooked Mark Zuckerberg. He had 323 friends already, but hey, you can always use another friend, right?

I was working last week on a post about the early days of Facebook when the news hit that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and former COO Sheryl Sandberg were testifying in an ongoing antitrust trial examining whether Meta monopolized the personal social networking market by acquiring Instagram and WhatsApp in 2012 and 2014. (see https://www.euronews.com/next/2025/04/17/metas-antitrust-trial...)

Then, I was diverted by another news story about a federal judge who ruled that Google violated antitrust laws by unlawfully dominating the online advertising market with its technology. The decision opens the door for U.S. prosecutors to seek a breakup of the tech giant’s $1.8 trillion ad-tech business.

The court found that Google monopolized two key segments of the digital advertising ecosystem: tools used by publishers to manage ad space, and the platform that connects those publishers with advertisers. By tying the two products together, Google made it difficult for competitors to gain traction. A second hearing will determine what steps the company must take to restore competition.

The ruling follows a separate decision in August, in which another judge found that Google had illegally dominated the markets for online search and text advertising. Remedies in that case are still pending, though the government has proposed that Google divest its Chrome web browser.

• Google’s digital ad network declared an illegal monopoly, joining its search engine in penalty box
• Google, explained: Here’s how it captures the online ad industry

I saw that today is the anniversary of the start of Facebook back in its undergraduate days of 2004. An old post on the now-defunct Writer's Almanac did a nice job of summarizing that early history, so I am using most of it here.

The social networking site Facebook was launched from a Harvard University dorm room on February 4, 2004 by  sophomore Mark Zuckerberg in his dorm room (Suite H33 in Kirkland House). He was aided by three other 19-year-olds.

Zuckerberg was a smart, middle-class kid from Dobbs Ferry, New York who started writing computer software when he was 12. In high school, he created a program called Synapse Media Player and was offered millions of dollars for the product and job offers by both Microsoft and AO. But he passed on them in order to attend Harvard instead.

The program he created at Harvard was called Facemash. It displayed two student photos side by side and asked people to rank who was hotter. It would later be duplicated in various forms as a "hot or not" game. In the site’s first four hours online, the photos were viewed 22,000 times. The site was shut down by Harvard a few days later. It so popular that it overwhelmed their server, but also because there were privacy violations since Zuckerberg had acquired the photos for Facemash by hacking into Harvard’s photo directory.

A couple of months later, Zuckerberg began writing code for a site that would allow students to view each other’s photos and some basic personal information. This site, TheFacebook, was launched on this day in 2004 at www.thefacebook.com.

More than a thousand students signed up within 24 hours, and after a month, half of Harvard’s undergraduates had signed up. Zuck was in trouble again, this time with three seniors who claimed that they had hired Zuckerberg to create a similar site, but that Mark had stolen their idea. Several years later, they reached a multimillion-dollar settlement.

When I first started consulting on social media in 2005, I was introducing blogs, wikis, podcasts and the newly -emerging social networks such as Facebook. Both with my academic colleagues and with clients, one of the persistent questions was "How do I know I'm getting any benefit from these social tools?"

Seeing the impact of your social marketing relies on attribution, which is similar to the older metric of ROI (return on investment). Both are sometimes difficult to quantify.

As someone who taught writing for many years, when I first heard the term attribution I thought of giving credit to the original source of information, ideas, images, or language used in a piece of writing. Attribution in writing is important because it shows respect for the work of others, helps to prevent plagiarism and those sources often provide additional information. (see my attribution at the end of this post)

That ROI (return on investment) is a much older dollars-and-cents measurement used well before the Internet and social media For example, you invested $1000 for an advertisement and it produced $5000 in sales. (Some might call that ROAS - Return on Ad Spend - but I'm being simpler here.) Or perhaps, you spent a $1000 on an ad and saw no increase in sales.

Attribution in the social media sense assigns value to the channels that drive an outcome. That might mean dollars but it coukd also be a measurement of a purchase, web visit, download, or subscribing to the site or a newsletter.

It is a bit of reverse engineering or backward design in that you are looking at the effect and trying to determine the cause.

My own tracking of the referring sites for posts on this site allows me to see if traffic to a post came from LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, one of my blogs or just a search engine. When someone finds me via Google, I can see what search terms they used. Those results can be surprising. I might get a surge of traffic from a search that found the mention of "Erik Satie" or "flat web design" or "social media attribution."

I have little control about search engine attributions, but I can control what I post on social media and how I word the posts.

Attribution is generally broken down as being in three modes:
Last-touch,
First-touch
Multi-touch attribution.
(Take a look at this diagram from digitalthought.me about more on multi-touch models called Even, Time Decay, Weighted, Algorithmic, etc.)

The first-touch attribution credits the first marketing touchpoint. For example, you run an ad and monitor how many contacts came from that ad.

 

Last-touch attribution credits the channel that a lead went through just before converting. Maybe you ran an ad on Facebook which someone later tweeted and the lead came from the Tweet that linked to your site for a purchase, so Twitter gets the attribution.

Last-touch is easier to measure, but both single-touch models fail to show the complete and sometimes circuitous customer journey. That's why multi-touch attribution is used. This gets much more complicated and more difficult to track. More complicated than the scope of this post. But as an example, the time decay attribution gives more weight to touchpoints closer to the final conversion event. If your original ad is the starting point but the final purchase came after a tweet that was retweeted and then posted as a link in someone's blog a week later, the blog gets more credit (as a personal endorsement) than the ad although obviously none of this would have happened without the ad.

Back to that question I started getting in 2005. It is important to remind clients that social media used for marketing and as engagement and brand-building may not always generate leads or sales directly but rather indirectly. Getting visitors to your site alone is a kind of success. It may not lead to sales (ROI) immediately, but it increases awareness of your brand for the future.

I will crosspost this on my business blog, Ronkowitz LLC, and measure which post gets the best results.

Attribution is more complicated than this primer, so you might want to check out these sources:

• A Comprehensive Guide to Attribution
• The Complete List of Marketing Attribution Models
• What is Marketing Attribution?
• Social Media Attrbution,