Hello, people. Some people will win the bet and some will lose. What were the odds that he would carry a bathroom sink into the building?
There is a plain view.
The earnings call this week was shocking. The market didn't like the idea of Mark Zuckerberg trying to keep things positive.
The investors took notice of flat growth, decreased revenue, and profits that were kneecapped by the pursuit of a future business that may or may not come to pass. Meta lost 25% of its value within hours. Meta was worth almost a trillion dollars less than a year ago. It is worth less than half of what it was.
Meta's plunge was caused by something. I've been covering the company since its early days and wrote a book that benefited from the input of hundreds of people, including the company's founder. The three moments that led to this dire point were identified by me.
SeanParker helped get control of the company. The founder of Plaxo felt that he had recently been screwed out of his role at the company, and so he gave up his position at the company. The corporate structure at Facebook was set up so that no one, not the board of directors, could overthrow him. Even if he decided to refocus the company on a risky bet on virtual reality, he was still an unstoppable force. The company name could be changed by him.
The business model was created by the author. After hiring a chief operating officer for his company, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg went trekking in India and Nepal to figure out how his company could make money. The system that served super effective ads was created by Sandberg. Every early employee had a lot of money. At a price. The users resented the practice. When that data was used, the company was in trouble. Meta was vulnerable to any force that would choke off its data collection. Meta lost billions when Tim Cook told users to switch off targeting on their phones.
Facebook is trying to catch up with mobile. When the action in computing shifted from the desktop to our pockets, not many people realized that Facebook had an issue. It made him paranoid that he would be behind again when the big thing came. He wanted to avoid the idea that dominant companies are doomed when the next paradigm arises because of their success and thinking. When he saw a demo of virtual reality, he thought it was the future of computing. He bought the company for $2 billion and spent $10 billion a year on research to remove the scientific obstacles that make his vision of the metaverse impossible.
Financial results have always mitigated Meta's problems. If the company was making a lot of money and the stock was going up, what would people think? Meta's weaknesses have taken center stage after the gains have been wiped out. The company has not done enough to improve its products. There's rot in them.
The big changes in social media have been driven by what is good for Meta and not what is good for the people who use it. One thing that people love about Facebook is the birthday experience, but instead of improving it, Meta is copying its main competitor, TikTok. That approach worked to a degree when stories were taken from snap The originator of that format is unlikely to be surpassed by Meta's TikTok clone. TikTok has a state-of-the-art discovery algorithm that can be used by people under 40. Is being second or third-best in short-form video an inspiring mission?
What will come next? I have a solution that works. Zuck, break up your business. It's not in the way the regulators would want. Meta is already a company. One is a technology bet on the metaverse and the other is a huge social business that has lost its focus. The twain should be made up of two parts.
Meta is a project to build mixed-reality hardware. He boasted in the earnings calls that work on the metaverse will be historic and no longer wakes up every morning feeling like he has been punched. Funding the research will be easy. If Musk can get $44 billion from investors, banks, and his own pocket to buy the company that never came close to the billion user goal it set for itself in 2009, he would have enough money to develop the metaverse he so passionately believes. His current company will invest some of its $40 billion in cash to bet on his demise. The board of directors will have ultimate control of the company according to the new investors.
All of the social apps will be retained by the remaining company. I think it would be better if it spent a bundle to buy the trademark for people. Put the company in the hands of engineers and designers who want to make those social apps great again, not by mimicking a popular rival, but by inventing to serve that mind-blowing customer base that still yields up heaps of profit.
Birthdays should be easier to celebrate and harder to miss. Mark, you're welcome.
It's time to travel.
In August 2007, I wrote a Newsweek cover story about Mark Zuckerberg's social network as it moved from serving only students to the world at large Helping people make connections was what he was focused on back then. The idea that people would use Facebook to connect to people like those we now call "influencers" was categorically denied by Facebook's founder. Leave that to the social networking site.
The man with the baby-faced looks at 23 doesn't talk about money. Building the company is all about it. He is more interested in explaining why Facebook is not a social-networking site but a tool to facilitate the information flow between users and their compatriots, family members and professional connections. He would always go back to No. 2 again. He calls it the social graph.
This is a mathematical construct that shows the real-life connections between humans on the planet. Each of us has a link to someone we know. He says that we do not own the social graph. The social graph is something that exists in the world and it always will be. It's natural for people to communicate through it because it's with people around you. The way the social graph looks in the world needs to be constructed as accurately as possible. Once we know who you care about, we can send a photo album to everyone.
As your friends join Facebook, that part of the social graph that matters to you moves into the digital fast lane and you are getting more out of your connections than you could have imagined. Since your friends on the graph are connected to other people, you have the chance to see their friends and expand your circle. Unlike services like the giant MySpace, which at more than 70 million users still wins in raw numbers, Facebook is not a place where emerging stand-up comics, hip independent bands and soft porn stars try to break out. It's possible to find promising strangers whose relationship status is "anything I can get" if you know where to look.
ask me one thing
Carl wants to know how the conflicts in Ukraine and other parts of the world are impacted by the spread of Covid-19.
Thank you Carl. The Ukrainian case load has been affected by the Russian invasion and bombing. We don't know how we'll know the Pandemic is over. The Omicron spike of last winter, which peaked well before the invasion, is not believed to have been caused by the virus. If another surge is afoot in the coming colder months, it may portend a higher death rate because vaccinations are harder to get. As of March, Ukraine had barely a third of its population fully vaccined, which is way lower than Russia or Poland.
The impact on Covid in the rest of the world wouldn't seem to be a big deal. There are a number of factors that could lead to more exposure to Covid. One more reason for those of us not in Ukraine to be aware that we are still in danger is this news. It would be less so if we were boosted.
Questions can be submitted to mail@wired.com. In the subject line, write "Ask Levy".
The Chronicle.
According to the UN, the world can't meet even minimal emission goals, and we are in for more intense flooding, fires, and heat waves. You thought that social media was a bad place.
It's last but not least.
The Republicans spent a lot of money on Facebook. The organization is backed by the Democrat party.
The internet is the public enemy number one.
The dollar store of the internet is here.
Omicron must be blamed on rodents. Cats may have helped too. Get the vaccine.
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