Chapter 3 Facepack - the rise of social media
Zuckerberg rejects my advice
Always On is about how smartphones and social media came together in a very short space of time to give us today’s ultra connected world. 2004 saw the birth of Facebook, in 2005 YouTube was created, Twitter came along in 2006, and then the iPhone was born in 2007. As the smartphone era began, the internet went mobile, and for millions it was their social media feeds that began to demand their attention as they became used to staring at their screens wherever they went.
This chapter tells the story of how our modern social media landscape took shape. It begins in the Spring of 2007 when there were the first hints that this new way of communicating was going mainstream. So much so, in fact, that even Radio 4’s venerable Today Programme took notice.
MySpace and Bebo were already popular in schools - and being banned by some for spreading gossip about the teachers, Facebook was beginning to spread outside the campuses where it had started and this weird text-based thing called Twitter had just started.
I was commissioned to do a piece explaining this new world. I joined every network I could find, and persuaded reluctant friends to share the experience so I would have a ready made community. They were particularly unenthusiastic about Twitter, which seemed to consist of people telling each other they’d had a cappuccino. My oldest friend, a hospital consultant who chose the name @topdoc, tweeted in exasperation “When does ruskin [I’d chosen @ruskin147 as my Twitter handle] broadcast and allow us to sink back into obscurity?”
The report was broadcast with an intro from the splendidly grumpy John Humphrys, who referring to something called “Facepack” and teased his colleague Edward Stourton for using it to communicate with his children. You can listen to it here:
Afterwards, many of my older friends melted away from social networks but I embraced them, seeing both a story of growing importance and a useful professional tool.
Twitter in particular was soon providing me with tips on breaking news before the news agencies had got out of bed - I called the newsdesk early one morning to tell them about an earthquake in China which was being discussed by American tweeters even before it had been reported by the US Geological Survey - and was also finding me case studies and experts for my stories.
Colleagues who had laughed at my obsession began to sit up and take notice. BBC Business Editor Robert Peston wandered over to my desk one day and asked me to explain “how this Twitter thing works.”
But if Twitter was favoured in media circles, Facebook was quietly overtaking MySpace and was on its way to becoming a social media superpower. When Mark Zuckerberg came to London in October 2008, however, the global financial crisis was at its height and it felt as though staying independent might be a foolish move if someone was offering to buy you out.
After all, Bebo had just been sold to the internet giant AOL for $850 million making its founders Michael and Xochi Birch fabulously rich and surely giving the network the financial muscle to take on Facebook. So when I interviewed Zuckerberg, this ageing correspondent who had reported on the boom and then bust of the dot com days had some advice for the naive youngster less than half his age. Here’s an extract from the chapter:
The previous year Yahoo had offered to buy Facebook for $1 billion, and then Microsoft had bought a small stake in the business at what seemed like an extraordinary valuation of $15 billion.
So when a jet-lagged kid in sneakers, jeans and a hoodie walked into a cavernous room in London’s Excel centre I hit him with what I thought was a series of killer questions. When was he actually going to start worrying about finding a business model and making some money, and what about that Yahoo offer he’d turned down? “That looks like a mistake now,'' I told him sternly. After all, he could have retired at 23.
Up until then his robotic replies to my questions had shown disturbing signs of media training, but this time he laughed and gave a simple answer.”what would I do?” At that stage he was utterly immersed in the building of his business and, understandably, the idea of giving it up and sitting by the pool all day was not enticing.
He insisted that the priority was building an audience rather than growing revenue. Writing about the interview I said that this sounded to me like a worrying echo of those dot com days of the late 90s when the accepted wisdom was that you worried about "eyeballs' on your site, rather than dollars in the bank.
I went on to refer to the Bebo sale as a fantastic deal, warning that “in the deepening economic gloom, there won't be many more where that came from.” And, I concluded, “you can’t help wondering whether this time next year Facebook's founder will be a little less confident about the wisdom of staying solo.”
Of course, although I turned out to be prescient about the timing of the Bebo deal - the fading business was sold on for just $10m a couple of years later - I was utterly wrong about Zuckerberg’s determination to keep control of his company.
His single-minded focus on growing his audience and either seeing off or buying his rivals paid off big time, turning him into one of the wealthiest and most powerful people on the planet - even if it stored up trouble for the years ahead.
If you want to know more about the early days of social networking, I made a radio series about it in 2011 with a brilliant producer Mike Wendling. All three episodes of the Secret History of Social Networking are still online - here’s the one about the rise of Facebook.