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STRATHMORE UNIVERSITY

TITLE: CASE STUDY OF FACEBOOK

CHRISTINE ONYANGO

Facebook is a social networking site that was created by Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin in 2004 driven by the urge to connect the world and create a mirror of the real world community rather than just an online community. By that time, there were a few such sites already in existence; MySpace and Friendster. These sites would at times face technical instability and had a lot of distracting advertisements. What made the big difference for Facebook is that the founders focus on the market and customize their site depending on what they deem fit for it. (Adam Hartung, 2011) in Forbes’ blog, stated that Zack’s willingness to let the business to go wherever the market wanted it, is one of the factors that led to the rise of Facebook. Some of the things for instance include; adding the capability to upload photos and identify the people on those photos as well as “tag” your friends on pictures and videos, game applications that basically allowed people to play games and the news feed feature was a great innovation that allows people to view “news” as posted by their Facebook friends.
At the start, the founders came up with a fund of $1,000 to be able to launch the site. Later on in the same year, Peter Thiel made an angel investment of $ 500,000 for 10.2% of the company. In 2005, Accel Investment made a $12.7 million venture capital investment and then joined the board. In 2006 Facebook received $27.5 million from Greylock partners and Meritech Capital in the form of venture capitalist investment. There was no financial support from the government or public agencies but the government provided a great political environment, proper learning institutions, ICT infrastructure and market sophistication that facilitated the growth of Facebook.
Mark Zackerberg is an individual with a tenacious personality and of firm conviction and also very consistent. One very notable characteristic is that he is very creative and innovative. Before he created Facebook, he had created a computer version of the board game called Risk , Zacknet which was an instant messaging program for the family members and music website called synapse that worked by anticipating the music preferences of specific individuals. While in Harvard, he hacked into the schools computer system and took images of students in order to aid him create a site known as Facemash that spiraled into a huge controversy. This array of creations clearly demonstrates how creative he was and also, that he was very consistent as symbolized by the fact that every creation was just as good as the previous one. Also, Mark had a very cunning personality. He forged ahead regardless of how many rules he broke or how many controversies he faced on the way. This was demonstrated when he hacked into Harvard computer systems to be able to get images which were a key component in the creation of his very mischievous site Facemash. Also, he sort of swept the rag under the Winklevoss twins when they contacted him to work on their idea (Harvard Connections). This too, spiraled into a huge controversy that even ended into a law suit. Mark Zuckerberg is computer savvy. He was able to write code at a very early age. This one factor that enabled him to be hands on in the creation and upgrading of Facebook. Mark was very optimistic and confident that his innovation would grow beyond imaginable limits. There had been attempts to buy Facebook by Yahoo in 2006 for $1 billion and later on MTV gave an offer of $ 1.5 Billion dollars which mark declined citing reasons for his decline as “I believe Facebook is worth much more and I still have some more ideas I want to implement”. Finally, Mark is a risk taker. He quit school and started working on Facebook and therefore forfeting the opportunity to acquire a degree from an Ivy league college and get a job in corporate America. Also, he had the habit of adding functionality to Facebook that his clients did not necessarily approve of. On one instance, he introduced the news feed, which resulted in all sorts of demonstrations by users claiming that it was infringing on their privacy, but Mark only apologized and held firm his decision to introduce the “news feed”. He felt that users would get used to it which they did. On another instance, he introduced the beacon that made public what users did on other sites that created a lot of controversy that even the government had problems with.
Facebook’s competitors Friendster and Myspace reacted by downsizing their employees. Myspace converted to a music news site and social network for music fans and Friendster basically died.
References

Hartung, A. (2011). How Facebook beat Myspace. Forbes.
Phillips, S. (2007). A brief hostory of facebook. The guardian.
Building of the Facebook empire Documentary (2013).

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