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people around them. What we figured is that if we could model what those connections
were, [we could] provide that information to a set of applications through which people
want to share information, photos or videos or events. But that only works if those rela-
tionships are real. That's a really big difference between Facebook and a lot of other sites.
We're not thinking about ourselves as a community - we're not trying to build a community
- we're not trying to make new connections."
Zuckerberg and his team clearly relish their project, their enterprise. "I was watching
an interview with Steve Jobs the other day, in which he said that 'In order to be doing
something like this, you have to really, really like what you're doing, because otherwise
it just doesn't make sense.' The demands and the amount of work that it takes to put
something like [Facebook] into place, it's just so much that if you weren't completely into
what you were doing and you didn't think it was an important thing, then it would be ir-
rational to spend that much time on it. Part of the reason why this is fun is because we've
managed to build a team of really smart people who come from different backgrounds and
have different experiences and think in different ways. People constantly try to put us in a
bucket: are we trying to sell the company? What are we trying to do? What is the business
strategy? People are often more interested in why we're hiring a stock-options administrat-
or. Whereas for me and a lot of people around me, that's not really what we focus on. We're
just focused on building things."
Other social networking and e-commerce successes? We know the names. LinkedIn.
eTrade. Kayak. Expedia. And many, many more. Today we cannot imagine retail goods,
travel-related services, information (including music and films) and financial services not
being available via the Web. This is the measure of a revolution. Forrester Research pre-
dicts that total world online retail sales will total $250 billion by 2014.
