Facebook Quotes
It only took me two weeks to build the first version of Facebook because I had so much stuff before then.
When I'm introspective about the last few years I think the biggest mistake that we made, as a company, is betting too much on HTML5 as opposed to native... because it just wasn't there. And it's not that HTML5 is bad. I'm actually, on long-term, really excited about it. One of the things that's interesting is we actually have more people on a daily basis using mobile Web Facebook than we have using our iOS or Android apps combined. So mobile Web is a big thing for us.
This is our commitment to users and the people who use our service, is that Facebook's a free service. It's free now. It will always be free. We make money through having advertisements and things like that.
What Facebook stands for in the world is giving people a voice and spreading ideas and rationalism.
We all know you don't get successful just by having a good idea or working hard. You get successful by being lucky too. If I had to support my family growing up, instead of having the time to learn how to code. If I didn't know that I was gonna be fine if Facebook didn't work out, then I wouldn't be standing up here today. And if we're honest, we all know how much luck we've had.
I literally coded Facebook in my dorm room and launched it from my dorm room. I rented a server for $85 a month, and I funded it by putting an ad on the side, and we've funded ever since by putting ads on the side.
I just think people have a lot of fiction [in the movie]. But, you know, I mean, the real story of Facebook is just that we've worked so hard for all this time. I mean, the real story is actually probably pretty boring, right? I mean, we just sat at our computers for six years and coded.
Facebook originally got started around the same time as a bunch of the early smartphones and those platforms got started. So we didn't really get to play any role in developing that platform.
I think that there is a role that Facebook can play in empowering community leaders, to strengthen existing communities, to help build new communities, to help look out for people in their community, to help keep people safe.
One thing I have reflected on is that when I started Facebook, the mission of connecting the world was not controversial. It was kind of as if it was a default assumption that people had - every year the world got more connected - and that seems like the direction that things were heading in.
The success of Facebook is because we empowered people. We gave people a way to share their opinion online that a lot of people didn't have before, and to connect with people that they didn't have before and that is why we have been so successful.
Just take terrorism, for example. We have a team of more than 200 people working on counterterrorism. I mean, that's pretty intense. That's not like what people think about what Facebook is.
Working with a lot of people at the same time is a task. I really like making stuff and getting stuff done. One of the things I really liked about Facebook was that I could always move so quickly. I wrote the original application in, like, nine days at the end of January.
Facebook is inherently viral. There are lots of sites that include a contact importer, and for lots of them it doesn't really make sense. For Facebook it fits so well. It wasn't until a few years in that we started building some tools that made it easier to import friends to the site. That was a huge thing that spiked growth.
The real question for me is, do people have the tools that they need in order to make those decisions well? And I think that it's actually really important that Facebook continually makes it easier and easier to make those decisions... If people feel like they don't have control over how they're sharing things, then we're failing them.
I updated my grilling app, iGrill, today and it now has Facebook integration that lets you see what other people are grilling right now around the world. Awesome.
We help Chinese companies grow their customers abroad. They use Facebook ads to find more customers. For example, Lenovo used Facebook ads to sell its new phone. In China, I also see economic growth. We admire it.
At Facebook, we build tools to help people connect with the people they want and share what they want, and by doing this we are extending people's capacity to build and maintain relationships.
No one has done a study on this, as far as I can tell, but I think Facebook might be the first place where a large number of people have come out. We didn't create that - society was generally ready for that. I think this is just part of the general trend that we talked about, about society being more open, and I think that's good.
For the first time we're allowing developers who don't work at Facebook to develop applications just as if they were. That's a big deal because it means that all developers have a new way of doing business if they choose to take advantage of it. There are whole companies that are forming whose only product is a Facebook Platform application.
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