I’m taking a course, CPSC430 Computers and Society. I need to keep a journal on the course material, and I thought since this blog is pretty much empty and just space wasting I’ll use it for the course and kill two birds with one stone. The course is offered by the Computer Science department, but unlike all the other courses offered by the department, especially upper level courses does not require copious amounts of programming. In fact, it requires no programming and seems more like an arts course at a glance. I’ve just completed CPSC304, Intro to Relational Databases and the amount of time I spent programming for that was huge – morning till night haha (but it was fun)! Instead of programming, the project for this course seems to be an essay, and lectures seem to consist of discussions and debates. Quite different, but should be interesting. So here goes!
Last lecture, we read an article about the history and controversy surrounding Facebook’s raise to success: The Battle for Facebook. The gist of it is that Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook by stepping over and spurning people, including allegedly stealing the idea from another group of Harvard students now running ConnectU, his college roommate, other people giving him help and advice and so on. However it is undeniable that Zuckerberg’s talents, skills and drive were also integral parts of making Facebook a success, despite his questionable morals.
In lecture we went through a debate on whether venture companies must/need not act unethically in order to succeed. The “must” side looked at the amount of success Facebook has today, Facebook’s ranking 2nd in the world in terms of daily pageviews and Microsoft investing $240 million on Facebook. In contrast, ConnectU does not have any of those things so if Zuckerberg had stayed with the ConnectU group and not acted unethically Facebook would not have succeeded. The “need not” side won the debate in class, by using a logical proof to show that unethical actions imply success, but success does not necessarily imply unethical actions. If Zuckerberg had not acted unethically, no one knows if Facebook would be an either bigger success today, without his loss of credibility he may have even more investors. That the “need not” side won in class may have largely been due to how the debate statement was worded – “must” is a lot stronger a word than “need not”. If the debate had been must vs. must not the outcome could have been different.
This debate made me think of Livejournal, it’s founder and it’s history. After all, I am much more of an LJ-er than a Facebook-er(?), I have been on Livejournal much longer than Facebook and the first time I heard of Facebook was on Livejournal! Plus XKCD’s map of Online Communities placed LJ right beside Facebook. So Facebook and Livejournal both have more of a “Focus on Real Life” than other online communities, at least according to XKCD’s creator. I think this is true too, although LJ doesn’t have a real name policy and sock puppet accounts are rampant so Facebook defiantly has much more of a focus on real life than LJ. Some may think of LJ strictly as a blogging platform, but with its communities (which are message board like, allowing users to make posts and comment), “friending” function, privacy controls and a “friends page” that is a feed of all the posts by friends and communities that the user is subscribed to makes LJ a social media site also. Like Facebook, Livejournal was also created by a college student in his spare time Brad Fitzpatrick.
Searching through the web I couldn’t find any stories on unethical actions by Fitzpatrick and Livejournal at all. The controversy I found were when user accounts were suspended without notice due to questionable content, this action isn’t even in the same category as those by Zuckerberg and Facebook. So Fitzpatrick did not act unethically to make LJ successful. However it is true that LJ is not as successful as Facebook in terms of number of users (LJ – 26675513 vs Facebook – 400 million), daily page views (LJ – Alexa Rank 79, Facebook – Alexa Rank 2) and so on. Also Fitzpatrick is no longer at the helm of LJ the way Zuckerbreg is at the helm of Facebook, LJ was sold to Six Apart which later should it to another company, SUP.
So it’s not necessary to act unethically to be successful. But the amount of success may be different…
Last thing, someone in class mentioned that Facebook is open source. That caught me as kind of a strange statement, I didn’t think it was…I mean there’s the Facebook Platform that allows people to develop applications for Facebook, but is the core code of Facebook out there for anyone to look at, modify, host their own copy of on their own web-server? So is Facebook properly classified as open source? I’m not sure. I mean, for LJ you can get all the code off of their public Subverison Repository, and there are other sites running on the Livejournal codebase.