Congrats to Facebook Platform star Playfish on being aquired by EA for north of $300 million. Sebastien, Kristian, and the entire Playfish team have been a pleasure to work with over the last few years as they have built a company with a truly passionate brand and community. Without their pioneering vision and passion, social gaming would not be where it is today.
3rd Faceversary
Today marks the 3 year anniversary of the day I joined Facebook. On that fateful night while I was sitting in a room finalizing the details with Mark Zuckerberg, Dave Fetterman stormed in to inform us that Facebook had just achieved the 10 million user milestone and that everyone was going out to celebrate.
Dave and I were two members of what would become the Facebook Platform team. Along with Adam D’Angelo, Charlie Cheever, Ari Steinberg, Eric Zamore, James Wang, Julie Zhuo, Mark Slee, and Ruchi Sanghvi (and over time many more amazing people), we set out to bring identity and social context to the Internet through a new social platform.
Since that night, we’ve added over 290 million more people to Facebook and built out Facebook Platform (and Connect) to support over 1 million developers in 180 countries who have built in upwards of 350,000 applications.
The opportunity to work alongside so many incredible and talented people here at Facebook and in the community which has developed around Facebook Platform has been one of the most humbling and rewarding experiences of my life.
To this day, Facebook still maintains the culture which was present on that night. Moving fast, being bold, and having fun. Thank you to everyone who has been, and continues to be, part of the journey. And, to Mark Zuckerberg, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes for starting a company that has given so many of us the chance to learn, grow, and make revolutionary things together.
To a more connected world.
The real question is: Why do we still store documents and data on computers like this?
This is how you can tell I’ve been really busy lately.
In practice, then, for us when we build a service, or invest, we look closely at the use case to determine what kind of application it might become. We don’t expect any evolution, though as dreamers we hope that there will be one. Show us an application, not a platform.
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I have to agree with Andrew Weissman in his post here. Rarely can you build a platform without a killer application. Windows needed Office. The Apple II needed VisiCalc. The Mac needed Pagemaker and Photoshop. The web needed Mosaic. Facebook Platform needed Facebook. The Twitter API needed Twitter. Telsa needs the Tesla Roadster before they can build a battery platform. And on and on.
Build a killer app. Then, you can turn it into a platform.
A video we put together at Facebook to celebrate the expansion of our developer community worldwide over the last few years. Enjoy.
Steve Jobs retakes the stage.
The web knows something, but it’s not telling us, at least not yet.
I think that a big part of my job is to minimize the highs and lows.
This is a neat camera.
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The Zumi Digital - a tiny digital camera that takes dreamy, Super 8-style video. She’s full of wonder.
