A few things stand out to me as fascinating.
- It was still called The Facebook, not Facebook. There were only 1.8 Million users at the time, and they were only on two continents.
- At this early date, not even the founders of Facebook knew what it would eventually be capable of. They only saw the site as a college networking tool, and were reluctant to branch into areas they were uncomfortable with.
-They were excited about a Party RSVP feature they were developing, which seems quaint by today's standards, but was groundbreaking at the time.
The transcript (unedited) is copied below.
Interview with Chris Hughes
Interviewed and transcribed by
Kevin Wong
Q: How did The Facebook start and
what was the primary inspiration?
A: It was originally just an idea
that came out of our dorm room.
Mark and I were roommates last year, and he had the idea to make a
personal Facebook online for Harvard students. At the time, we all had books for each dorm, but they were
usually just produced on paper and they were separated from dorm to dorm, so
the idea was to put it all online and the same time give the students
themselves a little more control over what information they wanted to give to
their peers. So that was the basic
idea and then we added social networking and messaging and other frills onto
that grounding.
Q: At what point did you decide to branch out to the other
colleges?
A: Well we released it at Harvard
in February 4th of 2004 and within a couple of weeks, just a
ridiculous number of people had signed up and really quickly and so we said
chances are this isn’t just something Harvard would be interested in using. And
so we added Yale, Columbia, and Stanford onto the network after that and then
we just expanded from there.
Q: When you originally started The
Facebook and starting expanding out, I noticed that at the very beginning, it
kind of focused around schools like Yale, Columbia, Ivy league type schools
Southern Ivy league type schools… was it something where you were trying to
create kind of a like a high academia network and then eventually where you
decided to branch off further than that?
A: No, not at all. The reason why we expanded to the
schools that we chose was more of a practical reason than anything...because we
had never really done any promotion of the site like never done any advertising
or postering or anything like that.
We invite our users to invite other students at other schools to join
the network and so the idea was, “Well where does every Harvard student know at
least one person,” and we figured that if we added Columbia, Yale, and Stanford
that we would come up with schools where each Harvard student would have a
connection. And so then the idea
was to fill out around those schools and sort of so the next one we added on
the West Coast after Stanford was Berkley. Why? Because we felt that those schools had a pretty
significant relationship between the student bodies and so it filled out like
that, but we never had any like desire to keep the network elitist or to start
it out that way.
Q: How many colleges are currently
on The Facebook, and can you give me an approximation of how many people are
wired into it?
A: Sure, there are 370 colleges and
there’s 1.8 million users.
Q: How many continents does it
stretch across?
A: Uh, two.
Q: Europe and North America?
A: Yeah.
Q: Do you have plans of maybe
including Tokyo University and going to Asia and Australia?
A: Recently, we just launched the
schools in Europe a few weeks ago, and so we’re waiting to see how they play
out…I mean we know that universities work differently in different countries
and in different cultures and what might work in one might not work in another
and so we’re still feeling out the territory.
Q: Do you have a strategy in branching out? I know that you have on your website
where you can suggest a school where you can branch out to. Do you follow those?
A: Yes that’s the way that we
decide what schools to add. We
pretty much have a list...not pretty much we DO have a list of those schools
that students are requesting be added to the network and whenever we decide to
add schools we pretty much just start at the top of the list and then work down
so we’ll probably be adding another 40 schools within the next week or so and
the way we’ve been choosing what schools to add is like that list and cutting
it off after number 40…so those 40 are the next 40 up.
Q: This issue is probably going to
run around June/ July…by then what is the projected number of school you’re
going to be wired in?
A: Um…there will be over 500... It
should be up towards.
Q: We were hoping that you could
give us any anecdotes or interesting things that you’ve seen that people have
done with The Facebook creatively… like is there anything where you’ve gone on
The Facebook or you’ve heard through word of mouth of things that people have
done with it….like “We didn’t think that someone would do something like that”
or someone that just went against convention?
A: Well I mean…the problem with of
anecdotes that we hear is that they’re actually using the network in ways that
they’re not supposed to and so I…don’t really like to talk about a lot of the
anecdotes because they’re not quite within the terms of agreement of the
site…but some of the more relaxed anecdotes are stuff like people who start
dating because of the site or we’ve had a couple of couples who’ve emailed and
said that they’re getting married....and….I don’t think any of them have ever
met originally on The Facebook….but they only briefly knew each other before
having access to the site and then got to know each other through the site. So those are always fun anecdotes to
hear about or to listen to.
Q: Has there only been one
marriage?
A: Well there have two or three
couples I don’t know if it’s two or three I know you want to be precise, but
it’s been less than 5…have emailed in just to say that they’re either planning
to get married or have gotten married but I mean a lot probably don’t email in
as well.
Q: Do you know anything about The
Facebook as a hookup network? Just
because you always see the ‘random play’ option…’whatever I can get’…have you
heard any successes of The Facebook as a hookup network for college students?
A: Yes, yes absolutely.
Q: Ok…can you give me any anecdotes
to that?
A: I mean…what I’m sort of
struggling with is your anecdote question and I’m not sure you’re gonna mine
out very good quality ones from me in this conversation. I can tell you a lot about how the site
works and what we’re trying to do. But the anecdotes we do get…there are a lot of
them and some of them are more interesting than others…but just in general I
know that people have used the site to find other people to hang out with to go
on a date with, to hook up with, to do a variety of things. Whether or not that happens or to what
degree that happens frequently oftentimes depends one each branch of The
Facebook, because you have to remember that students at Harvard don’t use the
site the same way that you know a completely different school in a completely
different region of a completely different size might use The Facebook like
UCLA or a more urban campus like NYU. So it’s hard to make the network wide
generalizations except to say that yes this does happen, often or not so often,
but we hear about it fairly often.
So as far as the site being used for hookups, we hear about it from time
to time but again, what we hear is not necessarily what’s actually happening,
so I would encourage you to talk to the kids who are using the site so you can
maybe get a more balanced idea of how it’s being used at UVa or other schools
on the network.
Q: Where do you see The Facebook
heading? Do you see it having more of an academic impact in the way that it’s
gonna help people network through classes or do you see it having more of a
social impact in the future?
A: I think it has some role
academically but not a very prominent one I think it’s used mostly as a social
tool these days... so as a way to encourage acquaintanceships or friendships
that are being forged…so I think it has a much more social emphasis
than an academic one…but there are...sometimes people do make study groups and
are better aware of who other individuals are within any given classes the
person is taking because of the site.
Q: Do you see it as ever moving beyond college use? Do you ever see yourself creating
branches that aren’t colleges on The Facebook or are just to strictly remain in
the realm of just college campuses?
A: We’ve thought about that
some. We’re most interested in
staying in and working with the stuff that we know… we’re all college students
who made the site. Originally, most
of the people who are working on the site now are college students, and it’s
easier to sorta take care of colleges in the states particularly and more
internationally before we start thinking about where to go after that.
Q: Do you think you can tell me any
new ideas or innovations or overhauls that you have planned for the Facebook in
the future?
A: We’re gonna continue to grow and
add more schools but on top of that we’re gonna add a couple of features…the
newest one that we’re probably gonna be adding in the next few weeks is a party
invitation and organization feature that’ll allow users to announce parties and
send out invitations to their friends or members of a given group and give
RSVPs if the users would like to RSVP.
So that’s the newest feature.
And there’s this other thing actually that we’re gonna be doing is
partnering the site with another project called Wirehog which you can get more
information about at wirehog.com but it’s basically a file sharing program that
allows individuals to share music, photos, videos with friends.
Q: What do you think makes The Facebook so appealing?
A: I think for the most part it’s
because the site is really versatile and people log on and do a variety of
things. You can log on to just
have fun and look at other individual’s profiles and you’re connected to them
or you can log on to get a variety of information that can be really
helpful. Whether it’s building a
study group for a class or finding someone’s phone number or screename or just
trying to find people who are interested in the same topic as you are, The
Facebook can serve that useful function along with the recreational fun.
