[rblion]

Facebook is the Jurassic Park of startups.

Founded by a hacker-idealist who wanted to bring people and technology together like never before. The experiment worked wonderfully at first as millions of people flocked to Facebook's revolutionary platform from around the world. Soon, questions of profitability came into the picture, forcing executives to compromise ethics for additional revenue. Chaos erupted and millions began to question their loyalty and wonder about their safety/privacy. Over time, the platform has become overgrown with ads (that are rarely clicked), spam (that embarrasses it's victims), and scandals (that frighten even the most loyal users). Fear of extinction due to unexpected competition has pushed Facebook to become even more aggressive by inflating the value of the company to astronomical proportions, acquihiring dozens of startups, and raising billions in an IPO. Today, the future of Facebook is in the air. No one knows how the variables will compound and what this corporate gene sequence will evolve into...

[MartinCron]

It's a good story, but I think you're remembering both the plot details and the themes of Jurassic Park differently than I am.

[rblion]

I perceived inGen trying to re-create complex organisms and arrange them into a simple system, and not being prepared when the consequences of chaos unfolded. I love the movie but it leaves out much of the discussion of complexity and chaos found in the book. You ever read the books?

[MartinCron]

I actually just re-read the book with my son. It holds up really well considering it's age. The complexity and chaos stuff maps, I just don't see the parallel between the idealistic Zuck wanting to change the world and inGen trying to make a dinosaur theme park.

[rblion]

The parallel is both were trying to do something considered 'impossible' and doing it on the grandest scale possible. John Hammond wanted to clone extinct animals, Mark wanted to create a network for millions of people. Both projects are incredibly complex with a lot of variables and the consequences of miscalculation could be disastrous. Chaos is the underlying theme of it all...

[code177]

To be fair to John Hammond, I'm not sure creating a (albeit massive) social networking service is in the same league as reverse engineering 65+ million year old, fragmented DNA strands, then bringing the dinosaurs not only to term, but healthy adulthood, and finally housing them in a multi-billion dollar facility on a leased island.

Facebook has roughly 4x as much source code as Jurassic Park did, and probably can't be run from a single room for up to three days with minimal staff.

Also, if say, Facebook Profiles breaks down, the profiles don't eat the users.

[rblion]

Keep in mind, it was a movie and the metaphor was constructed around chaos/complexity. If you read the books, Hammond actually needed an entire other island, Isla Sorna, to produce batches of dinosaurs and allow them to mature. Most of the embryos did not reach maturity. He also had a much larger control room on that island to oversee the main island.

If your Facebook data gets exploited, it could affect you in big ways.

[raverbashing]

And Unix