[corporalagumbo]

I appreciate that building Facebook to the point it is at now, and maintaining focus on the future company despite buy-out offers, is not trivial. Mark is clearly a talented individual.

However what is good for Facebook =/= what is good for Facebook users. And one point that emerges from Greenspan's description of Mark is that the man may be a genius for cutting out friends and building an empire, but when it comes to human warmth, he's lacking. And the problem with that is that it may very well limit Mark's ability to imagine how something like Facebook could evolve and work, and thus limit his ability to better equate what is good for Facebook with what is good for users.

A subsidiary point is that, due to network effects, Facebook's vulnerability to a poor core philosophy is reduced, at least in the short term. Once a social network grows into our lives, it isn't easy to replace. So if Facebook is indeed "rotten at the core" (I'm not arguing it is necessarily... just saying) then it may be able to buy itself a lot of time, even if it acts in its "own" interests, not its users'. But as technology continues to develop and its environment destabilises it won't remain invulnerable forever. Unless you are interested in slavery and extortion, eventually, under our moderated democratic capitalist model, what is good for a company is being good for its users.

[nancyhua]

I think I agree with your points assuming Mark is evil.

I am not convinced Zuckerberg's lacking "human warmth." It didn't strike me that Mark thought he was actually friends with Aaron or thought he was betraying anything- that's Aaron's perspective, which was understandable but we can't be really nice to everyone who considers themselves our friends or disagrees with us on who owns an idea.

Facebook so far hasn't done anything I really disagree with. But my feelings on privacy etc aren't that strong yet, maybe a failure of my imagination because nothing bad has really happened to me yet (knocking on wood).