Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, may seem like an over-sharer in the age of over-sharing. But that’s kind of the point. Zuckerberg’s business model depends on our shifting notions of privacy, revelation, and sheer self-display.
Happily for him, and the prospects of his eventual fortune, his business interests align perfectly with his personal philosophy. In the bio section of his page, Zuckerberg writes simply, “I’m trying to make the world a more open place.” The world, it seems, is responding. The site is now the biggest social network in countries ranging from Indonesia to Colombia. Today, at least one out of every fourteen people in the world has a Facebook account.
Five hundred million people have joined, and eight hundred and seventy-nine of them are his friends (just a few less than social capitalist John Agno's 907 close friends). The site is a directory of the world’s people, and a place for private citizens to create public identities.
Facebook profiles are always something of a performance: you choose the details you want to share and you choose whom you want to share them with.
This past spring, Facebook introduced what Zuckerberg called the Open Graph. Users reading articles on CNN.com, for example, can see which articles their Facebook friends have read, shared, and liked. Eventually, the company hopes that users will read articles, visit restaurants, and watch movies based on what their Facebook friends have recommended, not, say, based on a page that Google’s algorithm sends them to.
What this emerging transparency implies is a future tug-of-war about what it means to be a private person with a public identity. Zuckerberg’s critics argue that his interpretation and understanding of transparency and openness are simplistic. That indicates Facebook, who knows no boundaries and favors the bold, will probably publish a personal detail that you may not be ready to share.
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/09/20/100920fa_fact_vargas?printable=true#ixzz0zpBbRdo2