George Takei's Facebook Masterclass

The brightest Facebook star of 2012 hasn’t been the new timeline, a Mafia assassination game, or even the company’s initial public offering. It’s 74-year-old actor, gay rights activist, and sci-fi icon George Takei, best known for playing the cool headed, deep-voiced Mr. Sulu on the original Star Trek series. After launching his Facebook page last October, Takei has gained more than a million followers and his short, visual, fan-generated posts—which range from dogs dressed as Yoda to jabs at Rick Santorum—have rapidly spread to the news feeds of many millions more Facebook users.

Bloomberg Businessweek recently tapped Takei to school us in the art of Facebook curation.

Tell us a little about the growth of your page.

I began with Twitter in January of 2011 but moved to Facebook in October of 2011, as it gave me more of a way to interact and share ideas and laughter as a community. The site really gained traction after the first of the year, when we hit some kind of critical mass of people sharing and reposting, so that all “friends of friends” started joining in. Things really took off after I went on strike for a day [January 17th] to protest SOPA [the Stop Online Piracy Act proposed in Congress]. I think fans realized that the page had become a part of their daily lives, and so they were more eager than ever to participate.

What do you look for when you’re considering a post?

True to my base, I like to find fan-generated images that are in the world of science fiction, especially Star Trek or Star Wars—both are franchises that I have worked in. One of the most popular posts ever was a picture of Nichelle Nichols [who played Lt. Urura on Star Trek] and myself on the bridge of the Enterprise, and we had a fan caption contest, with the fans voting for the three finalists. The winner had Uhura saying, “the captain kisses like a girl.” And I was there saying, “I know.”

I also have a strong LGBT following, so images that have a gay spin to them are common. We’re split about 50/50 men and women, so posts that poke fun at either or both sexes are popular. On top of these, posts that make you think—or speak to the politics of the day or even of the moment—tend to be shared and commented on frequently.

How many submissions do you get per day—and how many, on average, do you post?

I receive hundreds of posts on the wall and e-mails from fans and unfortunately, don’t have the time to look at them all. But when I do, it’s not hard to find very funny material to share. I’ll share six items on a good day.

You’ve managed to capture a fairly large swath of users from different backgrounds. What’s the key to Facebook posts with wide appeal?

I think the fans understand that I am an equal-opportunity Facebooker. That is, everyone needs to be able to poke fun at themselves and not be too serious. We aren’t out to hurt anyone, just laugh together. Things that bring a smile, even if they are a bit naughty or edgy, are my favorites. Like the recent Gay Terrorist picture, with a fine-legged Arab fellow in heels, a full beard and a white dress, named Yomama Been Shoppin. I knew it was wrong, but I laughed anyway and thought: “If I can laugh at this, others should be able to as well.” And I was right.

The intros to each posting are short, succinct, and witty. What are you looking for when you write them? They’re almost Haiku-like.

I’ve had the fortune in my career of working with terrific writers for television, film, and stage, across all genres. Perhaps I am channeling them. The English language is a beautiful, malleable, and glorious tool when used effectively, so I like to put a little more effort into each post.

As the page’s followers have snowballed, how has this affected your posting, or the quality of material?

I like to think not. Certainly the material is shared more often, so I try to be careful to post higher-quality images, so that as many people on Facebook can enjoy them as possible. And I try to proofread more carefully—there’s nothing worse than a typo that 100,000 people point out to you. I also reduced the number of times per day I interact with the site, so that I can give each post and as many of the comments within them their due.

You’re a political figure on many issues, but the page seldom has overt political postings, and politics are more often subtly referenced. [For example, a cartoon with
marshmallow peeps standing around a plate of Fig Newtons, holding signs that say "God Hates Figs."] What place should politics have on a Facebook page?

There are fans from all political spectrums who follow the page, and I wouldn’t want it to become some large bridge for “trolls” to dwell under. Finding material that unites people in laughter is better than standing on a soapbox to disseminate messages that divide. That said, when there is an issue that all of us of good conscience can get behind, irrespective of political affiliations—like same-sex marriage—I am happy to pontificate.

Facebook has filed for an IPO and is valued somewhere close to $100 Billion. Given the spread of your page and the quantity of Facebook users who are forwarding and reposting your posts—and that the Telegraph recently valued each Facebook user at approximately $125—what would you value the page at?

There are certainly more important things than money, and I’m the last person to be able to answer that question. On occasion, I will ask the fans for support of a charity or project, and if they respond with contributions, that’s good enough for me. We were able to help a young documentary maker, for example, get funding for his Second Class Citizens project on gay rights. And we’re doing a plug for The Old Globe Theater and the Japanese American National Museum, both of which are favorite nonprofits of mine.

How has the background of your existing fan base helped this page grow so rapidly?

It appears that sci-fi fans tend to be quite avid Facebookers, so that core has really helped us grow initially. They also like to communicate with one another on the page, since it reminds them that we’re all a little weird, and finding other weird people with the same weird sense of humor is quite comforting. That’s one of the great aspects of Facebook: It can bring people together—in this case to laugh—without forcing you to sit right next to someone else. I’m not sure it’s what Mark Zuckerberg had in mind initially, but now look what’s happened. I’m having the time of my life at nearly 75 years old. But just imagine when all the 20- and 30-somethings today are still on Facebook as grandparents, poking each other and starting Facebook fights. How very droll!

Sax is a Bloomberg Businessweek contributor.

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Will Facebook Friend Preteens?

When Mary Kay Hoal started a social networking website for kids in 2007, the mother of five wanted to create a wholesome service her young family could enjoy. She quickly realized that catering to children on the Internet requires paying a steep toll. Hoal says she burned through hundreds of thousands of dollars just so her site, Yoursphere.com, could comply with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), a 1998 law that sets strict rules for sites targeting preteens. Its main requirement: that sites get parental consent before collecting personal information about children or allowing them to open accounts.

Hoal, a Davis (Calif.) entrepreneur, tried working with a number of third parties—phone banks, credit-card companies, identity verification services—before settling on an e-mail notification to parents when their kids try to sign up. Parents must respond before the account becomes active. “It’s a headache for a website publisher,” she says.

The law that blew Hoal’s budget will take on new importance now that Facebook (FB), the world’s largest social network, is exploring whether to open its site to kids, according to Bloomberg News. Doing so could help the company tap a new population of potential members. Facebook needs the help: It already has reached almost 1 billion members, and a recent report by ComScore (SCOR) says the social network’s growth has slowed dramatically—a warning sign for some investors. Allowing preteens to create profiles would introduce a valuable new demographic for advertisers to reach.

And yet the idea of opening Facebook to youngsters makes some uncomfortable: “What’s next? Facebook for toddlers?” says James Steyer, chief executive officer of Common Sense Media, a child advocacy organization. “Facebook should not target children under 13. Period.” The problems of keeping children safe online became horrifyingly apparent on June 12 when Skout, a mobile social network popular with teens, partially suspended its service after three adult members allegedly raped minors.

Currently, preteens are not permitted to create a profile on Facebook. But many lie: A Consumer Reports survey last year claimed that Facebook has 7.5 million users younger than 13. Eric Goldman, an associate professor at Santa Clara University School of Law, says “having Facebook comply with COPPA might be better than the current situation, where Facebook basically treats underage users like adults.”

Facebook says it’s difficult to enforce age restrictions on the Internet, in part because parents help kids access online services. “We are in continuous dialogue with stakeholders, regulators, and other policymakers about how best to help parents keep their kids safe in an evolving online environment,” says company spokesman Andrew Noyes. Facebook declined to comment on whether it plans to lower its age limit.

The social network, which raised $16 billion in its recent initial public offering, could easily afford to implement a parental verification system—and given Facebook’s history of privacy-related public-relations blowups, it may want something that goes beyond what COPPA requires. Last year, when Vincent Cannistraro created WhatsWhat.me, a social site for kids, he was careful to follow COPPA by setting up ways for parents to e-mail or fax permission slips, or provide a credit-card number. (The free site charges the card a penny only to make sure it’s active.) In addition, the Waltham (Mass.) startup requires that every new member take a Webcam photo, which is reviewed by an employee to make sure the person in the photo is a child. Each time members log in, they take another Webcam photo. Facial recognition software checks to ensure the photos match. Cannistraro says adults try to register or log in under existing accounts “all the time,” but the added security blocks them.

To comply with COPPA, Facebook would also have to offer parents the option to not have their children’s online activities tracked. That could be problematic because Facebook makes the majority of its revenue by mining user data and serving targeted ads. If large numbers of parents opt not to let Facebook track their children, then advertising to them could become a challenge since online advertisers have come to expect a certain level of detail about who their ads are reaching. Chad Perry, founder of an Orem (Utah) social network for kids called ScuttlePad, says sponsorship negotiations with a publishing company fell through when he refused to link users directly to the company’s site. Perry says he forbade the practice because he can’t control content on a third-party site.

“I’m open to advertising but it has to be right for us—it has to be safe and not promote ideas that are going to affect kids in a negative way,” says Perry. “However, the only way to stay free in the long run is through advertising. And that’s our challenge every day.”

The bottom line: Facebook has the money to set up a system for obtaining parental approval, but courting preteens could affect its ad-centric business model.

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Facebook Snaps Up Instagram

Facebook just shocked Silicon Valley, acquiring the photo-sharing service Instagram for $1 billion in cash and stock. The two-year-old company makes photo-sharing applications that allow smartphone users to snap photos in a variety of retro styles and share them with friends on the service, over e-mail, or on a variety of other social networks.

The acquisition is more evidence that we live in “bubblicious” times: The startup makes no money and has 13 employees, all of whom work out of Twitter’s original offices in San Francisco’s South Park neighborhood. Of course, that didn’t matter to Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg: “For years, we’ve focused on building the best experience for sharing photos with your friends and family. Now, we’ll be able to work even more closely with the Instagram team to also offer the best experiences for sharing beautiful mobile photos with people based on your interests,” Zuckerberg wrote on his Facebook page this morning.

Photograph by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

The rocket trajectory of Instagram shows how fruitful it can be on the Internet these days to reinvent the wheel for the dawning age of smartphones and social networking. There was no dearth of photo-sharing apps when Kevin Systrom, a former Google product manager, started the company in early 2010, originally targeting and quickly abandoning the check-in field dominated by Foursquare. Sites such as Ofoto, Shutterfly, Yahoo’s Flickr, and Google’s Picasa were firmly entrenched.

But Instagram gave the well-worn photo-sharing concept a half turn, tailoring its service for the limitations of smartphone cameras and mobile networks, and for people’s growing desire to share their pictures. The app was fine-tuned for the iPhone and made it simple to enhance one’s typically lousy cell phone photos by applying a variety of filters that give shots a fresh look. The app also compressed a photo’s digital file to upload it more quickly over limited mobile networks. By early 2011, when Bloomberg Businessweek covered the booming service, the app had been downloaded 1.75 million times. It now has about 15 million users.

Instagram’s new app for Android phones, released last month, was downloaded by a million users in less than a day. I actually downloaded the app yesterday and, after taking a few photos of the kids, was surprised to see more friends commenting on my photos on Instagram itself than on Facebook, where I also posted the shots. Zuckerberg and company may have recognized an incipient competitor—and a way to enhance the volume and quality of photo sharing on its own service. In a blog post, Systrom said the companies will continue to develop Instagram separately. Now Facebook can enjoy that growth, instead of fearing it.

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Who Do You Trust More with Your Data: Facebook or a Bank?

By Carol Matlack

If you want to know how much Web companies know about you, talk to Max Schrems. The Austrian law student used European Union privacy laws to obtain all the data Facebook had collected on him over a three-year period. It amounted to 1,222 pages of information, including copies of posts he had deleted months earlier and the time and date of each of his log-ins. “It’s very frightening,” says Schrems.

Facebook, Google, and other companies collect and use such data to make billions of dollars on targeted advertising. Now SWIFT (the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication), the nonprofit global cooperative that handles wire transfers between financial institutions, is working on a system that would let Web surfers store and manage their own data, much like money in a bank account, and selectively lend it to companies that provide a benefit in return. It will allow people to “take back control of their digital assets,” says Peter Vander Auwera, a member of the nine-person team, dubbed the Innotribe, that’s working on the project.

The idea comes as privacy advocates push for tougher controls on Web companies that track users as they shop, socialize, and hang out online. To settle complaints by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, Facebook recently agreed to obtain consent from users before sharing certain data. After a government audit in Ireland, Facebook has promised to purge data quickly from its servers when European users delete information they’ve posted. Pending legislation in the U.S. Senate and European Union would give consumers the right to opt out of data-tracking entirely. Spokesmen for Facebook and Google say the companies have taken steps to give customers more control over when their data are released.

SWIFT, though, figures that people don’t always mind sharing their data, so long as they get something in return. The Brussels-based group plans to set up and run an online network similar to the financial-transfer system it now operates, but for trading data rather than money. The way SWIFT envisions it, trusted companies such as banks and cellular carriers would have the right to set up so-called digital asset accounts to store details about users’ online activities, as well as health and financial records. Account holders could use the SWIFT system to release information to third parties at their discretion. They might agree to provide their data to a merchant in exchange for a discount, for instance, or sell information to data-collecting companies. As a nonprofit, SWIFT “has no stake in the data,” says Drummond Reed, a San Francisco entrepreneur who is advising the Brussels group. It’s a “trusted intermediary,” he says. SWIFT plans to start internal tests of the network this spring.

Creating the system is one thing. Getting people to use it is another. Under SWIFT’s plan, customers would probably have to pay to maintain digital-asset accounts, which would limit their appeal. And banks aren’t the most popular institutions these days; it’s debatable whether consumers trust them more than Google and Facebook. Those Web giants are also unlikely to consent to a SWIFT-operated data-trading network unless hordes of Web users flock to it. (Spokesmen for both companies declined to comment on SWIFT’s prototype because they are not familiar with it.) “Once a few companies defect, the entire system undergoes what economists call unraveling,” says Arvind Narayanan, a Stanford University researcher who is writing a book about online trading of personal data.

A final obstacle is SWIFT itself. Because its interbank transfer network has to be foolproof, it’s obsessed with testing and retesting new ideas before debuting them to the public. The group says that its data-trading network won’t be ready for launch for at least five years—an eternity in Internet time.

SWIFT’s management figures the project is worth pursuing, even if its only accomplishment is to shake up the group’s risk-averse culture. The interbank financial network “is well protected, for good reasons,” says Konstantin Peric, who was named in 2007 as SWIFT’s first head of innovation. “But we need to make sure that outside the castle is a sandbox for experimentation, where people can try things and fail.”

The bottom line: SWIFT’s data-trading system faces long odds with consumers, but it could spur innovation at the nonprofit.

Matlack is a Paris correspondent for Bloomberg Businessweek.

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Why Facebook Needs Sheryl Sandberg

Facebook HQ: Sandberg in the user operations department. Facebook plans to move into Sun Microsystems' old campus later this year Photograph by Robyn Twomey

By Brad Stone

On a Tuesday afternoon in late April, 30 managers of Facebook's various business units come together to discuss a matter that preoccupies its famous founder: how to keep their rapidly growing little company from getting too big. The meeting, organized and led by the second-most-famous person at the social network, Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, focuses on how to solve the problems of users, advertisers, and partner websites by using automated systems rather than bringing in thousands of new employees.

One by one, the managers stand and present their progress on new productivity-generating tools. A service called social verification offers a way for Facebook members who get locked out of their accounts to have friends verify their identity. Another new system intends to scare away creators of fake profile accounts by displaying their locations on a map and asking if they really want to continue.

Sandberg, sitting with one leg tucked underneath her, the other folded over the arm of the chair, listens intently and responds with a mix of positive feedback and disarming camaraderie. "That is a huge accomplishment," she says when an international manager talks about new efficiencies in the Hyderabad office. "Whoever worked on this, you guys should feel great. It took us four years at Google to do this." The success of an automated tool that eliminates duplicate profiles on the service evokes an "awesome."

Sandberg hopes the new procedures discussed at these meetings will allow the Palo Alto company to maintain a moderate pace of hiring. She believes that other booming Internet companies that doubled and tripled their staffs during similar periods of unchecked growth—Google (GOOG) has more than 26,000 employees—eventually came to regret the innovation-killing bureaucracy that resulted. Facebook has only 2,500 employees. A new headquarters under renovation one town over in Menlo Park, on the former Sun Microsystems campus, currently maxes out at about 3,600. "We think one of the best ways to stay small is just to stay smaller," Sandberg says later.

As the meeting winds down, a product manager shows a slide that nearly makes Sandberg jump out of her seat. The chart displays Facebook's advertising revenue and volume—both lines are tilting upward. It also shows the number of man-hours spent on support operations, a line that holds steady. "This is a beautiful chart. I might frame it on my wall," Sandberg says. "Guys, this is the difference. This is about, how big do we want to be as a company?"

Ever since Silicon Valley started turning out companies with beautiful growth charts, entrepreneurs and their investors have talked about the need for "adult supervision"—a seasoned executive who can take over a startup from its inexperienced founders, guide it through the hazards of hyperkinetic expansion, and convert a great idea or breakthrough technology into a bona fide business. Today, however, young founders generally want to remain at the helm of their companies, and there's a new shorthand for the kind of leader who's willing to serve as a second-in-command, complementing without overshadowing the wunderkind entrepreneur: a Sheryl Sandberg. As in, "we're growing, but God knows how we'll make money. What we really need is a Sheryl Sandberg."

No one needs a Sandberg more than the company that currently has her. In the three years since Sandberg, 41, defected from Google and joined Facebook as its COO, she has helped to steer the company to previously unimaginable heights, devising an advertising platform that's attracted the world's largest brands and forging a remarkably trusting partnership with Mark Zuckerberg, its imperious 26-year-old founder. (He turns 27 on May 14.)

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