While Facebook has grown, changes it has made have alienated some users. Mark Zuckerberg, left, the site’s founder, and Chris Cox, director of products.

As a company’s growth explodes, the power of crowds undergoes a digital metamorphosis.


By BRAD STONE


WHEN FACEBOOK SIGNED up its 100 millionth member last August, its employees spread out in two parks in Palo Alto, California, for a huge barbecue. Sometime soon, this five-year-old start-up, born in a dorm room at Harvard University, expects to register its 200 millionth user.

That staggering growth rate - doubling in size in just eight months - shows that Facebook is rapidly becoming the Web’s dominant social ecosystem and an essential personal and business networking tool in much of the wired world.

Yet Facebook executives say they aren’t planning to observe their latest milestone in any significant way. It is, perhaps, a poor time to celebrate. The company that has given users new ways to connect and speak truth to power now often finds itself as the target of that formidable grass-roots firepower - most recently over controversial changes it made to users’ home pages.

As Facebook expands, it’s also struggling to match the momentum of new start-ups like Twitter, the micro-blogging service, while managing the ex-pectations of young, tech-savvy early adopters, attracting mainstream moms and dads, and justifying its sometimes stratospheric valuation: Microsoft assigned the company a value of $15 billion when it invested in 2007.

By any measure, Face book’s growth is a great accomplishment. The crew of Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s 24-year-old co-founder and chief executive, is signing up nearly a million new members a day, and now more than 70 percent of the service’s members live overseas, in countries like Italy, the Czech Republic and Indonesia. Facebook’s ranks in those countries swelled last year after the company offered its site in their languages.

All of this puts Face book on a par with other groundbreaking - and wildly popular - Internet services like free e-mail, Google, the online calling network Skype and e-commerce sites like eBay. But Face book promises to change how we communicate even more fundamentally, in part by digitally mapping and linking peripatetic people across space and time, allowing them to publicly share myriad and often very personal elements of their lives.

Unlike search engines, which ably track prominent Internet presences, Face book reconnects regular folks with old friends and strengthens their bonds with new pals.

Facebook can also help rebuild families. Karen Haber, a mother of two living outside Tel Aviv, logs onto Face book each night after she puts the children to bed. She searches for her family’s various surnames, looking for relatives from the once-vast Bachenheimer clan of northern Germany, which fractured during the Holocaust and then dispersed around the globe.

“I was never into genealogy and now suddenly I have this tool that helps me find the descendants of people that my grandparents knew, people who share the same truth I do,”Ms.Haber says.“I’m using Face book and trying to unite this family.”

Facebook has also become a vehicle for broadbased activism - like the organizers on the site last year who mobilized 12 million people to march in protests around the globe against practices of the FARC rebels in Colombia.

Discussing Facebook’s connective tissue, Mr.Zuckerberg recalls the story of Claus Drachmann, a schoolteacher in northern Denmark who became a Face book friend of Anders Fogh Rasmussen, Denmark’s prime minister. Mr.Drachmann subsequently invited Mr.Rasmussen to speak to his class of special-needs children; the prime minister obliged last fall.

Mr.Zuckerberg says the story illustrates Facebook’s power to cut through arbitrary social barriers.“This represents a generational shift in technology,”he says.“To me, what is interesting was that it was possible for a regular person to reach the prime minister and that that interaction happened.”

Mr.Zuckerberg says Facebook’s most important metrics are not its membership but the percentage of the wired world that uses the site and the amount of information moving across its servers.

Facebook’s mission, he says, is to be used by everyone in the world to share information seamlessly.“Two hundred million in a world of six billion is tiny,”he says.“It’s a cool milestone. It’s great that we reached that, especially in such a short amount of time. But there is so much more to do.”

As Facebook stampedes along, it still has to get out of its own way to soothe the injured feelings of some users. More than two and a half million dissenters have joined a group on Face book’s own site called“Millions Against Face book’s New Layout and Terms of Service.”Others are lambasting the changes in their own status updates, which are now, ironically, distributed much more visibly to all of their Face book friends.

The simmering conflict over the design change speaks to the challenges of pleasing 200 million users, many of whom feel pride of ownership because they helped to build the site with free labor and very personal contributions.

“They have a strange problem,”says S.Shyam Sundar, co-director of the Media Effects Research Laboratory at Pennsylvania State University, of Face book’s quandary.“This is a technology that has inherently generated community, and it has gotten to the point where members of that community feel not only vested but empowered to challenge the company.”

Those tensions boiled up previously, when Facebook announced the intrusive Beacon advertising system in 2007, and again when Face book introduced new service terms earlier this year, which appeared to give the company broad commercial control over the content people uploaded to the site.

Face book responded to protests over the second move by promising users a vote in how the site would be governed. But while Face book is willing to give users a voice, it doesn’t necessarily want to listen.“It’s not a democracy,”says Chris Cox, 26, Face book’s director of products and a confidant of Mr.Zuckerberg.“We are here to build an Internet medium for communicating and we think we have enough perspective to do that and be caretakers of that vision.”

In the six weeks since Rich Hall, a 52-year-old theater manager in Mount Carroll, Illinois, joined Face book, he has reconnected with more than 400 friends and acquaintances, including former high school friends, his auto mechanic and former buddies from his days as a stock car driver.

In the course of his new half-hour-a-day Facebook habit, Mr.Hall also“friended the 60 high school students he is directing in a school play, so he could coordinate rehearsal times. That led some of them to deny his request because, as he says they told him, their parents “found it creepy.”Along the way, Mr.Hall also found photographs of his 19-year-old son on the site, drinking beer at a Friday night bonfire.

“He denied it and said he wasn’t there,”Mr.Hall says.“I said,‘Let’s go to this page together and look at these photos.’Of course he did it. There are no secrets anymore.”

Facebook has introduced advertising tools to let companies focus on users based on the language they use and their geographic location. So an advertiser can now tailor a message to the Latino community in Los Angeles or French speakers in Montreal.

Despite the gloom permeating much of the advertising world, and the formidable challenges facing the site, some advertisers say they glimpse the future in Face book’s brand of interactive advertising.

“Our clients all want to see if they can make this work,”says Al Cadena, the interactive account director at Threshold Interactive in Los Angeles, which represents companies like Nestle, Honda and Sony.

“Advertising used to be a one-way communication from advertiser to consumer, but now people want to have a dialogue. And Face book is becoming the default way to do that, not only in the States but really for the whole world.”