Facebook is worth $75-$100 billion. If we broke that down by user, it would mean that each individual is worth $118.34. Or, if we’re looking at it in terms of revenue from 2011 – $3.71 billion – each user is worth $4.39 in revenue per user per year. Yet Zuckerberg owns 28.4% of Facebook, and holds 56.9% of the voting power.
The world over is reacting to the fact that Facebook has now put a dollar value on 845 million users’ personal data. Zuckerberg had something to say about it, too. About three hours after the IPO dropped, he posted a revealing photo to his Facebook page.
The status update has more than 70,000 “likes” and 6127 shares, but only 128 comments. Most of them are congratulatory: “Like!” says Larry Chiang, emphatically. “Keep the vision and stay thirsty my friend! Congrats!” writes Ken Walden. Zuck is absent from the entire comment thread.
There’s a common, understood practice in the Facebook culture. If a user gets feedback on a status update, they take a few minutes to go through and “like” some of the comments that their friends left. It shows recognition and approval of the comment, producing a feeling of momentary happiness in the user. It’s even better than a smiley-face approval.
Zuck didn’t “like” any of the comments that anyone posted. Notably, KuoChuan Chang, a user in Taipei, Taiwan, went through and liked quite a few of the comments that other Facebookers left Mark. Chang even shared the “Stay Focused & Keep Shipping” photo to his own page. For added emphasis, he decided to “like” it, too.
“Personal relationships are the fundamental unit of our society,” Zuckerberg writes in his IPO letter. “Relationships are how we discover new ideas, understand our world and ultimately derive long-term happiness.”
Zuckerberg is the man (er, boy) behind the technological side of Facebook. But when it comes to making “friends,” he does not participate in the culture of Facebook that he helped create.
