Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg applauded the concatenation.

"Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber performed Rebecca Black's song at our campus and I Twittered it on Google."

"
Justin Bieber and I are going to do a duo," Lady Gaga said. "It's a song that Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg wrote with Rebecca Black and that we heard at Twitter when we were visiting Google."

"So I was at Twitter once with Mark Zuckerberg from Google, no, Facebook," said Black, "and Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber were really nice."

Miley Cyrus photograph by Alex Loves Mikey

60 Minutes also got a sneak peek at the new Facebook profile pages, which are being rolled out gradually, according to a post on the official Facebook blog. The new profile pages will be available to all of Facebook's 500 million users by early next year, says the company.

Facebook's New Profiles

As for the new profile pages, Facebook says it made a number of improvements to make it easier for users to tell their story and learn about their friends.

The revamped Facebook profile includes an updated introduction section, with the basics of where you're from, where you went to school and where you work. However, on these new profiles, it's photos that take center stage. Now, the recently tagged photos of you and photos of your closest friends (as chosen by you) are highlighted, the latter in a section called "Featured Friends."

There's also more flexibility in how you can share your interests and activities, says Facebook. "You can list the projects you worked on at your job, classes you took in school, your favorite musicians and sports teams, and more," says Facebook's Josh Wiseman, one of the project's leads. "You can also share your life philosophy by connecting to the religions, political affiliations, and people you follow and admire," he said. All of these interests are represented by images now, which you can rearrange to showcase those most important to you.

Facebook sped up browsing photos through a new "infinite scroll" feature and improved its people search, allowing for more search filters including name, hometown, school and more.

You can read more about the changes on Facebook.com/about/profile, on Facebook's blog or you can preview them for yourself in the video below.

In addition, Facebook has posted an FAQ which answers users' top questions about the new profiles, including a juicy little tidbit about how you can upgrade early by explicitly opting in.

With a controversial article last month in the LA Times that the undertook a "value-added" analysis of local teachers to ascertain their "effectiveness," and with the release this week of the new documentary Waiting for Superman by Oscar winning filmmaker Davis Guggenheim, the subject of education is getting a lot of press over the last few weeks. And while a national "conversation" about the subject is crucial, our schools - our kids - deserve more than talk.

Zuckerberg's money is being matched by $100 million from Newark Mayor Cory Booker. In exchange, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie will be ceding some control of the Newark public school system to Booker, who has long been an advocate for charter schools. The state of New Jersey seized control of the failing Newark schools over a decade ago, but since then test scores and graduation rates have not improved.

All told, this $200 million amounts to over 20% of Newark's budget of $940 million. It's not clear yet what the funding will be used for, and Zuckerberg said in a press conference this morning that there were "no earmarks" for how his money will be spent. Instead, he said it's an investment in "great leaders" and in Booker in particular.

In a blog post this morning, Zuckerberg wrote that, "Education has always been important to me and my family. Growing up, my parents emphasized the importance of learning and academic success." Zuckerberg says he's like to see a "startup approach" to fixing education, challenging the slow-moving educational bureaucracy to respond with the sort of flexibility and speed he identifies with Facebook.

While some cynics point to the timing of Zuckerberg's donation to coincide with the release of The Social Network, others are skeptical that the philanthropy, while commendable, will really bring about a sustainable transformation to the struggling Newark schools.

He also denied reports that the company is building its own operating system (OS), such as one that would compete with Google's Android mobile OS, for example. However, when asked about a "Facebook-branded phone," things became a little fuzzy.

Today, a Bloomberg report may have figured out why he was hedging. According to multiple unnamed sources, Facebook is working on two "Facebook phones" with handset manufacturer INQ Mobile Ltd., the report says.

Reportedly, Facebook has not yet decided whether it will lend its name to help in the branding of the devices.

That would certainly explain this odd portion of the TechCrunch/Mark Zuckerberg interview where the previously forthcoming exec all of a sudden needed further clarification before proceeding to answer a direct question:

(Note, edited for brevity)

Michael Arrington: Have there been discussions with hardware manufactures to have a Facebook-branded phone some time sort of soon, in the next year or so?

Mark Zuckerberg: What does that mean... Facebook-branded phone...?

Michael Arrington: You know, like the Nexus One was Google-branded even though it was also HTC-branded. I would imagine we're talking about physical branding on the phone itself.

Mark Zuckerberg: I think there are probably exploratory conversations around.. on the order of what I just said with all these different companies. But none of them have gotten to that level of detail. Like Apple in their ads has Facebook as a fairly prominent feature. But you wouldn't call this a Facebook-branded phone. And we want to do as deep an integration as we can with them, because this is an incredibly important device. I don't know... whether we help companies out with marketing, I think is almost more of a tactical question.

Earlier in the interview, Zuckerberg talked about an older INQ-built phone, also once dubbed the "Facebook phone" that featured deep social networking integration. He said that the company didn't have any of its engineers involved with that project at the time.

Meanwhile, the company's statement in response Bloomberg's new report confirmed that Facebook is working with INQ to help them build devices: "We've been working with INQ for a couple of years now to help them build a deeply integrated Facebook experience on their devices."

Hmmm.

The question now is: To what extent did Facebook help INQ this time around?

Tech blogger Om Malik of GigaOm may have that answer. He has contributed some information about the so-called Facebook phones from INQ, including juicy tidbits like this:

• The AT&T deal is not final and the phones won't be ready by early 2011 as Bloomberg reported
• The phones will show up first on Hutichinson's 3/3G network
• The phones will also bundle Spotify, the digital music streaming service
• The user experience was primarily designed by INQ, not Facebook

Reading between the lines of the Zuckerberg interview and the leaked INQ news, it does seem like the story of "Facebook" INQ phones is legit. The phones may or may not carry actual Facebook branding, as that's undecided for now, but they will certainly feature heavy integration, from what it sounds like.

That means soon we'll have "Facebook phones" that run on Android and offer Spotify music streaming. That sounds good to us, whether or not they're officially called "Facebook phones."

Image credit: INQ

It's undeniable that apps are in vogue. But does that mean the open Web - the one we access through a browser - is dead? Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg really hopes not.

Apps are increasingly popular with users because, well, they just work better. Apps are built to do a few things really well, whereas the Web is written in a language originally conceived for documents and accessed with a single browser that tries to accommodate all the myriad things users and developers want to do. Apps are also popular because they're more more monetizable with advertising, in-app purchases and by simply charging users to download them.

The concern is that the rise of apps could mean an outward migration of quality developers and users to the protected walls of various app stores, leaving the open Web to... well, not die, but fill up with lower quality content and malware. This would be bad because the open Web is also the free Web, where you don't need to buy an app or a fancy mobile device to use it and the barrier to entry is low if you have an idea for something like Facebook.com.

Why it's bad for Facebook if the Web dies

But Facebook's founder seems to think apps, and specifically mobile apps, are where things are headed.

"Mobile... will eventually get to a larger scale than the web. The Web is only at one and a half billion people, whereas everyone is going to have a phone and all the phones are going to be smartphones. So our strategy is that we want to go wherever people are building apps so we can make all of those apps social if they want that," Zuckerberg said today in an interview with TechCrunch about the rumored "Facebook phone."

But Zuck misses the Web, and his reasons for it may be why the Web will never die. Even a billion-dollar corporation like Facebook can't build an app for everything.

"When I was coding Facebook there was no question in my mind like what I was going to build for. It was, you're clearly going to build for the web. I'm not going to build software and I'm not going to build for a phone...

"And that clarity was so valuable whereas today it's like, okay, we want to go build an app. Even a new product that we launch. We're working on Questions, and it's like okay. So we build Questions for the web, then we build the "m" site for Questions, then we build the Touch HTML5 version of Questions. Then we build the iPhone version of Questions, and then the Android version, and then maybe... the iPad stuff. And then we don't work on a RIM version and then a bunch of people are pissed because it's not available on their phone.

"It's kind of a disaster right now. I really hope that the direction that this stuff goes in is one where there's more of a standard."

Why the Web is not going to die

That standard is HTML5, which Facebook plans to push very hard. If HTML5 can deliever a wide range of functions with a good user experience, then Facebook can develop one HTML5 version for every new product it launches and "that would be awesome," Zuckerberg said. And HTML5 could combate the problem of unfair access raised by the great App Migration.

Already Facebook has launched a special mobile site for people in developing countries (and some developed ones). 0.facebook lets users access a speedy, data charge-free version of Facebook with a mobile browser from any basic phone even in parts of the world with poor infrastructure.

Until the devices that people use to access the internet are completely standardized, the Web will never die.

"To celebrate, we've put together a collection of stories you've shared with us about the impact Facebook and your friends have had on your lives," writes Zuckerberg. "We're launching a new application called Facebook Stories where you can share your own story and read hundreds of others, categorized by themes and locations around the world."

Despite the company's recent bumpy rides through the mires of privacy disputes, over the last 6 and a half years, Facebook has redefined how we maintain relationships with our connections. We here at ReadWriteWeb even had the adventure of unknowingly confusing thousands of Facebook users who thought our homepage was a radical new redesign of their favorite social network.

500 million users later, distant families and long-lost friends are reconnecting and keeping abreast on one another's lives. I moved away from my hometown at the age of 9, but I managed to find my childhood friends on Facebook. I also have relatives that I see maybe once a year at best, but with Facebook we can stay connected - and it's only because the network is as large as it is. Certainly, there are other social Web solutions for staying connected, but the massive scale and acceptance by users young and old of Facebook makes it the best tool we have right now.

Children growing up today don't remember a time before Facebook - and that's both scary and fascinating. Future generations will be more and more accepting of sharing their lives on the Internet, which has its obvious pros and cons. At the other end of the spectrum, when my generation grows old and wants to look back on our lives, we won't need an old crusty photo album. We will simply use whatever popular device at the time that lets us flip through our life's history as aggregated from decades of social sharing. Facebook has been at the forefront of paving the way for that future.

It has taken 77 months for Facebook to go from 0 to 500 million and the company shows little sign of slowing, even with many leaving the network over privacy issues. The truth is, there is no viable alternative yet, but perhaps Google or those four students from N.Y.U. can change that.

As the one of the people who popularized that concept in relation to social networks, and as a founding member of the organization representing that cause, I'd like to call bullshit on that.

Until now I have stayed largely silent on the privacy hoopla because data portability and the open Web are not strictly related to privacy - at least in the sense that things don't need to be public for them to be portable or interoperable.

For example, just because the Web is based on open technologies (HTTP, HTML, SSL, JavaScript, etc.), it does not mean using your credit card on a properly configured website is public or unsafe. Sending email from one person to another does not mean third party websites can now suddenly "instantly personalize" their recommendations to you based on keywords found in your inbox.

Despite being based on interoperable technologies, these transactions remain private and secure.

Advocating Open Technologies Is Not Promoting the Death of Secrets

In the face of this, however, Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook continue to (deliberately?) confuse the idea of open technologies with "sharing in public." The attempt to correlate the two things is at best misinformed and at worst dishonest.

With his latest statement, Zuckerberg and Facebook are now going so far as to declare their privacy missteps as "data portability." Actually, Facebook's changes have nothing to do with data portability. In fact, the root of the user backlash has nothing to do with what the company is doing but rather how its are doing it.

Its problem is that, as a service, Facebook started as a place for people to share with friends and family in a private setting. Users expected privacy. This expectation is referred to as a "social compact." It is an implied agreement that has less to do with the terms of service and more to do with user expectations and ethics. When I give you my business card, for example, I expect (through our implied social compact) that you won't give it to spammers.

It turns out, however, that this compact was good for users but not great for Facebook's business. There are two broad reasons why Facebook has felt forced to make the service more public.

Mark Zuckerberg Facebook SXSWi 2008. Photo by deneyterrio.

First, it's hard, if not impossible, to monetize private communication. People don't use those kinds of service with the intent to buy, but rather with the intent to communicate. Intention is critical when it comes to advertising and e-commerce.

Second, competition from services like Twitter have made it cool to be public, and it's finding interesting ways to monetize this public information (the least of which is selling its inventory of Tweets for $15 million a pop).

Most of Facebook's very mainstream users, however, still just want a private place to keep up with their friends and family. In short, the economic interests of the service are not in line with the interests of its users. Despite this, Facebook has been forced to smashed big cracks in its privacy blanket and started forcing its users, en mass, to adopt more transparent and public online personas.

This (now public) data can be used by advertisers, publishers and other third parties to help Facebook attract even more users, more data and ultimately more dollars through targeted ads and micro-transactions.

The Wrong Social Compact

The problem, then, is not Mark Zuckerberg's stated goal of making the world a more open (read, less private) place, but rather that Facebook did not initially establish the right social compact - promise - to its users to justify its role in this vision of public sharing.

As a result, users feel (rightly) violated. Facebook broke its promise for business purposes. And this is not the first - or last I suspect - time it will do it. (Remember Beacon?)

Finally - in regards to actual data portability, interoperability and the Web - the technology choices Facebook makes are anything but open. It uses proprietary technologies, protocols and formats to capture value from the Web and lock it up in its hub.

In short, nothing about its cultural or technological approach is open or interoperable; it has nothing to do with interoperable data portability - the only kind that matters.

Facebook has every right to do whatever it likes with its service. The market will decide if it continues to like the service or not. Any backlash from the media, or demands for more fairness, are largely irrelevant unless users vote with their feet and stop using the service. Facebook knows this is unlikely, though, given its deep (and growing) integration with the rest of the Web.

But claiming that users love the changes because more and more of them are stumbling into the service by way of widgets on publisher pages is dishonest. There is a real fear amongst the user base (and their partners) about these changes.

When it comes right down to it, the lack of honesty and clarity from the company and its representatives about these issues, and the continued trend of taking established language - such as "open technology" or "data portability" - and corrupting it for its own marketing purposes, is far more disconcerting than the boundaries it's pushing with its technology choices.

What Are the Next Steps?

We as responsible members of the technology community and the open web must be clear and honest about what we see - and any threat it might pose to our industry or the wider world. While jumping on the bandwagon might be fun and easy (and even profitable), it is a abjection of our own responsibilities.

So what can Facebook do in the face of this criticism and push-back?

• Declare clearly and unequivocally that its service has changed from a private place for sharing to a tool for public publishing.
• Go beyond what it has already done to correct the issue and provide a giant status indicator on the top right of a user's profile page indicating if they are in one of three modes: Public, Private, or Friends and Family only.
• Alternatively, (although highly unlikely) it can change its business model from one based on ads and publishers and to one that's based on charging users for pro services in order to align its economic interest with those of its users.

What can others do to protect their privacy or capitalize on Facebook's faults?

• Right now: Recognize that Facebook has violated user trust over and over for the sake of its business model, and will do it again. Stop sharing private information with the service.
• Short term: Create a properly private sharing network where people can feel safe to be with their friends and family.
• Medium term: Recognize (or decide to ensure) that Facebook is only one service, and in order to maintain and encourage competition and respect in the marketplace, other smaller (and not-so-small) players must be supported when making technology decisions (i.e. publishers must choose cross-platform tools and technologies).
• Long term: Continue to create an open alternative to Facebook whereby the Web is the platform and users can choose the applications that make sense for them, which includes privacy.
• Forever: Understand the difference between an "interoperable, open Web" and "Death of Privacy" - they are not the same thing.

Next week The DataPortability Project will be announcing a new initiative that will improve communications between Web services and users - stay tuned.

Mark Zuckerberg told blogger Robert Scoble, "We're going to be ready to start talking about some of the new things we've built this week."

"We've been listening to all the feedback and have been trying to distill it down to the key things we need to improve. I'd like to show an improved product rather than just talk about things we might do.

We're going to be ready to start talking about some of the new things we've built this week. I want to make sure we get this stuff right this time.

I know we've made a bunch of mistakes, but my hope at the end of this is that the service ends up in a better place and that people understand that our intentions are in the right place and we respond to the feedback from the people we serve."

Screenshot from Robert Scoble

Read on to find our live blog of Mark Zuckerberg's keynote. The keynote is scheduled to start at 10 a.m. PST (GMT -7:00).

Watch it Live

You can also find live video of the keynote here.

We will refresh this page regularly during the keynote. Please reload this page to see these updates.

9:45: Audience is getting seated.

10:01: Looks like there is a little delay. Keynote is now scheduled to start at 10:10 a.m. PST.

10:07: Rumor: Facebook and Microsoft will announce a new application partnership.

Image credit: Devin Reams.

10:11: Zuckerberg on stage.

10:12: "What we have to show you today will be one of the most transformative things for the Web we've ever done."

Open Graph: Puts people at the center of the Web. "The Web can become a semantically meaningful set of connections."

10:14: Recap of Facebook stats: 400 million users on Facebook, 100 million people use Facebook Connect.

"A lot of startups are requiring that their users use Facebook Connect. We want to make it simple to create these personalized experiences."

Policy updates: All permissions are now managed in one permissions dialog.

Cache: Developers can now store information for longer than 24 hours.

10:18: Facebook credits: More than 100 developers working with Facebook already.

10:18: Back to Open Graph: "Facebook only maps out the part of the social graph that relates to people." Others, like Yelp and Pandora map out the social graph around other topics.

10:21: There is no way to bring these different graphs together yet. Right now, developers use the stream metaphor, but the services don't understand these connections.

10:22: By connecting these graphs, Facebook will be able to show you restaurants your friends like, music your friends like, etc. "By doing this, the Web will get a whole lot better."

10:23: New Graph API: Makes it simple to read connections on FB. Based on a new standard.

New plugins for sites: Make your sites instantly social and personalized.

10:24: Example: See what your friends already liked on CNN. CNN won't know who you are or who your friends are.

On CNN homepage: See all your friends' activity.

10:25: Bret Taylor (formerly of Friendfeed) on stage.

10:27: How do you get people to feel comfortable with importing their Facebook friends?

Experience from Friendfeed: The only signup button that mattered was Facebook Connect, because that was the best way for people to find their friends.

10:28: New products: Social plugins: add social features with just one line of HTML.

Universal like button: A like button for the Web that will instantly share your like back to FB. Based on an iframe.

10:31: Activity streams plugin: Transport the FB news feed to your site.

10:31: Recommendations plugin: Show users articles on your site that they are most likely to like. Highly personalized.

Login plugin: See which of your friends already signed up for a given service.

Social bar: The "kitchen sink" of Facebook's new plugins. One bar at the bottom of the site will show all of these features.

10:33: Talking about the news feed: Open Graph will make the stream more useful. Allows you to markup your pages to tell Facebook what kind of real-world object your page represents. You can say, for example, that a page is about a band and where this band is from.

New section on your profile can now show which movies, songs, etc. you liked.

10:36: Launching with 30 partners today.

You can also subscribe by topics.

These likes and updates will point to sites outside of Facebook. "My identity is not just defined by Facebook but also by all of the things I do around the Web."

10:38: Graph API: Our attempt to re-architect the Facebook platform with simplicity and the Graph API in mind.

10:40: You can download all of the connections of a given user from the Graph API.

10:41: Search: You can search through all of the public updates on Facebook.

Real-time will be built-in. Facebook will ping developers when a user posts an update.

10:42: Facebook will use oAuth 2.0. "It's so much more awesome than our current system. Available for the Graph API and all of Facebook's existing APIs.

10:44: Zuckerberg back on stage.

Facebook expects to service a total of 1 billion like buttons today.

10:45: "The Web is at an important turning point today." Startups require their users to bring their real identity. "The default is now social."

10:46: What kind of products would be possible if Facebook partners already knew everything about their users?

Microsoft Docs.com: Online version of Microsoft's office suite. Collaborate with friends on documents.

All of the power of Microsoft Office - but with a built-in social experience.

Second example: Pandora. See what bands your friends like on Pandora.

10:50: Zuckerberg finishes the keynote with an anecdote about his girlfriend.

However we have heard very few stories about Zuckerberg and the inspiration behind Facebook during the period prior to February 4th, 2004, the day he launched Facebook from his Harvard dorm room. In this post we tell that story.

The reason we hear so little about Zuckerberg's pre-launch vision for Facebook (which was originally called thefacebook.com) is likely because he has been a controversial target over the true origins of his business. In 2007, several of Zuckerberg's classmates came forward and claimed rights to the Facebook idea after reports surfaced that Yahoo had offered $900 million to purchase Facebook just two years after the founding of the company. Even though the suit against Zuckerberg was settled last year, given the nature of the proceedings, we'll likely never get an official answer from Zuckerberg himself about the true origins of his inspiration. But maybe we don't need one after all?

It turns out that Zuckerberg's academic history offers a great deal of insight into the inspiration for Facebook and why it was so wildly successful when it first launched. February 4th, 2004 may mark a major milestone in Facebook's history, but the story of Mark Zuckerberg's rise to fame in fact starts years before he stepped foot on the Harvard campus, and is much more complex and interesting than is usually portrayed.

Pre-Zuckerberg: Tracing the Roots of Facebook Culture

You may be surprised to hear that while Harvard was fertile ground for the launch of Facebook, the seed of the concept was likely planted in Zuckerberg in high school. You never hear about Zuckerberg's alma mater Phillips Exeter Academy in stories because Harvard was where the action really started (and the Harvard name, to some extent, validates Zuckerberg's smarts and makes for a more sensational story). But in fact, the time that Zuckerberg spent at the academy from 2000 to 2002 likely had more influence on the name and initial concept of Facebook than any of his classmates at Harvard.

Phillips Exeter Academy (or "Exeter") is a private boarding school for grades 9 to 12, located in Exeter, New Hampshire. The prestigious prep school is a member of the Ten Schools Admission Organization, which includes such famous boarding schools as Phillips Andover, Deerfield Academy, St. Paul's, and Choate Rosemary Hall. Like the other "Big Tens," Exeter has a tight-knit boarding community that lives on campus full time. Students refer to themselves as "Exonians" and have a strong group identity rooted in a rich culture of customs and tradition.

An Exonian for two years, Zuckerberg had plenty of time to observe and participate in the social culture and rhythms ingrained in Exeter's boarding lifestyle. Every year, the school says goodbye to a few hundred students and welcomes a few hundred more. Zuckerberg enrolled in the fall of his junior year and, like every new and returning student, received his own copy of Exeter's student directory, "The Photo Address Book," which students affectionately referred to as (you guessed it!) "The Facebook."

We interviewed several of Zuckerberg's peers this week, and they all confirmed what David W. Farrant (class of 2000) had to say:

"The front cover says "The Photo Address Book," but we all called it "The Facebook" all the time because "The Photo Address Book" was such a mouthful. Everybody called it that."

"Facebook" photo directories were (and still are) a huge part of the students' social experience and culture at prep schools such as Exeter. Every school in the Big Ten prints and distributes one for its students annually. When students arrive on campus each fall, the rhythm of their social lives is predominantly set by their dormitories, their class year (i.e. seniority), and their proximity to friends in other houses. Because students aren't allowed cell phones on campus and living accommodations are in such flux from year to year (they change houses and phone numbers annually), these "Facebooks" are a valuable resource for students.

Of course, not only do students need the directory to find and contact their peers, but the books become part of the culture of bonding between classmates and friends, as students use it to see where their peers live, who's hot and who's not, who lives with who, and who the new kids are. Sounds an awful lot like how people use Facebook online now, right? Of course, it also describes an early pre-Internet social culture, facilitated by photo directories, that students enjoyed long before Zuckerberg even made it to high school, a culture he happened upon and got to participate in by a stroke of pure luck and glorious opportunity.

But the story doesn't end there. In Zuckerberg's senior year, the student council, headed by student body president Kris Tillery, successfully lobbied the administration to have the school's IT department put the full contents of Exeter's Photo Address Book online. By the time Zuckerberg graduated, the website was put up at http://student.exeter.edu/facebook, with the URL directory (i.e. "facebook") named after the students' pet name for the physical book and effectively shortened to something useful. Tillery was unavailable for comment.

In our interviews, some of Zuckerberg's peers pointed us to this screenshot of the original website hosted on the school's .edu domain. The screenshot was posted in the public Facebook group "Exonians" in 2006 and is still there. Some of the comments about the screenshot (which date back to 2007) refer to it as "the original Facebook" and refer to the Photo Address Book as "the physical Facebook."

Of course, the school's student.exeter.edu/facebook website is no longer online, and none of our sources were able to confirm whether Zuckerberg himself was involved in, or responsible for, the student council initiative that got the directory online in the first place. All we know is that students were enthusiastic enough about an online version of the physical directory that the student council made an effort to lobby the administration, that the online directory was created during Zuckerberg's senior year, and that he was likely aware of its existence.

A More Complete Picture of the Facebook Success Story

Now that Facebook has graduated from its academic roots and been released to the world for free, its continued growth has many experts saying it will likely be the dominant social platform for the foreseeable future. At 200 million users (and counting), Facebook makes it hard to doubt that it will have considerable influence in the way we all connect and communicate in the future, both locally and across borders. While we may never know the true origins of Mark Zuckerberg's inspiration for Facebook, looking at the social culture of the prep school he attended and his experiences as a boarding student there offer us insight into where the explosion of global Facebook culture may have begun, why it was so successful when it launched at Harvard, and how luck and opportunity may have led one of the world's youngest visionaries to start coding in his college dorm room.

Steffan Antonas is a technology anthropologist, writer, and blogger who currently lives in San Diego, CA. He began studying human behavior in virtual communities as a graduate student in Georgetown University's Communication Culture and Technology (CCT) Program in 2003. He has worked in Southern California as an IT Professional for the past three years. You can contact Steffan at steffanantonas@gmail.com and on Twitter @steffanantonas.

Image credits: Phillips Exeter Academy by etnobofin. Book cover and Mark Zuckerberg photos by Alex Demas and Mark Flores.