Facebook“创始人公开信”空洞虚伪

    扎克伯格只是在向投资者们解释理想主义的重要性。可结果，他却像是一个聪明的书呆子在用居高临下的语气向约会对象唠叨，他通常只会和喜欢电脑的女孩约会。接着，他又用四年级小学生就能理解的大白话，继续解释电脑的重要性。

    扎克伯格写道：“我们希望增强人们之间的联系。”但只要上过网的人都知道，虽然Facebook大幅度提高了朋友间联系的频率，但代价却是降低了交流的质量。Facebook上的更新、聊天和照片充其量也就是为人们交流现实生活中有意义的活动提供了一个在线场所而已。

    他继续写道：“我们并非为了赚钱而提供服务，而是为了提供服务去赚钱。”鉴于Facebook最大的成功在于挖掘用户数据，帮助广告商有的放矢地投放广告，并引导用户像对待朋友一样对待企业品牌，因此，这样的话显然不够坦诚。扎克伯格的信共有83个句子，其中有41次提到“人们”，7次提到“商业”，但却仅有一次提到广告——而这才是网站架构的核心所在。

    而且，被扎克伯格上升为Facebook使命的一系列理念——开放的世界、负责任的政府、促进人们之间的联系、黑客文化等，其实并非Facebook的专利，而是整个互联网共同的理念。自从互联网诞生以来，这些理念便是互联网的一部分。Facebook能够接纳这些理念值得称赞；然而，刨除这些一般性的理念来看Facebook，其实它就是一家极为擅长通过在线广告盈利的公司而已。

    所以，扎克伯格的行文或许比佩奇、布林和梅森更加出众，但同时也最为空洞，毫无意义。与谷歌和Groupon一样，Facebook最初坚守理想主义，但面对金融市场的残酷现实，最终这种信念也将土崩瓦解。唯一的区别在于，Facebook在上市之前便早已在现实面前举起了白旗。

    译者：阿龙/汪皓

    Zuckerberg is simply trying to explain to investors why idealism is important. But he ends up taking the patronizing tone of a brilliant geek telling his date he usually doesn't date girls who don't like computers, so he's going to explain -- in language a fourth-grader could understand -- why they're so important.

    "We hope to strengthen how people relate to each other," Zuckerberg wrote. But anyone who has spent time on the site knows that, while Facebook is very good at improving the quantity of friend connections, this comes at the cost of the quality of the interactions. Updates, chats and photos on Facebook are at best placeholders for the meaningful interactions that happen away from the site.

    He continues: "We don't build services to make money; we make money to build better services." This also seems disingenuous considering that Facebook's biggest triumph is to help advertisers by mining user data to target ads and to train them to treat corporate brands like friends. Zuckerberg's letter mentions the word "people" 41 times in 83 sentences. "Business" is mentioned seven times. Advertising, the real mission that the site is structured around, only once.

    The ideals Zuckerberg so nobly expounds as Facebook's mission -- an open world, accountable governments, connecting people, the Hacker Way -- belong not just to Facebook, but to the web itself. They have been a part of the Internet from its earliest days. It's nice that Facebook embraces them too, but take out these generic ideals and you are left with a company that is devilishly good at making money from online ads.

    So while Zuckerberg's founder's letter may be better written than those of Page, Brin and Mason, it's also the most hollow of meaning. Like Google and Groupon, Facebook started with an idealism that, confronted with the realities of financial markets, collapses in time. The only difference is, with Facebook, this capitulation happened long before it went public.