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A Older people in particular are often taken aback by the speed with which the Internet's "next big thing" can cease being that. It even happens to Rupert Murdoch, a septuagenarian me dia mogul. Two years ago he bought MySpace, a social-networking site that has becomed the world's largest. The other day, however, Mr Murdoch was heard lamenting that MySpace appears already to be last year's news, because everybody is now going to Facebook, the second-largest social network on the web, with 31 million registered users at the last count Facebook was started in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg, a student at Harvard and not even 20 a the time, along with two of his friends. The site requires users to provide their real names and e-mail addresses for registration, and it then links them up with current and former friend., and colleagues with amazing ease. Each Facebook ,profile" becomes both a repository of each user's information and photos, and a social warren where friends gossip, exchange messages and "poke" one another.
B Facebook is generating so much excitement this summer that bloggers are likening Mi Zuckerberg to Steve Jobs, the charismatic boss of Apple, and calling his company "the nex Google" on the assumption that a stock market listing must be imminent. It may be. Mr Zuck. erberg has rejected big offers from new- and old-media giants such as Yahoo! and Viacom One of his three sisters, who also works for Facebook, has posted a silly video online that makes fun of Yahoo!'s takeover bid and sings about "going for IPO". And Facebook has advertised for a "stock administration manager" with expertise in share regulations. Yet Mr Zuckerberg insists that he is "a little bit surprised about how focused everybody is on the 'exit'." The truth is that he is sick of talking about it. The venture capitalists backing Facebook may want to cash out, but Mr Zuckerberg is only 23 and doesn't need the money. He also happens to believe—rather as Google's young founders do—that he can, and should, change the world. A flotation would be a big distraction.
C Metaphorically, Mr Zuckerberg views himself as similar to the pioneering Renaissance map-makers who amassed and combined snippets of information and then charted new lands and seas so that other people could use their maps to find, say, new trade routes. In Mr Zucker-berg's case, the map charts human relationships. Whereas many of the other social networks on the web primarily help people to make new contacts online—whether for hanky panky, marriage or business—Mr Zuckerberg is exclusively interested in "mapping out" the "real and pre-existing connections" among people, he says.
D The fancy mathematical name he has for this map is a "social graph", a model of nodes and links in which nodes are people and connections are friendships. Once this social graph, or map, is in place, it becomes a potent mechanism for spreading information. For instance, he says, "we automatically know who should have a new photo album," because as soon as one person uploads it to the site, all her friends see it, and the friends of friends might notice too. Other social networks can also do this, of course, but Facebook is distinctive in several ways. First, it is currently considered classier than, say, MySpace. One academic researcher argues that Facebook is for "good kids", whereas MySpace is for blue-collar kids, "art fags", "goths" and "gangstas". Facebook's roots are indeed preppie. Mr Zuckerberg took Latin, Greek and fencing at Phillips Exeter Academy and started Facebook at Harvard, after all. From there, it spread to other elite universities, and it only opened up to the general population last September.
E Mr Zuckerberg, however, thinks that the bigger difference is that Facebook is now becoming a "platform". By this he means that it is evolving into a technology on top of which others can build new software tools and businesses. In May, Mr Zuckerberg op