What is Facebook? Mark Zuckerberg has been asked that question over and over since 2006, and the answer keeps changing. Along the way, Facebook has grown from a site where people in colleges would accept each other as friends to one of the biggest and most influential companies in the entire world, one with billions of users and the power to affect political landscapes around the globe. But somehow, the company’s founder can’t seem to settle on how to talk about it.

Earlier this week saw the biggest shift yet in a letter from Zuckerberg, which laid out a new, privacy-focused direction for the company. Public sharing and the lucrative news feed would move to the back burner in favor of private, encrypted, and ephemeral messaging. It’s a completely new way to think about Facebook, and as always, the marketing may be changing more than the product.

Zuckerberg’s latest reimagining makes the most sense in context, set alongside all the other pitches for exactly what Facebook is. So we’ve put together a quick survey of exactly how much that vision has changed over the years, and tried to answer an even trickier question along the way: how did we get here?

2006-2008: Your Friendly Neighborhood Social Network

The early days of Facebook are so far behind us that it’s hard to remember that this now monolithic corporate entity was once a youthful startup (albeit, one whose roots lay in a controversial “hot or not” style site.) In the early days, Zuckerberg was far more idealistic, his posts filled with talk of bringing the world together, connecting with friends, and giving people ways to share things with each other.

It’s a very different era: Zuckerberg was more open, willing to admit mistakes, and roll back changes when they didn’t work out. But, with the meteoric rise of the company, it’s not a surprise that this didn’t last.

Facebook is about real connections to actual friends, so the stories coming in are of interest to the people receiving them, since they are significant to the person creating them….. Nothing you do is being broadcast; rather, it is being shared with people who care about what you do—your friends.

In 2006, Facebook launched what might be the single most important aspect of the site: the News Feed. It was not well received at first, due to concerns over privacy and the fact that suddenly, all the information that users were pumping into Facebook was suddenly all aggregated into one place. In this post, Zuckerberg tries to assuage concerns about the new feature.

Facebook is about helping people share information and share themselves. And for the last four years, what we’ve been doing is just building products that in different ways help people share parts of their personality, help them communicate, share parts of their identity with each other and just open up in a way that they’re comfortable with. There are a lot of important pieces to that that make that possible: giving people complete control over their privacy and the information they put out there. That’s really critical to help people share that information.

A key encapsulation of what Zuckerberg believes early Facebook to be: a place that brings people together and connects groups of friends, so that they can then share information and ideas about the things that they’re passionate about. Zuckerberg lays out here what will be Facebook’s guiding star for nearly the next decade: make it easier for people to share by continuing to build out new products because the more that they share, the more connected and informed everyone can be together.

2009-2011: The Sharing Machine

At this point in time, Facebook’s rhetoric has firmly solidified around one central cause: getting users to share their lives on the site, in any and every way. As far as Zuckerberg is concerned, sharing is connection, and the more information people put up on Facebook for their friends and families, the better everyone’s lives will be.

Zuckerberg talks a lot about his goal of making the world “more open” during this time period, part of the idea being that society has entered a new, post-privacy era where information should be put out in the open for everyone, not hoarded away.

The idea is that these connections—whether friendships, affiliations or interests—exist already in the real world, and all we’re trying to do is map them out. We believe that connecting people to their friends is just the beginning, and we’re working hard on making Facebook a place for people to connect with and keep track of all the interests in their lives. We think that as it becomes easier to connect and share across the social graph, people—as well as companies, governments and other organizations—will share more information about what is happening with them. As this happens, the world will become more open and people will have a better understanding of everything that is going on around them.

When I started Facebook from my dorm room in 2004, the idea that my roommates and I talked about all the time was a world that was more open. We believed that people being able to share the information they wanted and having access to the information they wanted is just a better world: People can connect better with the people around them, understand more of what’s going on with the people around them, and understand more in general. Also, openness fundamentally affects a lot of the core institutions in society – the media, the economy, how people relate to the government and just their leadership. We thought that stuff was really interesting to pursue.

Further reading:

Zuckerberg continues to emphasize on openness and sharing in these articles. Most notable is Zuckerberg’s thoughts on new privacy settings, where he lays Facebook’s mental order of operations pretty clearly: Facebook wants people to share. If people get privacy settings, they will share more. And more sharing will lead to a better and more connected world.

2012-2016: The Imperial Period

Before now, it had never been clear if Facebook could actually build a sustainable business, or if it was just surfing a wave of VC hype. But after the company went public, it became clear this was a real business, and it showed no signs of slowing down.

As the business scaled up, so did the rhetoric. Now, Facebook wasn’t just a company that could change the world; it was changing the world already. The company rolled out ambitious zero-rating projects, delivering connectivity from satellites or solar-powered drones, with no concern for cost. To hear Zuckerberg tell it, apps and websites were just instruments in a broader mission to connect humanity, a mission every bit as ambitious as Google’s goal to organize all the information in the world.

Our mission is getting people to connect. There’s a very deep appreciation inside this company that in order to make that all work, we need to build a really strong business and that means we need to serve that class of partners well on the marketing side, build good products for them and appreciate that we need to grow at a certain rate to attract the kind of people we need to keep attracting.

So for the next five or 10 years the question isn’t going to be, does Facebook get to 2 billion or 3 billion? I mean, that’s obviously one question. But the bigger question is, what services can get built now that every company can assume they can get access to knowing who everyone’s friends are. I think that’s going to be really transformative. We’ve already seen some of that in games and media, music, TV, video, that type of stuff. But I think there’s about to be a big push in commerce.

Our mission at Facebook is to connect the world. We often think about this as connecting you with your friends and family -- those who matter to you most. But this also means helping people connect with businesses, governments and other organizations in their lives as well. By helping businesses connect with new and existing customers, and by helping developers share their apps with the world, the Facebook community is creating a lot of jobs and economic opportunity around the world.

Further reading:

These selections mark a shift in Facebook’s priorities — now, the company (and Zuckerberg) have shareholders and a bottom line that needs to come first in the company’s mental calculus for rolling out new features and products.

Additionally, Zuckerberg’s comments in his New York Times interview about how he feels that “anonymity is not the first thing that we’ll go do” with Facebook, and the divide between private and public communication is particularly telling in light of the newly announced direction for the company.

The end of this era also sees Zuckerberg’s futurist period, where he would focus intensely on AR and VR as the future of the internet. It’s a natural progression here: Facebook has been important on text, photo, and video sharing. Why not also be a critical player in whatever comes next?

2017-2019: We’re Very Sorry

The end of 2016 — and specifically the election of Donald Trump — marks a dividing line for Facebook’s priorities. The cracks in the foundation of Facebook had become glaringly clear.

Adding to the mix was Facebook’s 2018 of hell, marred by the spectre of the Cambridge Analytica scandal that dragged the company’s name through the mud and Zuckerberg in front of governmental bodies to testify. The modern era of Facebook has seemingly been one constant apology tour — first for the state of the platform on a whole, and then for the abuse of power that bad actors were able to use it for.

With that in mind, it’s almost no wonder that Zuckerberg’s new focus and direction for the company is a more closed off and withdrawn one.

Facebook stands for bringing us closer together and building a global community. When we began, this idea was not controversial. Every year, the world got more connected and this was seen as a positive trend. Yet now, across the world there are people left behind by globalization, and movements for withdrawing from global connection. There are questions about whether we can make a global community that works for everyone, and whether the path ahead is to connect more or reverse course. The most important thing we at Facebook can do is develop the social infrastructure to give people the power to build a global community that works for all of us.

Facebook has a new mission now. No longer is the goal to make “the world more open and connected” — i.e. the nebulous goal of sharing. Instead, the company’s goal is to give people the power to build communities, and get closer together. After years of unchecked expansion, Facebook has essentially gotten too big. Feeds are a mess of viral, often toxic, or simply false content, and the negative effect it’s had on the company and its users is clear.

After so many years of building the biggest thing possible, the new era of Facebook is now to build these smaller, more intimate communities again.

Over the last 15 years, Facebook and Instagram have helped people connect with friends, communities, and interests in the digital equivalent of a town square. But people increasingly also want to connect privately in the digital equivalent of the living room. As I think about the future of the internet, I believe a privacy-focused communications platform will become even more important than today’s open platforms. Privacy gives people the freedom to be themselves and connect more naturally, which is why we build social networks. Public social networks will continue to be very important in people’s lives… But now, with all the ways people also want to interact privately, there’s also an opportunity to build a simpler platform that’s focused on privacy first.

Further reading: