On June 30, 2009 Facebook symbolically crossed the finish line of top ten million users in Italy. He did not yet have an office with us, he would open it a few months later, on October 24, in Milan. To the point that many celebrated Facebook’s ten years in Italy starting from that date, when there were already millions of Italians on Mark Zuckerberg’s platform. According to the annals, 2009 should be remembered as the first year in which Facebook closed its balance sheet in surplus but to review it today that figure should be read in perspective: revenues for 2009, 770 million dollars; revenues in 2020, almost 86 billion dollars. 2009 is the year when the idea born in the Harvard dormitory took off.
At the time Facebook was still only Facebook: there was no Messenger, there were no Stories, there were no live shows, the marketplace, the dating service; actually there was something, the “like” button had just been introduced but few realized that it paved the way for voluntary user profiling like never before. At the time, above all, Facebook was a myth and Mark Zuckerberg was likeable. Not only was he forgiven for showing up to events in Bermuda shorts and havaianas, he even looked cool to some. I remember presenting a book at the time, The Facebook Effect, by David Kirkpatrick, who painted an elegiac picture of it. (But ten years later the author will say: “Mark is not bad. On the contrary: he is a good guy. And he is sincere when he says that he, with his site, wanted to make the world a better place, where relationships between people were denser, more frequent, easier. A place where, if our friends live on the other side of the world, it doesn’t affect how much we know about their lives. Zuckerberg, with Facebook, wanted to do this, and at least until at a certain point he succeeded. Only then the game got out of hand, like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice “).
In reality, it wasn’t just Facebook that was the problem: there were many at the time who believed that the web and social media would have created a better world anyway.
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