Inside Facebook's little Red Book for employees

Facebbok's Little Red Book takes its name from the nickname of a tract of quotations by Chinese communist dictator Mao Zedong. 

Facebook, like many Silicon Valley giants, has a mythology that's used to indoctrinate workers. To help spread this ancestral origin story, Facebook enlisted its in-house print shop to publish a book of cultish aphorisms to guide inductees towards the light.

Several photographs of the book are published on the portfolio website of Ben Berry. Berry is a designer who used to run Facebook's Analog Research Laboratory, a hip studio that hopes to encourage some non-digital thinking at the world's most powerful social media company. According to Berry's writeup:

As the company of Facebook grew, we faced a lot of challenges. One of them was explaining our company's mission, history, and culture to new employees. Over the years, a lot of formative company discussions and debates had happened in Facebook Groups, over email, or in person. Those who had been present at the time had context, but for new employees that information was difficult to find, even if you knew what you were looking for. We wanted to try to package a lot of those stories and ideas in one place to give to all employees.




The Little Red Book takes its name from the nickname of a tract of quotations by Chinese communist dictator Mao Zedong. That pamphlet used to be carried around and quoted by party members. Now it's a cutesy title for a tech company's Welcome Aboard manual.



The teachings of Facebook CEO Mark Zukerberg range from hollow to insightful. And though the book's concept has the tinge of delusional self-importance, a lot of it rings true. You're right Facebook, I don't like you and your horrible privacy policies, but I use you because all my friends are on Facebook and I like them.





Like other design-forward manuals we've seen before, Facebook's Little Red Book is beautiful. It's hand-bound and artisanal, so it's the kind of thing you keep on the shelf right next to your desk at all times. It's meant to be a cherished memento that welcomes new employees to the group, and reminds them that goshdarnit, we're making the world more open and connected, how cool is that?

Why Facebook forced everyone to download Messenger app

NEW DELHI: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has finally explained why the users were forced to download the messaging app — Facebook Messenger. In a public question and answer session held on Thursday in Facebook headquarters, Zuckerberg answered the questions posted and voted by Facebook users across the globe. But the most popular question he addressed was "Why you forced us to install Facebook messenger?"

Below is Zuckerberg's answer to it, and we bring it to you verbatim in his own words:

"I'm grateful for hard questions. It keeps us honest. We need to be able to explain clearly why what we're thinking is good. Asking everyone in our community to install a new app is a big ask. I appreciate that that was work and required friction. We wanted to do this because we believe that this is a better experience. Messaging is becoming increasingly important. On mobile, each app can only focus on doing one thing well, we think."

"The primary purpose of the Facebook app is News Feed. Messaging was this behavior people were doing more and more. 10 billion messages are sent per day, but in order to get to it you had to wait for the app to load and go to a separate tab. We saw that the top messaging apps people were using were their own app. These apps that are fast and just focused on messaging. You're probably messaging people 15 times per day. Having to go into an app and take a bunch of steps to get to messaging is a lot of friction."

"Messaging is one of the few things people do more than social networking. In some countries 85% of people are on Facebook, but 95% of people use SMS or messaging. Asking folks to install another app is a short term painful thing, but if we wanted to focus on serving this [use case] well, we had to build a dedicated and focused experience."



"We build for the whole community. Why wouldn't we let people choose to install the app on their own at their own pace? The reason is that what we're trying to do is build a service that's good for everyone. Because Messenger is faster and more focused, if you're using it, you respond to messages faster, we've found. If your friends are slower to respond, we might not have been able to meet up."

"This is some of the hardest stuff we do, is making these choices. We realize that we have a lot to earn in terms of trust and proving that this standalone messenger experience will be really good. We have some of our most talented people working on this."

Facebook first began to force users to switch to Facebook Messenger in July this year, a move that was highly criticized by everybody. Users complained that switching between Facebook app and Messenger app was inconvenient and they should rather be given a choice than to be forced.

Facebook COO Shery Sandberg to star in comic book Female Force

SAN FRANCISCO: The life of billionaire Facebook executive and 'Lean In' author Sheryl Sandberg has been distilled into a 32-page comic book set for release this week.

'Female Force: Sheryl Sandberg' will be available in print and digital versions, according to publisher Bluewater Production.

The publishing company's 'Female Force' line of biography-based comics has also spotlighted Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama, Melinda Gates, Martha Stewart and Madonna.

"Sheryl Sandberg is a hero to many women," Bluewater said in a post about the comic at its website. "So becoming a comic-book superhero was the next logical step."

Facebook co-founder and chief Mark Zuckerberg was the hero of a Bluewater comic book released about four years ago.

The Sandberg comic sets out to show "behind-the-scenes machinations" that resulted in Sandberg becoming a force for empowering business women, according to Bluewater publisher Darren Davis.

Art in the comic book is the work of Angel Bernuye, according toBluewater.

"I found it quite a challenge, as it was necessary to distill her life to date into one comic," Sandberg comic author Michael Frizell said in a release.

"Sheryl Sandberg's accomplishments and sage advice could fill several issues."

The 45-year-old former Google executive was catapulted onto the billionaire's list by her stake in California-based Facebook.