ash That Like Button: Facebook's Chris Cox Is Messing with One of the

Most Valuable Features on the Internet

Inside Facebook's Decision to Blow Up the Like Button

The most drastic change to Facebook in years was born a year ago during an

off-site at the Four Seasons Silicon Valley, a 10-minute drive from headquarters.

Chris Cox, the social network's chief product officer, led the discussion, asking

each of the six executives around the conference room to list the top three

projects they were most eager to tackle in 2015. When it was Cox's turn, he

dropped a bomb: They needed to do something about the "like" button.

The like button is the engine of Facebook and its most recognized symbol. A

giant version of it adorns the entrance to the company's campus in Menlo Park,

Calif. Facebook's 1.6 billion users click on it more than 6 billion times a day

more frequently than people conduct searches on Googlewhich affects billions

of advertising dollars each quarter. Brands, publishers, and individuals

constantly, and strategically, share the things they think will get the most likes.

It's the driver of social activity. A married couple posts perfectly posed selfies,

proving they're in love; a news organization offers up what's fun and entertaining,

hoping the likes will spread its content. All those likes tell Facebook what's

popular and should be shown most often on the News Feed. But the button is

also a blunt, clumsy tool. Someone announces her divorce on the site, and

friends grit their teeth and "like" it. There's a devastating earthquake in Nepal,

and invariably a few overeager clickers give it the ol' thumbs-up.

Changing the button is like Coca-Cola messing with its secret recipe. Cox had

tried to battle the like button a few times before, but no idea was good enough to

qualify for public testing. "This was a feature that was right in the heart of the way

you use Facebook, so it needed to be executed really well in order to not detract

and clutter up the experience," he says. "All of the other attempts had failed." The

obvious alternative, a "dislike" button, had been rejected on the grounds that it

would sow too much negativity.

Cox told the Four Seasons gathering that the time was finally right for a change,

now that Facebook had successfully transitioned a majority of its business to

smartphones. His top deputy, Adam Mosseri, took a deep breath. "Yes, I'm with

you," he said solemnly.

Later that week, Cox brought up the project with his boss and longtime friend.

Mark Zuckerberg's response showed just how much leeway Cox has to take

risks with Facebook's most important service. "He said something like, 'Yes, do

it.' He was fully supportive," Cox says. "Good luck," he remembers Zuckerberg

telling him. "That's a hard one."

The solution would eventually be named Reactions. It will arrive soon. And it will

expand the range of Facebook-compatible human emotions from one to six.

Cox isn't a founder, doesn't serve on the boards of other companies, and hasn't

written any best-selling books. He's not a billionaire, just a centi-millionaire. He

joined Facebook in 2005, too late to be depicted in The Social Network, David

Fincher's movie about the company's early days. While Zuckerberg manages an

expanding portfolio of side businesses and projectsInstagram, WhatsApp, the

Oculus Rift virtual-reality headset, a planned fleet of 737-size, carbon-fiber,

Internet-beaming dronesCox runs "the big blue app." That's Facebook's term

for the social network that we all compulsively check a few dozen times a day.

He's also the keeper of the company's cultural flame, the guy who gives a

rousing welcome speech to new recruits every Monday morning at 9 a.m. It's a

safe bet that all 12,000 Facebook employees know his name.

He's probably the closest thing Internet users have to an editor-in-chief of their

digital life. Cox's team manages the News Feed, that endless scroll of Facebook

updates. Invisible formulas govern what stories users see as they scroll,

weighing baby pictures against political outrage. "Chris is the voice for the user,"

says Bret Taylor, Facebook's former chief technology officer. "He's the guy in the

room with Zuckerberg explaining how people might react to a change."

Cox's ascension has been gradual and, for the past few years, clearly visible to

Facebook watchers. Many first met him during the 2012 initial public offering

roadshow, when the company distributed a video of executives talking about its

mission. Along with Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Zuckerberg and Chief

Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, the film included Cox, who gazed earnestly

into the camera at close range while employing some seriously overheated

rhetoric: "We are now changing within a generation the fabric of how humanity

communicates with itself."

He's frequently seen at Zuckerberg's side. Here are Zuckerberg and Cox running

a three-legged race for a company game day, with Cox wearing a banana suit;

embracing after Facebook started trading on the Nasdaq (Zuckerberg hugged

Sandberg first and Cox second); riding a float together during San Francisco's

gay pride parade.

Zuckerberg says Cox is one of his closest friends and "one of the people who

makes Facebook a really special place." He mentions Cox's IQ and EQ

emotional intelligenceand how "it's really rare to find people who are very good

at both." He's also cool in a way that Zuckerberg, in particular, isn't. Cox, who

moonlights as a keyboard player in a reggae band, dresses fashionably, usually

leaving a button open on the top of his neatly tailored work shirts. He's also

irksomely handsome and displays the casual cheer of someone who knows it.

Look a little deeper, though, and Cox's record isn't quite as tidy. He's been in

charge of some of Facebook's biggest duds: a nicely designed news-reading app

for smartphones called Paper, which no one used, and a major revamp of the

News Feed that was scrapped because it didn't work well on small screens. If

you look at the things poised to deliver big growth opportunities at Facebook

Instagram and WhatsApp being the biggestthey're mostly acquisitions, not

reinventions of the big blue app.

In Silicon Valley fashion, Cox prefers to recast past mistakes as healthy

experiments and valuable learning experiences. "I think any good company is

trying things, is forcing itself to try things, and you need to be able to put things

out there and try and learn," he says. "People only get in trouble if they're not

honest about failure."

Cox first heard of job opportunities at Facebook while pursuing a master's degree

in computer-human interaction at Stanford. A roommate already worked there

and badgered Cox to interview, primarily because there was a $5,000 recruiting

bonus. Cox was skeptical. Wasn't Facebook just a glorified dating site?

The headquarters back then were on University Avenue, Palo Alto's main drag.

When he got there, co-founder Dustin Moskovitz described Facebook as a crowd

sourced directory of everyone. He drew circles on a whiteboard, then lines

connecting them to represent "friending" on the site. By looking at each other's

profiles, friends could bypass the first awkward five minutes of every

conversationthose rote questions like "where are you from?"and move on to

deeper connections. Cox was riveted.

He dropped out of Stanford (naturally) and joined the company when it had about

30 employees. His first job was developing the News Feed, the feature that made

Facebook a global addiction. At the time, though, he and Zuckerberg badly

misjudged user reaction: People hated it. They felt as if their private interactions

were suddenly being exposed. "It wasn't our best product rollout," Cox concedes.

He learned that people tend to be suspicious of well-capitalized Silicon Valley

startups preaching lofty values such as "openness" and "sharing."

In late 2007, after Facebook hired its 100th employee, Zuckerberg decided he

needed to put someone he trusted in charge of personnel. This became Cox's

strangest career move: Zuckerberg asked him to become the company's first

human resources chief. Zuckerberg now says he thought it was "an opportunity

to take a different approach than other companies and to bring a technical spirit

to defining all these different aspects" of the company's culture.

Cox scheduled one-on-one meetings with every employee and became a sort of

in-house therapist. "He had to endure the slings and arrows of people's

complaints from all over the company," Yishan Wong, an early employee, wrote

on the community website Quora. "And he did so without becoming a cynical,

uncaring shell of a man."

Cox says the HR job gave him a way of looking at things through other people's

eyes. It also led him to ponder Facebook's mission in the world, which is when he

started reading the works of communications theorist Marshall McLuhan. Each

wave of media technology, McLuhan wrote, is initially greeted with anger and

mistrust.

That was comforting to Cox, because it explained some of the hostility that

Facebook was encountering. "We were in this period back then where people

really didn't understand Facebook and didn't believe it could become anything,"

he says. "McLuhan helped tell that story in a broader context."

Cox returned to engineering in 2008, but he's still the company's cultural

ambassador. He weaves McLuhan's lesson into his Monday morning speeches

to the new recruits. The talks usually start with a question: "What is Facebook?"

He lets the room hang in silence until someone is brave enough to say, "It's a

social network." Wrong. Facebook is a medium, Cox says, referring to McLuhan's

famous dictum, "The medium is the message." In other words, how Facebook

presents content and the way in which it allows users to read, watch, comment

on, and like that content influences how all 1.6 billion members see the world

around them.

Cox spends most of his days in the new Frank Gehry-designed Building 20 on

the Menlo Park campus. The structure is a huge, 430,000-square-foot rectangle.

A grassy park is on the roof, with a hot dog stand on one side and a smoothie

shop on the other. Inside the cavernous space, full of rustic art and chalkboard

walls, Facebook employees tie silver balloons to their movable standing desks to

mark their "Faceversary," celebrating how long they've worked there. Cox had his

10th Faceversary last fall.

On a Wednesday in November, he enters a conference room for the second of

five meetings and confesses that he's breaking the rules: Executives are

discouraged from scheduling meetings on Wednesdays, which is supposed to be

a day engineers and designers can work without interruption. Nevertheless, Cox

and his team need to talk about tailoring the Facebook smartphone app for India.

On a screen at the front of the room, there's a bar chart of Indian users on

Android phones, broken down by the estimated speed of the cellular network

they use most often2G, 3G, and so forth.

"Can you just hang on that stat for a sec?" Cox asks, peering at the chart with his

elbows on his knees. "4G is a whopping 0.2 percent."

"It's just one guy hanging out there," says a product manager, Chris Struhar.

The team can't afford to wait for India to speed up its mobile networks

frustrated users will simply stop using Facebook. (Or worse. The company

recently faced street protests in the country for its plan to offer Free Basics, a

stripped-down, free Internet service that includes Facebook and not much else.)

Struhar proposes to use less data in the app, in part by recycling older stories

that don't have to be freshly downloaded. Cox agrees. "My intuition, which we

could prove wrong, is people just want more stuff," he says. He imagines himself

as the user, looking for any hit of digital nicotine that will stave off boredom at,

say, a bus stop. "That's definitely what I want. I just want more stories." Cox then

reviews a couple of other ideas, like a spinning icon on photos that will let users

know the app is loading, potentially decreasing what the company calls "rage

quits."

Near the end of the meeting, he wonders aloud how to get other Facebook

employees to start thinking about the particular challenge of building features that

will work on yesterday's mobile networks, still in use around the world. Someone

proposes switching everyone at the company to a 2G connection once a week.

Cox loves the idea. "This is our tool for empathy," he says. "Happy Wednesday,

you're in Delhi!" Two weeks later, the company implements 2G Tuesdays.

"Empathy" is a word Cox throws around a lot, and which his colleagues often use

about him. Facebook blundered in the past when it didn't take the time to talk to

and understand its users. In the old days, product teams tested features in New

Zealand, which has the advantage of having an isolated, English-speaking

population but is hardly an accurate representation of the world. Under Cox,

Facebook's product team is tackling more sensitive subjects, such as designing a

way for accounts to become memorials after someone's death, or helping users

navigate the aftermath of a breakup by selectively blocking pictures of the ex. His

goal, which he admits Facebook hasn't reached, is to make the News Feed so

personalized that the top 10 stories a user sees are the same they'd pick if they

saw every possibility and ranked it themselves. A side effect of making things

easier for users: happy advertisers. Under Cox, Facebook found a way to make

advertising work on its smartphone app, and came up with video ads that play

automatically.

Since Cox was elevated to chief product officer in 2014, his team has consulted

with an outside panel of about 1,000 Facebook users who rate every story in

their feed and offer feedback. There are also a handful of product test stations

scattered around Facebook's offices that look a little like interrogation rooms

tiny spaces with brightly lit desks. A camera is attached to a test subject's

smartphone to film their actions while Facebook employees watch through a one-

way mirror. Sessions can go on for hours. Sometimes they're live-streamed to a

larger audience of employees.

Cox applied this testing regimen to the revamping of the like button. He wasn't

part of the team that originally developed the button from 2007 to 2009, but

colleagues have war stories about how hard they had to work to get Zuckerberg

on board. According to longtime executive Andrew Bosworth, there were so

many questions about the buttonshould likes be public or private? would they

decrease the number of comments on stories?many thought the feature was

doomed. Even its champions had no idea of the impact it would have on the

company's fortunes. It was simply meant to make interactions easierjust click

like on someone's post about their new job, instead of being the 15th person to

say congratulations.

Eventually the button became a crucial part of how Facebook's technology

decides what to show users.

If you like beauty tips a friend shares from some Kardashian or other, the

software calculates that you should also see ads and articles from People

magazine and Sephora. "The value it has generated for Facebook is priceless,"

says Brian Blau, an analyst at Gartner.

It's a way of creating a connection, even if it's superficial. If users click like on a

post about the Red Cross's disaster relief efforts, they feel as if they've done

something to help. (In January, Sandberg went so far as to suggest that likes

could help defeat Islamic State: By promoting the posts of survivors, users could

somehow drown out the hate.) Liking someone's photo is an awkwardness-free

way to make contact with someone you haven't seen in years. Alternatives to like

will let Facebook users be a little more thoughtful, or at least seem to be, without

having to try very hard.

Facebook researchers started the project by compiling the most frequent

responses people had to posts: "haha," "LOL," and "omg so funny" all went in the

laughter category, for instance. Emojis with eyes that transformed into hearts,

GIF animations with hearts beating out of chests, and "luv u" went in the love

category. Then they boiled those categories into six common responses, which

Facebook calls Reactions: angry, sad, wow, haha, yay, and love.

The team consulted with outside sociologists about the range of human emotion,

just to be safe. Cox knows from experience that he doesn't have all the answers:

When the company redesigned the News Feed in 2013, it looked great on the

iMacs in Facebook's headquarters but made the product harder to use

everywhere else. "There are a million potholes to trip over," Cox said.

Facebook Reactions won't get rid of likeit will be an extension. Within the

company, there was some debate on how to add the options without making

every post look crowded with things to click. The simpler Facebook is to use, the

more people will use it. Zuckerberg had a solution: Just display the usual

thumbs-up button under each post, but if someone on her smartphone presses

down on it a little longer, the other options will reveal themselves. Cox's team

went with that and added animation to clarify their meaning, making the yellow

emojis bounce and change expression. The angry one turns red, looking

downward in rage, for example. Once people click their responses, the posts in

News Feed show a tally of how many wows, hahas, and loves each generated.

This update may seem trivial. All it's doing is increasing the number of clickable

responses. People already comment on posts with emojis or, in some cases,

actual words. But the feature will probably make Facebook even more addictive.

And it will certainly give Cox's team a lot more information to throw into the News

Feed algorithm, thereby making the content more relevant to usersand, of

course, to advertisers.

In October the team got close enough to a final design that Zuckerberg felt

comfortable mentioning the project in a public interview, giving no details except

that there wouldn't be a dislike button. Cox worried it was too soon to talk about

the emotions Facebook picked. (Yay was ultimately rejected because "it was not

universally understood," says a Facebook spokesperson.) Cox says he spent the

next morning parsing through responses to the announcement, reading what

users thought the social network needed and preparing to start over if necessary.

A few weeks later, the team began testing Reactions in Spain and Ireland, then

Chile, the Philippines, Portugal, and Colombia. In early January, Cox flew to

Tokyo to sell Reactions to Japan. "You can love something, you can be sad

about something, you can laugh out loud at something," he said to a crowd of

reporters at Facebook's offices in the Roppongi district. "We know on phones

people don't like to use keyboards, and we also know that the like button does

not always let you say what you want."

He explained Facebook's goal: a universal vocabulary that lets people express

emotion as they scroll through their feed. In a sense, Reactions is an adaptation

of digital culture in Asia, where messaging apps such as Line and WeChat have

already established a complex language of emojis and even more elaborate

"stickers."

Cox says Reactions' biggest test so far was during the November terrorist

attacks in Paris. Users in the test countries had options other than like, and they

used them. "It just felt different to use Facebook that day," he says.

Facebook won't give a specific date for when Reactions will be introduced in the

U.S. and around the world, just that it'll be "in the next few weeks." Cox says the

data he has looks good and that users will take to Reactions, though he takes

pains not to sound in any way triumphant. "We roll things out very carefully," he

says. "And that comes from a lot of lessons learned."

Source:

Frier, S., "Smash That Like Button,"

Bloomberg Businessweek,

February 1-7, 2016. Copyright 2017. All rights reserved. Used with permission

of Bloomberg L.P.

QUESTION

What traits do you think Chris Cox is high on, and to what extent does he engage in

consideration and initiating structure?