Please DO NOT Sign into Facebook For The Entire Day of JUNE 6, 2010
THATS TOMORROW/MAYBE TODAY FOR SOME
To much media fanfare, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg removed his signature hoodie at D8 conference Wednesday, revealing a strange Illuminati-like diagram printed on the blue silk lining. Interviewer Kara Swisher took one look at the bizarre garment and remarked, "What are you in, some kind of cult?"
The notion of some sort of secret seal struck a chord with the D8 audience -- and raises larger questions: The image is impossible to find on any open Facebook marketing materials, or online at all. When contacted by SF Weekly, the official channels at Facebook held that they had no details on the insignia, despite the fact that they could have just written it off on an over-enthusiastic design team.
Using blown-up photos from the conference, we created a mock-up of Zuckerberg's "Mission Statement Seal" hoodie. The design itself represents the three key parts of Facebook's strategy for 2010 (hence the 2010 in the middle):
♦ The bi-directional arrows indicate that each part generates inbound and outbound sharing;
♦ The labels on the arrows -- GRAPH, here represented by the "friend requests" icon, STREAM, represented by the "messages" icon and PLATFORM, represented by the "notifications" icon -- represent the three prongs of Facebook's strategy for 2010, as revealed at F8 conference;
♦ The blue ring is the interface or Facebook's wall around user data --
the permeability of which remains a major point of controversy;
♦ The motto on the upper half of the blue ring,"Making the world more open and connected" is, according to Zuckerberg, Facebook's obviously unofficial "Mission Statement."
If the logo was an open piece of marketing fodder, it would just be discounted as a silly Illuminati-looking logo, on par with the Facebook quail. It's also easy to write this off as Harvard attendee Zuckerberg being a little too keen on secret society machinations. And we are sure conspiracy theorists will try to decipher this, remarking on how the intersects of the arrows produce a slightly off-kilter Star of David in the center.
However, a source familiar with Facebook tells SF Weekly that there's never been evidence of secret Facebook rituals aside from the usual team-building exercises. In all fairness, the graphic was probably made quite innocently; people at Facebook are so unaware of how they're perceived that it just didn't occur to them that an insignia like this could come off as childish and creepy -- especially when accidentally revealed during a cold sweat.
This is the actual emblem, these hoodies are given to all employees
Note: If anyone at home would like to make their own, you might want to check the legality of reproducing this before sending it to CafePress.Update: As commenter Sean Walker correctly points out, while Mark Zuckerberg did insert the word "more" when relaying the Facebook motto to the audience at D8, the actual copy on the Mission Statement reads "Making the World Open and Connected." We have updated the artwork to reflect this.
