Numair Faraz: I was once a Facebook fool/Archive

I was once a Facebook fool

By Numair Faraz • September 23rd, 2011

It was interesting observing the flurry of Facebook integration announcements in the past 24 hours, especially regarding music services. Back in the day, I had helped convince then-Apple employee Dave Morin to join Facebook to build what became the Facebook Platform, and had hacked together one of the first music applications, Audio, on the then-day-old platform.

I never really talked about what happened to Audio; however, in seeing that so many businesses and people seem hell-bent on integrating ever-further with Facebook, I figured I'd provide a cautionary tale.

At the time of my creation of Audio, it turned out that Facebook had already cut some sort of deal to help another music application -- thus, in some strange way completely unknown to me, I was operating outside of the "plan." While Dave Morin worked quietly and bravely to defend me against the moves of the "competitor" and Facebook executives to shut down Audio, he eventually found himself as a casualty in a greater power play quietly orchestrated by senior Facebook executives, in which he was demoted and replaced by a former AOL employee. This employee had been previously known to me from my friends at Winamp as "the guy who fucked Winamp," (after Winamp had been sold to AOL) and seemed like a pretty lame dude. Turns out that he had cut a backroom deal with Sean Parker to enable easy exporting of social graphs from AOL/AIM into Facebook -- and in return, as soon as the Platform appeared to be successful, Dave Morin was ousted from his job and the AOL guy was hired with what was said to be $90 million in Facebook stock. (Note that the AOL/AIM import deal happened at a time when Facebook was quietly struggling to get adoption of its product among MySpace-addicted high schoolers.)

As soon as the AOL guy took over from Morin, I immediately started to hear more and more about how the record labels were about to shut down Audio due to copyright demands. In fact, the guy would call and email my business partner and I on a regular basis to tell us that the app was about to be shut down -- and every time he did, I would have to frantically stave him off, telling him about how we were cutting deals with the labels to bring them on board and get licenses. What I didn't realize at the time, however, is that it was this very assurance of label support that was actually screwing me over with Facebook, as the AOL guy was basically just trying to shut down Audio to help his friends at iLike. Once he got word that we were in the final stages of a major round of funding from Universal Music and two of the other big four labels, he immediately shut down the app and thus killed the whole business. The funny thing about the final phone call from the AOL guy was that he claimed that Universal Music's general counsel had sent him a notice saying they would sue Facebook if they didn't shut down Audio -- but when he called me, I was sitting in Jimmy Iovine's office; Jimmy personally called the GC of Universal who told him the entire story was complete bullshit.

(Many of Audio's old users wondered why I never updated the app or fixed many of their complaints -- now you know what I was dealing with!)

I remember having a call with Sean Parker, who I then considered to be a friend, explaining my problems with Audio before its collapse. "It will never work," he said to me. "You'll see what I mean." I would have never thought that Parker would have been pulling such crazy shit on me at the time, but hey -- you live and you learn.

If you are entrusting your life data to Facebook, or if you are depending on Facebook and its platform for your livelihood, beware. In the real Facebook world, there is no trust, and there is no friendship -- there is only money and power. Think really hard -- really, think -- before trusting Facebook or its employees with anything. Don't be a Facebook fool.