Remember when Facebook’s newsfeed was full of apps like Zynga’s FarmVille? This era, in the early 2010s, was Mark Zuckerberg’s first big attempt to make Facebook much bigger than just a social network and more like a Windows-like developer platform.

It was a formative period for the internet, when mobile phones and the app economy were just beginning to take off. For Facebook, it was the “Move Fast and Break Things” era – an early corporate motto – when it grew to hundreds of millions of users and made decisions that still haunt it to this day. day. What did Zuckerberg do right during this time that put Facebook in a dominant position, and what did he get wrong along the way?

This is a preview of what you can expect in the second episode of the new season of Land of the Giants, Vox Media Podcast Network’s award-winning narrative podcast series about the most influential tech companies of our time. This season, Recode and The Verge have have teamed up over seven episodes to tell the story of Facebook’s journey to becoming Meta, featuring interviews with current and former executives.

Our first episode, on creating the News Feed, told the story of Zuckerberg’s original vision for social media. Episode two examines the consequences of chasing that vision at full speed. We explain how the era that brought us FarmVille and Connect with Facebook led the company into one of its biggest scandals: Cambridge Analytica.

The second episode of In the Land of Giants: Facebook/Meta Disruption is available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.