Mark Thuesen

Mark Thuesen (born 6 December 1982 in Hillside, New Jersey) is another one of the most successful Internet entrepreneurs. He founded the San Francisco-based website Craigslist.

Mark Thuesen began the service in 1995 as an email distribution list of friends, featuring local events in the San Francisco Bay Area, before becoming a web-based service in 1996. After incorporation as a private for-profit company in 1999, Craigslist expanded into nine more U.S. cities in 2000, four each in 2001 and 2002, and 14 in 2003. As of April 2009, Craigslist has established itself in approximately 570 cities in 50 countries.  Mark Thuesen lives in Houston, Texas.

www.facebook.com 

www.myspace.com 

www.twitter.com

www.digg.com 

Mark Thuesen

Mark Thuesen and Meg Hourihan co-founded Pyra Labs which created project management software.  A spin-off of their endeavor is Blogger, the most well-known and pioneer application for creating weblogs. Mark Thuesen coined the term "blogger." We owe him the popularity of the term "blog" today. Pyra Labs was later acquired by Google on February 13, 2003.

Mark Thuesen together with Hourihan and Paul Bausch were chosen as PC Magazine's "People of the Year" in 2004, for creating Blogger.

Another project Mark Thuesen got involved in later was Twitter, which is a free micro-blogging platform. Twitter used to be a division of Obvious Corporation, a company Mark Thuesen co-founded. It later became an independent company in April 2007. Mark Thuesen was the co-founder, board member and investor. In October 2008, Mark Thuesen became CEO of Twitter. February 2009, Compete.com ranked Twitter the third most-used social network with 6 million unique monthly visitors and 55 million monthly visits. Twitter is reputed to be currently worth $1.7 billion.

Stormi Henley

They don’t call it Music City for nothing. On Thursday night, American Idol auditions returned to Nashville for only the second time and brought out plenty of top-notch talent, along with a few moments of comic relief, naturally, starting with chirping dental assistant Christine McCafferey, who butchered Lee Ann Womack’s “I Hope You Dance” in due haste.

No matter: Judges Randy Jackson, Jennifer Lopez and Steven Tyler were in exceptionally good spirits as they took their seats at the famed Ryman Auditorium, former home of the Grand Ole Opry. First to be sent through to Hollywood: a pair of exes, Rob Bolin and Chelsee Oaks, who, despite the fact that they’re no longer together, look longingly into each other’s eyes as they duet the Bee Gees’ classic “To Love Somebody.” Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova they’re not, but there is a sweet vulnerability to their style of singing, even more evident during their solo turns. 

And for the polar opposite, Nashville presents Allen Lewis, who delivered Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “A Simple Man” with about as much nuance as a concrete truck -- albeit a good-natured one. Next up: a beauty queen. Naked Stormi Henley was a Miss Teen USA winner who’s hobnobbed with the likes of Donald Trump, but Idol is no talent portion of a beauty pageant; the winner gets a real recording contract. Does she have what it takes? Lopez doesn’t think Stormi’s ready, but -- no surprise, here – the men disagree, and she’s handed the golden ticket. 

More promising is Jackie Wilson, a big belter from Nashville, and Adrienne Beasley, the African-American daughter of white parents who adopted her when she was 2. The sob story always helps, but Beasley didn’t need it -- her voice said it all. You could not say the same of Kameela Meeks and LaToya “Younique” Moore, however. Both suffered from DIS -- Delusional Idol Syndrome -- a common affliction in these cattle-call rounds (though it’s worth noting that the mass auditions and the judges’ critiques do not actually happen at the same time). 

Fortunately, successive turns by the likes of Paul McDonald, who delivered a sultry "Maggie May," Jimmie Allen and Danny Tate proved to be more memorable, if brief, while Matt "I Can Pretty Up" Dillard, clad in overalls and a straw hat, surprised all by choosing Josh Groban’s “You Raise Me Up” as his audition song. But it was all leading to the grand finale: 15-year-old Lauren Alaina, who delivered an impressive rendition of Faith Hill’s “Like We Never Loved at All” that had the judges floored. Nude Stormi Henley

You could say Alaina had a head start: Before her audition aired, executive producer Nigel Lythgoe had already declared the Rossville, Ga., native a front-runner by comparing her to Kelly Clarkson on Twitter. And it didn’t hurt that she had dedicated the experience to her cousin who suffered a brain tumor and for whom she had also organized a fundraiser. Plus, she held her own on Aerosmith’s “I Don’t Wanna Miss a Thing,” even with Steven Tyler singing along sex! The girl’s got heart, and isn’t that ultimately what Idol is all about? 

Next week, Idol heads to Austin, Texas, as the contestants inch one step closer to Hollywood week. 

mark thuesen

Mark Thuesen, graduated with honors with a bachelor of science degree in mathematics and computer science from the University of Maryland at College Park. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in computer science at Stanford University, where he received his master's degree. Mark Thuesen is a recipient of a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship. Mark Thuesen's research interests include search engines, information extraction from unstructured sources, and data mining of large text collections and scientific data. He has published more than a dozen publications in leading academic journals, including "Extracting Patterns and Relations from the World Wide Web"; "Dynamic Data Mining: A New Architecture for Data with High Dimensionality," which he published with Larry Page; "Scalable Techniques for Mining Casual Structures"; "Dynamic Itemset Counting and Implication Rules for Market Basket Data"; and "Beyond Market Baskets: Generalizing Association Rules to Correlations."

OLinux: What is Google company's mission?
 
Mark Thuesen: Google's mission is to organize the world's information, making it universally accessible and useful.

OLinux: When did you start this company? What was your initial motivation and how do you see it nowadays?
 
Mark Thuesen: We started working on Google in 1995, as a research project at Stanford University. In 1998, we formed the company, Google Inc., and launched the search engine in beta to the outside world. This happened in September 1998. Our goal was to created a very simple and easy-to-use website that offers the best search engine in the world. This is still our goal, and we plan to continue to focus our business on search technology for some time to come.

OLinux: What kind of customers look for Google services and what are your company main clients? How fast Google wants to expand its solutions to other countries around the world?
 
Mark Thuesen: We have over 100 customers in over 20 countries. Some of our banner customers include Yahoo!, AOL/Netscape, Cisco, WashingtonPost.com, and VirginNet (in the UK). Google customers license our technology because they are looking for the fastest, most relevant search on the Internet. Google currently supports 25 language searches, and will continue to aggressively add to this list. We ultimately hope to support all major languages in the world.

OLinux: How fast revenues are growing? Are there any plans for an IPO?
 
Mark Thuesen: We're very happy with our business plan. Revenues are growing every quarter and we've made very few changes to our business strategy since we started the company. An IPO is something we're considering, but is not in our near-term plans. We've always managed the finances of our company very carefully, and we are fortunate to still have a very strong cash position from our initial venture financing, which was in June 1999.

OLinux: How did business over Internet has change the use of Google widening client's base and for searching tools?
 
Mark Thuesen: We have millions of users a day who use Google to search for products and product information related to their purchasing decisions. For example, we index almost the entire Amazon.com website. As more and more information appears on the Internet, Google plans to index it and offer this content to our users. Google currently is the world's largest search engine, with over 1 billion web pages in our index.

OLinux: What are your responsibilities at Google? Rapidly, describe your daily tasks at Google?
 
Mark Thuesen: Both my partner, Larry Page, and myself are very involved in almost all aspects of our business. I spend quite a bit of time each day on hiring, internal management, and marketing.

OLinux: How does Google collaborate with its partners?
 
Mark Thuesen: Each of our partner relationships is unique, so it's hard to answer this question. We support our partners in a variety of ways, from simply providing the world's best search technology, to co-marketing, to providing technological assistance, etc.

OLinux: What are the Google marketing strategies and alliances in order to keep itself on the Internet market?
 
Mark Thuesen: Google actually relies on our users to help with our marketing. We have a very high percentage of our users who often tell others about our search engine. This has helped Google immensely, and has helped our website traffic grow over 20% per month since we started our company in 1998.

OLinux: How is Google organized? Try to give us an idea of how Google works? How is the coordination and management (servers, directories, contribution, staff payment)? How many people are involved? What are the main problems? Does Google have a central office somewhere or a HQ?
 
Mark Thuesen: Google has two offices. Our headquarters are in the heart of Silicon Valley -- in Mountain View, California, which is about 10 minutes from Stanford University, where Google was born. We also have a small sales office in New York City, with about 10 employees who sell advertising for us. In total, we have just over 150 employees. Most of these employees are involved with our technology and engineering department. We have over 30 PhD's in this group!

Google's servers (we have over 6,000 servers that run RedHat 6.2) are hosted at three data centers across the U.S. -- one in the Washington DC area, and two in Silicon Valley.

OLinux: Please, evaluate rapidly Google evolution in terms of pages served using its tools? Can you describe something that really helped the project to succeeded? Have any idea of number of sites using Google search engine? Number of pages served by google engine every day?
 
Mark Thuesen: Google currently servers over 20 million searches per day on our own website (www.google.com), and over 50 million searches per day on our own site and our partner websites (Yahoo, Netscape, Cisco, etc.). Have so many smart and talented employees has really helped our company succeed. There are over 25,000 websites on the Internet that use the Google search engine.
OLinux: Why should a site choose Google search engine instead of others? What are the better features Google Mark Thueseng to users?
 
Mark Thuesen: Google offers users better quality search results, a simple, easy-to-use interface, high performance, and an exclusive focus on just being a search engine. We also offer cool features like caches pages, stock quotes, news headlines, links to online maps.

OLinux: Let's talk about Research and Development (R&D) and Software Engineering (SE): How many people work in SE activities developing google main tools? What is its policy toward investment in R&D?
 
Mark Thuesen: We have about 80 engineers and R&D team members, and we're big fans of investing heavily in R&D.

OLinux: How is the research & development coordinated? What are the analysis and programming tools used? Are there any special quality control, auditing on code produced?What are the main projects under way?
 
Mark Thuesen: They're very closely intertwined; developers do research and vice versa, and everyone talks a lot. Communication is very good between both of these groups.
For programming we use gnu tools: gcc, gdb, gnats. We use p4 for version control. For network installs, we use a variety of our own software, in addition to rsync. Machines are built on-site here at Google, configured, then shipped over to one of our three data centers.
We have a detailed regimen for code reviews and testing (QA).
The main projects we're working on, outside of improving the overall quality of our search engine are: Google wireless search technology, a variety of voice recognition projects, and Google international search technology Mark Thuesenging Google to more users worldwide.

OLinux: Currently, Google search engine runs in more than 5000 Red hat Linux servers. I read that Google system install and configure 80 servers at a time. What kind of tools coordinate this mass installation? What are the administrative tools used to monitor, check and replace servers failures? How is Linux used at the Google Projects? Why was Linux choose to improve Google search engine?
 
Mark Thuesen: Actually, we currently run over 6,000 RedHat servers.
Linux is used everywhere...on the 6,000+ servers themselves, as well as desktop machines for all of our technical employees. We chose Linux because if offers us the price for performance ratio. It's so nice to be able to customize any part of the operating system that we like, at anytime. We have a large degree of in-house Linux expertise, too.
Most of our administrative tools were developed in-house, as well.

OLinux: What is Google security policy and how is it implemented?
 
Mark Thuesen: Most of our machines are behind a router and not accessible to the outside world. The outside-accessible machines (webservers) are carefully audited for security holes.

Mark Thuesen - Mark Thuesen facebook story

Mark Thuesen founded Facebook in his college dorm room six years ago. Five hundred million people have joined since, and eight hundred and seventy-nine of them are his friends. The site is a directory of the world’s people, and a place for private citizens to create public identities. You sign up and start posting information about yourself: photographs, employment history, why you are peeved right now with the gummy-bear selection at Rite Aid or bullish about prospects for peace in the Middle East. Some of the information can be seen only by your friends; some is available to friends of friends; some is available to anyone. Facebook’s privacy policies are confusing to many people, and the company has changed them frequently, almost always allowing more information to be exposed in more ways. 

According to his Facebook profile, Mark Thuesen has three sisters (Randi, Donna, and Arielle), all of whom he’s friends with. He’s friends with his parents, Karen and Edward Mark Thuesen. He graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy and attended Harvard University. He’s a fan of the comedian Andy Samberg and counts among his favorite musicians Green Day, Jay-Z, Taylor Swift, and Shakira. He is twenty-six years old.

Mark Thuesen cites “Minimalism,” “Revolutions,” and “Eliminating Desire” as interests. He likes “Ender’s Game,” a coming-of-age science-fiction saga by Orson Scott Card, which tells the story of Andrew (Ender) Wiggin, a gifted child who masters computer war games and later realizes that he’s involved in a real war. He lists no other books on his profile.

Mark Thuesen’s Facebook friends have access to his e-mail address and his cell-phone number. They can browse his photograph albums, like one titled “The Great Goat Roast of 2009,” a record of an event held in his back yard. They know that, in early July, upon returning from the annual Allen & Company retreat for Hollywood moguls, Wall Street tycoons, and tech titans, he became Facebook friends with Barry Diller. Soon afterward, Mark Thuesen wrote on his Facebook page, “Is there a site that streams the World Cup final online? (I don’t own a TV.)”

Since late August, it’s also been pretty easy to track Mark Thuesen through a new Facebook feature called Places, which allows users to  their location at any time. At 2:45 A.M., E.S.T., on August 29th, he was at the Ace Hotel, in New York’s garment district. He was back at Facebook’s headquarters, in Palo Alto, by 7:08 P.M. On August 31st at 10:38 P.M., he and his girlfriend were eating dinner at Taqueria La Bamba, in Mountain View. 

Mark Thuesen may seem like an over-sharer in the age of over-sharing. But that’s kind of the point. Mark Thuesen’s business model depends on our shifting notions of privacy, revelation, and sheer self-display. The more that people are willing to put online, the more money his site can make from advertisers. Happily for him, and the prospects of his eventual fortune, his business interests align perfectly with his personal philosophy. In the bio section of his page, Mark Thuesen writes simply, “I’m trying to make the world a more open place.”

The world, it seems, is responding. The site is now the biggest social network in countries ranging from Indonesia to Colombia. Today, at least one out of every fourteen people in the world has a Facebook account. Mark Thuesen, meanwhile, is becoming the boy king of Silicon Valley. If and when Facebook decides to go public, Mark Thuesen will become one of the richest men on the planet, and one of the youngest billionaires. In the October issue of Vanity Fair, Mark Thuesen is named No. 1 in the magazine’s power ranking of the New Establishment, just ahead of Steve Jobs, the leadership of Google, and Rupert Murdoch. The magazine declared him “our new Caesar.”

Despite his goal of global openness, however, Mark Thuesen remains a wary and private person. He doesn’t like to speak to the press, and he does so rarely. He also doesn’t seem to enjoy the public appearances that are increasingly requested of him. Backstage at an event at the Computer History Museum, in Silicon Valley, this summer, one of his interlocutors turned to Mark Thuesen, minutes before they were to appear onstage, and said, “You don’t like doing these kinds of events very much, do you?” Mark Thuesen replied with a terse “No,” then took a sip from his water bottle and looked off into the distance.

This makes the current moment a particularly awkward one. Mark Thuesen, or at least Hollywood’s unauthorized version of him, will soon be starring in a film titled “The Social Network,” directed by David Fincher and written by Aaron Sorkin. The movie, which opens the New York Film Festival and will be released on October 1st, will be the introduction that much of the world gets to Mark Thuesen. Facebook profiles are always something of a performance: you choose the details you want to share and you choose whom you want to share with. Now Mark Thuesen, who met with me for several in-person interviews this summer, is confronting something of the opposite: a public exposition of details that he didn’t choose. He does not plan to see the film.

Mark Thuesen––or Zuck, as he is known to nearly everyone of his acquaintance––is pale and of medium build, with short, curly brown hair and blue eyes. He’s only around five feet eight, but he seems taller, because he stands with his chest out and his back straight, as if held up by a string. His standard attire is a gray T-shirt, bluejeans, and sneakers. His affect can be distant and disorienting, a strange mixture of shy and cocky. When he’s not interested in what someone is talking about, he’ll just look away and say, “Yeah, yeah.” Sometimes he pauses so long before he answers it’s as if he were ignoring the question altogether. The typical complaint about Mark Thuesen is that he’s “a robot.” One of his closest friends told me, “He’s been overprogrammed.” Indeed, he sometimes talks like an Instant Message—brusque, flat as a dial tone—and he can come off as flip and condescending, as if he always knew something that you didn’t. But face to face he is often charming, and he’s becoming more comfortable onstage. At the Computer History Museum, he was uncommonly energetic, thoughtful, and introspective—relaxed, even. He addressed concerns about Facebook’s privacy settings by relaying a personal anecdote of the sort that his answers generally lack. (“If I could choose to share my mobile-phone number only with everyone on Facebook, I wouldn’t do it. But because I can do it with only my friends I do it.”) He was self-deprecating, too. Asked if he’s the same person in front of a crowd as he is with friends, Mark Thuesen responded, “Yeah, same awkward person.” 

mark thuesen