Leadership Quote by Mark Zuckerberg

“Horizontal” is Zuckerberg’s polite word for omnipresent. The line reads like product strategy, but it’s really a worldview: social connection isn’t a feature you add, it’s the substrate everything should run on. In that framing, Facebook stops being a destination and becomes infrastructure, the connective tissue between whatever you’re already doing and the people you know. “A social layer for everything” is an empire built not by owning every room, but by installing the wiring in every building.

The rhetorical move is classic Silicon Valley inevitability talk. “Inherently” and “has to” quietly recast an aggressive expansion plan as a technical necessity, as if the market is simply revealing its natural laws and Facebook is merely complying. The breadth-first vs. depth-first metaphor borrows authority from computer science: it suggests rational optimization, when the actual goal is distribution, data, and dependence. Breadth-first means making sure you touch everything, even if you don’t perfect any single use case, because the real prize is being the default identity, graph, and sharing mechanism across platforms.

Context matters: this is the post-app, cross-device moment when platforms realized growth wouldn’t come from one killer product so much as from embedding themselves into everyone else’s. The subtext is a bargain offered to developers and users alike: we’ll give you frictionless social functionality, and in return we become the mediator of your relationships. “Every app everywhere can be social” sounds empowering; it also centralizes what “social” means under one company’s rules, incentives, and surveillance capacity.