The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World Paperback – February 1, 2011

Facebook is both impressive and scary, especially after reading this very well-researched book. I now better understand the origins and potential of Facebook, but am still ambivalent and uneasy about some things, especially the privacy issues. Regardless, it is an amazing story of a college dorm-room site gone viral all over planet earth to a worth of $50-billion in just a few years, via a Harvard sophomore and his roommates! Founder Mark Zuckerberg, the sophomore, is undoubtedly a brilliant visionary, but what kind of virtual world of personal information sharing are we evolving into?To start to understand Facebook, I read the Time Magazine article recently that named the 26-year-old Zuckerberg as `Person of the Year'. I then saw a highly acclaimed movie, The Social Network, based on `The Accidental Billionaires' which I also listened to from a library audio-book CD-set. Finally, a few weeks ago, I opened an account on Facebook and started using it.The first thing is that Facebook is indeed big and comprehensive, and recently surpassed Google as the number-one website on earth. Zuckerberg said his goal is `total ubiquity' for Facebook, and it seems like it is getting there, as it accommodates 600 million users now and expects to surpass 1 billion users later this year. It is in 190 countries with 170 languages, increasing by a million users per day, uploading 100 million photos daily, and taking in 30 terabytes of information daily (30,000 gigabytes/day). The average user has 130 `friends' and is on Facebook daily! Also, its tentacles are everywhere as it connects back-and-forth to possibly millions of websites! You can instantly broadcast changes to your profile, new photos, and `What's on Your Mind' Twitter-like thoughts to groups of your friends anytime the mood strikes. Email, by the way, has taken a hit since Facebook has made it easier to broadcast messages.The most striking thing in my opinion is the skill, patience, and foresight of the very young CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. His goal from the beginning was to provide a `platform' or `utility' , described in the book as `obsessively minimal,' that would connect people. He wants people to have a relationship with other people instead of with Facebook. With that in mind, he built in the ability of users to add `objects' or apps and photos to their web pages. He led the expansion sequentially from Harvard to the other colleges, then highs schools, then the general U.S. public, and finally to foreign countries. This allowed him to incrementally add servers and not repeat the mistakes of Friendster social network that expanded too fast then imploded due to lack of servers. Zuckerberg emphasized expansion over advertising because he didn't want others to overly influence the direction of the company. Besides, Facebook would become more attractive to advertisers through the sheer size increase of usership. For that reason, he was `uber, uber, uber long-term' in his outlook. As he `monetized' via VC's (venture capitalists), he always made sure that his people dominated the company board to keep control close to home. A notable investor early-on was Peter Thiel of Clarion Capital who invested $500,000 in Facebook in what the book calls arguably the best investment ever, worth hundreds-of-millions of dollars now. A couple of years into the company life, Zuckerberg took `CEO lessons' to help him communicate better with VC's and his own employees. The latter were concerned because Zuckerberg was often meeting with companies seemingly hot to buy Facebook from him, and Zuckerberg was not talking about it!Privacy is absolutely a bothersome aspect, at least to me. First, it makes Facebook seem a little nosy by its digesting of every stroke added to your profile, your messages, and your photos, for highly-targeted advertising purposes. It looks at keywords of things you like, where you live, what you have bought, your friends, etc, etc., and pumps them through its algorithms. It hopes that the requirement of your real ID sign-on will result in real `transparency', or lots of accurate information about you. The company's advertising goal is to create demand based on what it specifically knows about the users; this is in contrast to Google, its leading competitor, which tries to fulfill demand based on the lesser amount of personal information it has. Facebook caused uproar a few years ago with Beacon, when it would automatically broadcast any change to your profile, any new photo, or any new message to every one of your friends. After a few weeks, this `opt-in' feature had to be reverted to `opt-out' to quell the unhappiness.The culture of so-called `ambient intimacy' also bothers me. How real is it? It is likened to a small-town where everybody knows your business. Also, what about face-to-face or phone-to-phone interpersonal skills, especially for the younger generation? And doesn't it start to equalize all news, with the big stuff and little stuff all homogenized into sameness of value. Then again, what about the potential virtual stalking, virtual narcissism, or virtual exhibitionism?What about the anti-trust issues of an organization that has more information on its citizens than the government does? This is really big issue for repressive, foreign countries.As another aside, what about the `aging' of the data? Does Facebook just keep adding data forever or does it drop it off a piece at a time based on age? It already has 30,000 servers! Can it add servers forever? I'm obviously less concerned about this issue than the privacy issue.Facebook is indeed very impressive and scary! I think I'll continue to keep my Facebook profile to a bare minimum. Maybe later I'll let my guard down and be more `transparent', but - - - I doubt it!

"The Facebook Effect" by David Kirkpatrick divulges an immense amount of information of all aspects of Facebook, including its birth, growth, struggles, and visions. The author aims to present an unbiased story of how Mark Zuckerberg's company has been completely changing the world since its very beginning.He begins his story by explaining the current use of Facebook and its vast usage among countries for political and cultural events and issues, using an extremely radical story of FARC in Columbia. He goes on to explain (in entirely too detailed of description) exactly how Facebook emerged, struggled, grew, and triumphed. Most of the history I had recalled from "The Social Network," so it seemed like it took too large of a portion of the book. He quotes many numbers and employees that readers are really not so interested in, and soon forgot after the page was turned.He goes on to talk about the future of Facebook and how the company is evolving as a whole for far too small a portion of the book. In my opinion, for this book being about Facebook's effect, it spends far too little time actually talking about how it is currently changing our world and also how it is expected to continue to change our future. Instead, he dwells for slightly too long on details and amusing anecdotes of Zuckerberg's peculiar behavior.For most of the book, the author is arguing for his readers to realize the greatness within Mark Zuckerberg and all he has done for us with Facebook. It deemphasizes some of the big squabbles and lawsuits he has encountered from his early behavior. It appeared as if he was being slightly biased toward Mark's view of everything versus the views of his employees, friends, foes. It almost seemed as if the author did not fully try to get an unbiased opinion as he aims for. For example, his comment about the Winklevoss twins' lawsuit nonchalantly says "I guess we will never know." The author should know and take time to get their side of the story, or else I will just have to assume "The Social Network" was the most accurate.However, Kirkpatrick does an excellent job of portraying the "real life Mark." He was a CEO before he was a legal drinker and therefore bound to make mistakes. Older, more experienced companies were slightly perplexed by Mark's actions and that affected the way they handled this young CEO. One confused senior executive quotes "Either this guy is being very strategic... or he's just got his sandbox and he's playing in it." The way the author depicted Mark and his "tee-shirt, shorts, and Adidas flip-flops" really gave you the picture of the adolescent, yet focused atmosphere he lives in. He was also awkward, introverted and stubborn and that was reiterated over and over within these pages.The ideas proposed for the future of Facebook, however, I found extremely intriguing. While some did seem quite far-fetched like that "Facebook "credits" (virtual currency)...[could] begin operating as a truly global economy", and some caused the wheels of potential to turn inside my brain. He brought up many different points that made me worry slightly about my privacy on Facebook in the future, but also about the amazing possibilities that may be possible due to social networking. One amazing (and frightening) example Kirkpatrick proposes is of "our GPS having the ability to recognize a name and connect to your Facebook profile and find your house." Crazy right? It will probably one day be possible, but am I then going to put my address on my profile for the world to find my house? Probably not.The author makes a great case for why Facebook was so successful: Zuckerberg dedicated his time to his users happiness over monetary value. He states over and over again how it was about the users' experience and wanted to avoid ads, and that he didn't care about monetization. I think his dedication to this philosophy was one of the biggest reasons it lead to huge success. Even to this day, the advertising is limited to the bottom-right side, and embedded in the News Feed by companies we follow. However, it is ironic how Kirkpatrick comments on how Zuckerberg wanted to remain in control, and that he would only possibly start to lose that control if Facebook went public, and only a year or so later the company had gone public.Though I have some critical views on "The Facebook Effect," overall it was an extremely interesting book that opened my eyes to the realities of Facebook and all that had happened even before I joined the site in 2007. It gave too many numbers, costs, and names to remember, but the overall point and message was clear and caused me to change my overall view of Facebook. It has thoroughly earned my respect even more so than it had. Facebook has fought hard to become the company it is today and it is definitely due to the way Zuckerberg handled his business, even if his colleagues did not all agree. I will most definitely be looking out for future evolutions of Facebook, and how users, like myself, react to them. There are likely to be more significant political and social effects as Facebook spreads even larger globally. We should all be looking out for Facebook and its proposed eventual world domination.

The book describes real case studies that could be applied to anyone's website to make another facebook.

The Real story behind the most important social network nowadays

Leggo frequentemente libri sia in italiano che in inglese e ho scelto questo titolo dopo una attenta lettura di diverse recensioni. Dopo alcuni anni ho riletto con piacere il testo e confermo la validità dei contenuti e soprattuto della forma linguistica scelta dall'autore. È un'opera che può essere interessante anche se acquistata dopo anni dalla prima pubblicazione. Se la lettura è affrontata con spirito critico ci si accorge come i recenti eventi che hanno caratterizzato la storia di Facebook siano una logica conseguenza di quanto allora immaginato e in parte anticipato dall'autore. Buona lettura.

This was an interesting read. Well written and well paced. It balances detailed description of events with insightful comments, critiques and asides. It puts you in the moment with just the right amount of drama and detachment. I wish he'd write a sequel.

explica de manera independiente y veraz el proceso de creación de Facebook. también es un libro muy interesante para entender valoración de empresas del sector digital