Reviews of book

Forbes.com:
(http://www.forbes.com/2010/05/25/social-media-facebook-internet-
opinions-book-reviews-george-anders.html)
Book Review
Social Media Frenzy
George Anders, 05.25.10, 4:00 PM ET
In Aldous Huxley's futuristic classic of the 1930s, Brave New World, people constantly glide into a dreamy,
cheery state caused by a drug called soma, which provides "all the advantages of Christianity and alcohol;
none of their defects."
It turns out we don't need soma after all. We've got Facebook.
Started in a Harvard dorm just six years ago, Facebook has grown into what's probably the most appealing,
addictive website on the planet. Nearly 500 million people now are counted among the ranks of Facebook's
active users, including at least 100 more that are joining as you read this sentence. Many visitors linger on
the site for hours each day, peeking at one another's photos, swapping playful comments and turning odd
games like Farmville into global crazes.
What's going on? A few years ago Facebook might have seemed like a campus fad that hardly merited a
serious book. But in 2006 veteran journalist David Kirkpatrick sensed something bigger was afoot. Now
he's in print with The Facebook Effect, a carefully reported book that should change the way you think
about a very unusual enterprise.
Because Facebook is based in Silicon Valley and has venture capital investors, it usually is treated as a
business. But it doesn't act like one: it keeps growing its user base insanely fast while its moneymaking
abilities remain defiantly mediocre. Most of the business press fumes about this discordance without
knowing what else to say.
Give Kirkpatrick credit for seeing Facebook through fresh eyes. He portrays it as "a new pathway for
sharing": in essence a social cause--maybe even a novel way of life--that's all about maximizing its own
influence, not its revenue. Kirkpatrick's language can seem sycophantic when he talks about "bringing the
world together" or helping ideas "rush through groups." No matter; Kirkpatrick's basic premise is powerful.
Facebook should be grouped in with Christianity, alcohol and soma. Its mission owes much more to Rick
Warren than to Warren Buffett.
By seeing Facebook as a cause, Kirkpatrick is able to march through its six-year history much more crisply
than previous narrators. He opens the book by showing how excited Facebook's founders where when a
Colombian activist, Oscar Morales, used the site in 2008 to stir up peaceful protests by millions of people
worldwide. He astutely focuses on Facebook's creation of easy photo-sharing as a trigger for the company's
greatest growth surge. And he explains why Facebook has been so eager to expand into emerging markets
such as Turkey, Chile or the Philippines, even if it's hard to earn much selling ads there.
Kirkpatrick also does the best job yet of making sense of Facebook's founder, 26-year-old Mark
Zuckerberg. It's ironic--yet superbly fitting--that Zuckerberg's ability to create a vast online social network
contrasts with his frequent stumbles at real-world friendship. In the course of the book, we see Zuckerberg
parting ways with most of his founding team, churning through a series of No. 2 executives and getting
tangled in lawsuits with other Harvard students over who played what role in starting the enterprise.
An earlier book about Facebook, The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich, portrayed the company's
formation chiefly as a story of hedonism and greed. Kirkpatrick isn't buying that, and you shouldn't either. I
got to peek inside Facebook for a couple months in 2008 doing some part-time consulting, and it was clear
that in spite of the free food and RipStiks, the engineering culture was about as demanding and driven as
I've ever seen. In fact, Kirkpatrick portrays Zuckerberg as a prophetlike figure peering into the future,
making grand pronouncements and being the only person in the room who is completely unsurprised when
they all come true.

Meanwhile, the middle chapters of the book are packed with vivid stories of Zuckerberg's coming of age. A
high-school fencer, Zuckerberg conducted one business meeting while repeatedly poking a foil at a
colleague. Later the Facebook founder accepted a dare to pitch venture capitalists in his pajamas. In another
scene Zuckerberg retreated to the bathroom during stressful business negotiations to burst into tears, unsure
what to do.
Is Zuckerberg a genius? A flake? A bit of both? The book explains how his many facets fit together.
Facebook these days is in the midst of a public firestorm over its attitudes toward user privacy. Zuckerberg,
as we learn in the book, has long believed that online sharing is wave of the future, with old-fashioned
guardedness yielding to a new era of "greater transparency." Maybe. But being on display isn't always fun,
as seen by employees who lose jobs after private mischief on Facebook becomes public knowledge. There's
an underlying tension between confidentiality and openness that Facebook hasn't yet figured out how to
resolve.
Brave New World ended darkly, with an outsider's failed attack on soma-based society. Kirkpatrick isn't
predicting anything quite so bleak, but his final chapter is surprisingly blunt about ways that Facebook
could falter. Sheer size can unnerve the authorities; so can concentration of power.
"The closer that Facebook gets to achieving its vision," Kirkpatrick writes, "the more likely it is to attract
government attention."
George Anders is working on a book about picking talent in America.

---------
(http://www.economist.com/node/16271065)

Facebook

Village people
Jun 3rd 2010
From The Economist print edition

How to avoid trouble

The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company that is Connecting the World. By David
Kirkpatrick. Simon & Schuster; 372 pages; $26. To be published in Britain by Virgin in July; £11.99. Buy from
Amazon.com
MARSHALL MCLUHAN is very popular at Facebook, according to David Kirkpatrick’s new book on the social-
networking giant. That is hardly surprising. In the 1960s McLuhan argued that the rise of electronic
communications would inevitably shrink the world to create what he called “a global village” whose members
would have a heightened sense of their collective identity. Facebook, which may soon boast 500m active users in
its online-networking service, seems bent on turning McLuhan’s vision into a reality.
That the social network has come so far so fast in six years is testimony to the drive of another visionary: Mark
Zuckerberg, its youthful founder and chief executive. Mr Kirkpatrick provides some intriguing insights into the
psyche of Mr Zuckerberg and his journey from a dorm room at Harvard University, where he created the
forerunner to Facebook, to the boardroom of what is now one of the best-known technology companies in the
world. His research helps explain Facebook’s success, but it also hints at why the firm has repeatedly found itself
mired in controversy.
In the early days Mr Zuckerberg comes across as a mixture of programming prodigy and business neophyte (his
initial business cards bear the memorable phrase “I’m CEO…bitch!”). But his leadership instincts are
commendably sharp. By surrounding himself with experienced advisers, he manages to steer Facebook clear of
hurdles that threaten to derail its growth and soon finds himself the object of fawning attention from companies
and venture capitalists drooling over the firm’s fast-growing franchise. The pressure on the fledgling entrepreneur
is intense. In one scene Mr Zuckerberg retreats to the bathroom of a swank Silicon Valley restaurant and bursts
into tears during a stressful negotiation over funding.
But behind the tears is toughness. Facebook’s boss turns down several Croesus-like offers to buy the company in
spite of intense lobbying by fellow shareholders who think he should sell. And he pursues his vision of making the
world a more open and connected place with single-minded determination. Some of the most interesting
passages in “The Facebook Effect” describe how Mr Zuckerberg’s missionary zeal makes him ambivalent towards
initiatives that would mint money for Facebook but fail to advance its agenda of “radical transparency”.
It is this zeal—and the company’s habit of suddenly revealing more of a user’s information in unexpected ways—
that has repeatedly got it into hot water. Here Mr Kirkpatrick puts his finger on the contradiction between Mr
Zuckerberg’s professed belief in the importance of protecting people’s privacy and his deep-seated conviction that
people are rapidly losing interest in keeping their personal data hidden.
Resolving this tension will not be easy. If Facebook is too conservative, it risks being usurped by fast-growing
upstarts. If it pushes its agenda of openness too hard, it could alienate users. Mr Kirkpatrick believes that
Facebook’s leaders are smart enough to come up with strategies that will keep the company growing like crazy.
“When I’m in their offices I often feel this could be the smartest bunch of young people on the planet today,” he
gushes.
Perhaps they are, but some of the team’s ill-considered actions have raised the hackles of privacy watchdogs and
policymakers. A groundswell of protest recently took the company by surprise and forced it to roll back changes
that automatically made more data publicly available. If Facebook is to prosper it needs to accept that even in an
emerging global village, many people will not want to live in houses that are made entirely of glass.

Copyright © 2010 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.

------------------
CNET
(http://news.cnet.com/the-social/?keyword=The+Facebook+Effect)

http://news.cnet.com/the-social/
June 2, 2010 12:00 PM PDT

Review: The good, the bad, the ugly of

Zuckerberg
by Caroline McCarthy
Let it be known that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wanted a book to be written about the company he
founded. At the top of the acknowledgments for journalist David Kirkpatrick's new book about Facebook,
"The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World," Kirkpatrick makes
it clear. "Had (Zuckerberg) not encouraged me to write this book and cooperated as I did so, it would likely
not have happened."
"The Facebook Effect," which will be available for purchase Tuesday, is the most extensive work written
about the ubiquitous social-networking site and the people who lifted it from late-night college project to
Silicon Valley powerhouse. It commences with a single story of Facebook's sheer brawn: the Facebook-
based organization of Colombian activists against paramilitary guerillas that culminated in protests
attended by hundreds of thousands. Then the book plunges into Facebook's flip-flops-and-Red-Bull days as
a start-up headquartered out of a Harvard University dorm. By the end, it's setting up Facebook as,
rightfully so, the most formidable rival to Web giant Google.
The cover of the 300-plus-page hardcover tome is the silhouette of a face made of mirror-like, reflective
paper. Pick the book up, and you'll see your own face, set against a background of the same soft blue color
that Facebook uses on its own site. You can, already, judge a bit from the cover of this book: This is the
Facebook that Facebook wants you to see--both the glamorous and the ugly sides of one of the most
successful, fastest-growing companies in recent memory.
The reporting by Kirkpatrick, a longtime Fortune magazine technology editor, is meticulous and
exhaustive. The reader learns precisely what percentage of equity Facebook's biggest shareholders have,
exactly which major technology and media companies have courted Facebook over the years for both
investment deals and potential acquisitions, and the story behind Facebook's random inclusion of the
"Wedding Crashers" quotation "I don't even know what a quail looks like" below its search box in the
social network's early days.
In the process, Kirkpatrick interviewed a first-rate who's who of Facebook insiders, from Mark Zuckerberg
himself to executives like Sheryl Sandberg and Chris Kelly, co-founders Dustin Moskowitz and Chris
Hughes, and investors Peter Thiel and Jim Breyer. It's an unprecedented level of depth and perspective into
the company. And it has Facebook's seal of approval.
"The Facebook Effect" can be considered, then, the counterpoint to last year's "The Accidental
Billionaires," author Ben Mezrich's unauthorized, hormone-fueled panty-raid of a Facebook creation tale.
With no cooperation from Facebook (in fact, outright antagonism), Mezrich penned "Billionaires" largely
from the perspective of spurned co-founder Eduardo Saverin; the founders of would-be rival site ConnectU,
who had a longstanding lawsuit against Zuckerberg and Facebook; and former Facebook executive Sean
Parker, who resigned in the wake of boardroom friction and a drug-related arrest. (Saverin is the only one
whom Mezrich has explicitly confirmed that he worked with as a source.) In "Billionaires," Zuckerberg is
painted as calculating and ethically challenged, ruthlessly severing ties to people who threaten his
authority. And it's Mezrich's, not Kirkpatrick's take on Facebook that forms the basis for "The Social
Network," the David Fincher-helmed film starring Jesse Eisenberg and Justin Timberlake as Zuckerberg
and Parker, scheduled for a release in October.
A number of Facebook's critics and rivals, each with their own agenda, indeed appear to have been cut out
entirely from the development of "The Facebook Effect." Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, two of the three
co-founders of ConnectU, say that they were never contacted for comment or an interview. Neither was
Aaron Greenspan, a Harvard computer science student who built a social-networking project around the
same time that Zuckerberg did and who later claimed ownership of the concept behind Facebook.
The differences between the treatment of Facebook's early scandals in Mezrich's book--which Facebook
has openly discredited--and Kirkpatrick's are stark. In "The Facebook Effect," co-founder Saverin was "in
effect, demanding to be CEO of Thefacebook without even making a full-time commitment" and that his
"business skills didn't impress his colleagues." While Kirkpatrick characterizes Zuckerberg's treatment of
the ConnectU situation as "rude" and that "he certainly should have alerted (the ConnectU
founders)...earlier about what to expect," he implies that ConnectU was significantly different from
Zuckerberg's initial conception of Facebook. And Sean Parker, whom Mezrich implies in "The Accidental
Billionaires" may have been surreptitiously forced out of the company, is acknowledged in "The Facebook
Effect" to have been a lightning rod and a liability, but also a crucial early player in the company's success
whom Zuckerberg "continues to this day periodically to consult" on business matters.
There's also no comment in "The Facebook Effect" from the founders of Twitter, which Facebook
attempted to acquire in a $500 million stock deal that Twitter subsequently turned down and which
certainly influenced a handful of Facebook product development decisions in late 2008 and early 2009
(both of which Kirkpatrick details in the book). "I'm not sure if David had any questions for us regarding
this project or if he was interested in talking to anyone here at Twitter," co-founder Biz Stone told CNET in
an e-mail. "I've not personally spoken with him."
To an extent this is commentary on Kirkpatrick's part on what really matters to Facebook's history:
Interpret it as his way of saying that Twitter's alleged rivalry to Facebook, as well as the ConnectU
kerfuffle, were drops in the bucket compared to the ways in which the company is affecting international
affairs, global communications, and the public's interaction with the digital world. But it would have been
useful and added a bit of color to hear from Facebook's critics and rivals, particularly if the intent of this
book is to be a complete account of the company's early days. Representatives of Facebook were available
for comment.
"The book was authorized but not approved," Kirkpatrick told CNET in an e-mail on Thursday, assuring
that there was no pressure on him to suppress anything that spoke nastily of Facebook. "Facebook did not
see my drafts nor did I request their permission for anything." Kirkpatrick said that he had a brief voice-
mail exchange with Divya Narendra, who co-founded ConnectU with the Winklevoss brothers, and that he
tried extensively to get in touch with Eduardo Saverin but that Saverin's lawsuit settlement conditions
forbade him from speaking to the author.
That's not to say that "The Facebook Effect" whitewashes Zuckerberg's rebellious streak. He's still,
proudly, the captain of a pirate ship (a phrase that Kirkpatrick uses). He still hacked into Harvard servers to
launch his controversial "Facemash" project in college, carried business cards that read "I'm CEO...bitch,"
oversaw the company's operations out of a Palo Alto, Calif., "frat house" that his employees subsequently
trashed over the course of a summer, and gave the middle finger to investment firm Sequoia Capital by
showing up for a meeting in pajamas and giving a mock presentation. ("It's not a story I'm very proud of,"
Zuckerberg told Kirkpatrick regarding the Sequoia incident.)
This is Zuckerberg the adventitiously crowned boy-king of the social Web, both cocky and naive, prone to
pensive episodes of teeming thought as well as verbal matches armed with a fencing foil. This is the Digital
Age's version of a globe-conquering young renegade, an Alexander the Great in Adidas sandals--but still an
ultimately benevolent visionary, Kirkpatrick asserts, writing about Facebook's disastrous handling of its
Beacon advertising program in 2007 and saying that it's a "fundamental misreading" of Zuckerberg to
attribute the "poorly designed alert service" to insidious intentions on Facebook's part.
But whatever side Kirkpatrick takes, at its core "The Facebook Effect" is an insight not only into Facebook
itself but into the complicated process behind the growing pains of a company whose roots were as
amateurish as they get. This is a story about how deals were made, how executives were hired, how internal
disputes ebb and flow. It's fascinating. It's well-written and masterfully reported.
Still, one is left wondering if anything more sordid was missed.
Disclosure: Simon & Schuster, publisher of "The Facebook Effect," is a division of CBS Corp., which also
publishes CNET.
This post was updated at 12:32 p.m. PT on Thursday with comment from David Kirkpatrick.
-------------
USA Today:
(http://content.usatoday.com/communities/technologylive/post/2010/06/new
-facebook-book-hits-shelves-the-internet-today/1)

New Facebook book hits shelves, the Internet, today

The Internet's most pervasive service, Facebook, has a storybook feel to it.
Six years after its humble beginnings as Thefacebook.com at Harvard University, the social-networking
behemoth is a hourly presence in the lives of its 500 million members. It has fomented a fundamental shift
in the way people communicate, share personal information and view their digital privacy. (The company
and its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, are also the subject of a major Hollywood movie, The Social Network,
due in October.)
Along the way, Zuckerberg has turned down acquisition offers of as much as $15 billion; worked with and
against technology giants Google, Microsoft and Viacom; and knocked heads with privacy advocates.
Those are some of the gems in the illuminating new book, The Facebook Effect (Simon & Schuster, $26),
by former Fortune columnist David Kirkpatrick. Kirkpatrick was granted unprecedented access to
Zuckerberg and key Facebook staff to tell the yarn of how a 19-year-old Harvard student, Zuckerberg,
slavishly focused on growth over profits with an unrelenting desire to make Facebook a dominant Internet
company -- as well become a ubiquitous presence in communication, marketing, business and people's
identities.
"The reality is that nothing on Facebook is really confidential," Kirkpatrick writes. "Facebook is founded
on a radical social premise -- that an inevitable enveloping transparency will overtake modern life."
-- By Jon Swartz
USA TODAY ONLINE

-----------

Christian Science Monitor:

(http://www.csmonitor.com/Books/Book-Reviews/2010/0607/The-
Facebook-Effect)
The Facebook Effect
_Facebook may know more about you than your
government does
The Facebook Effect By David Kirkpatrick Simon & Schuster 320 pp., $26
By Jackson Holahan / June 7, 2010
Most adolescent boys spend their high school years worrying about acne and girls. Not Mark Zuckerberg.
While at Phillips Exeter Academy, he and a friend developed Synapse, a software program that assessed
users’ listening habits and suggested other songs they may like. Synapse received purchase offers of close
to $1 million from Microsoft and other tech companies. These same firms also lobbied Zuckerberg to forgo
college and immediately come to work for them.
Zuckerberg declined all offers to skip college and to sell Synapse and instead enrolled at Harvard. The
Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., native did not seem to be motivated by money. He harbored grander ambitions. By the
spring of 2004, his sophomore year, the then 19-year-old had launched Facebook.com. David Kirkpatrick,
senior technology editor at Fortune magazine, captures this moment and the subsequent ascension of
Facebook in The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That is Connecting the World.
The genius of Facebook is that Zuckerberg has repeatedly shunned profit and increasingly larger buyout
offers in favor of designing a service that delivers more utility to its users. Its user base of over half a
billion – increasing at a rate of approximately 25 million a month – indicates that the Facebook team has
achieved high levels of practical utility. For many people Facebook has, as Kirkpatrick correctly notes,
replaced Rolodexes, cellphones, and even e-mail.
Kirkpatrick is an experienced and perceptive observer of technological entrepreneurship. In sharp prose he
deftly explains the social capital that Facebook provides its users. The site has generated a remarkable mass
appeal that spans countries, generations, and cultures. As an Internet platform, Facebook has made it very
easy to stay in touch with friends, family, co-workers, and long-lost acquaintances. David Schlesinger,
editor in chief of Thomson Reuters, said, “I think the Facebook News Feed is real news. It tells me news
I’m interested in.”
Despite Zuckerberg’s stated desire to ensure that Facebook remains a service-first, profit-second enterprise,
significant obstacles remain. With more than 500 million users volunteering various degrees of very
personal information – their age, gender, hometown, occupation, favorite movies, hobbies, etc. – Facebook
is the advertising industry’s holy grail. Facebook has the means to host ads for very specific targeting
demographics.
One of Facebook’s greatest challenges in the years ahead will be to continue growth and appropriately
monetize its efforts without compromising the personal information of its users. Although users freely offer
their personal information on the site, perceived breaches of confidentiality have aroused considerable
uproar. The specter of government intervention – antitrust, solicitation of private information, and so on –
also remains a very real possibility. Kirkpatrick even opines that Facebook may soon house more data
about citizens than do their own governments.
Zuckerberg is somewhat of a philosopher-software king. When asked, “Why don’t you sell the company?”
he has said, “I don’t really need the money. And anyway, I don’t think I’m ever going to have an idea this
good again.” Kirkpatrick’s unmitigated access to the technology industry’s corporate titans, Facebook’s
highest-ranking executives among them, paints Zuckerberg as both a genius and a visionary. Zuckerberg
genuinely aims to create the most applicable and practical Web tool in the world. He views Facebook as a
vessel for good and provides this vision to his employees in order to maximize consumer utility.
Zuckerberg’s repeated testimonials deferring to the needs of the user should not be overblown, however.
The fiercely competitive Zuckerberg may well hope to become more relevant, more powerful, and even
wealthier than his Palo Alto rivals, Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page. Given the way things
have gone for him in the past six years, it’s not at all far fetched to imagine that it will all come true.
Jackson Holahan is a freelance writer in Columbus, Ga.
----------------
NY Times
(http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/08/books/08book.html)
June 7, 2010
Company on the Verge of a Social
Breakthrough
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
THE FACEBOOK EFFECT
The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World
By David Kirkpatrick
Illustrated. 372 pages. Simon & Schuster. $26.
Responding to growing user concerns about privacy and growing scrutiny from American and European
regulators of privacy practices, Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and chief executive of Facebook.com, last
month tried to explain his company’s core principles in an op-ed piece in The Washington Post.
Facebook, he said, was built around a few simple ideas: that “people want to share and stay connected with
their friends and the people around them”; that if people have “control over what they share, they will want
to share more”; and that “if people share more, the world will become more open and connected. And a
world that’s more open and connected is a better world.”
Never mind all the people who doubt whether a more connected world necessarily translates into a better,
more trusting world. There are plenty of Facebook users who simply question its commitment to letting
them easily control their own information. While the company responded to the public uproar over recent
changes to its privacy policy (which made some profile details available to the public at large, and gave
third parties more access to user data) by promising to roll out new, simplified privacy settings, its default
position, as Time magazine recently noted, has long been to “automatically set users’ preferences to
maximum exposure and then put the onus” on them to dial back access.
Not only has the promotion of user sharing fueled the company’s business, enabling data mining and highly
directed advertising, but it’s also been part of the company’s almost utopian credo.
“Members of Facebook’s radical transparency camp, Zuckerberg included,” David Kirkpatrick writes in
“The Facebook Effect,” “believe more visibility makes us better people. Some claim, for example, that
because of Facebook, young people today have a harder time cheating on their boyfriends or girlfriends.
They also say that more transparency should make for a more tolerant society in which people eventually
accept that everybody sometimes does bad or embarrassing things.”
Mr. Kirkpatrick — who for many years was the senior editor for Internet and technology at Fortune
magazine — was encouraged by Mr. Zuckerberg to write this book and was granted extensive access to
him and his associates. Their cooperation has resulted in a mostly sympathetic — at times, gushingly
laudatory — account of the company, though Mr. Kirkpatrick does not shy away from dissecting its
missteps and successive disputes over privacy. He gives the reader a detailed understanding of how the
company grew from a 2004 Harvard dorm-room project into the world’s second-most-visited site after
Google.
Facebook is not only the world’s largest social network, but Mr. Kirkpatrick suggests that it may also “be
the fastest-growing company of any type in history.” He reports that over 20 percent of the 1.7 billion
people on the global Internet now use Facebook regularly, including 35.3 percent of the American
population. The number of users is growing at the remarkable rate of 5 percent a month , he says, and the
average user, astonishingly enough, spends almost an hour there each day.
But while Mr. Kirkpatrick has some interesting observations on Facebook’s evolution and future as it
grapples with competitors like Twitter, his examination of the company’s social and political impact
(helping people to self-organize) is pretty familiar, touching upon its use by Obama supporters in the 2008
campaign and its use in Colombia to organize protests against the hostage-taking FARC guerillas. His
meditations about Facebook’s impact on advertising and the broader media landscape are similarly
glancing and predictable.
The portrait of Mr. Zuckerberg, now 26, that emerges from this volume is that of a brilliant, sometimes
naïve, frequently prescient visionary, who has evolved over the years from an impulsive college student
fond of baggy jeans, rubber sandals (even in winter) and T-shirts, into a Silicon Valley executive (even
known to don a dress shirt and tie), speaking around the world to promote his company’s global ambitions.
He’s the wunderkind who has repeatedly resisted the temptation to sell his company for vast amounts of
money in order to retain control, a chief executive with an almost missionary zeal when it comes to getting
people to share information.
In the course of recounting Facebook’s story, Mr. Kirkpatrick provides a succinct history of the rise of
social networking, arguing that the company triumphed through a combination of luck, timing and its
creator’s determination that the service work smoothly on a technical level: after all, an early social
networking site called sixdegrees.com, which began in 1997, was hobbled by the slowness of dial-up
modems, and another precursor called Friendster was plagued by debilitating outages and slowdowns .
Mr. Kirkpatrick also contends that Facebook’s “ultimate success owes a lot to the fact that it began at
college,” where “people’s social networks are densest and where they generally socialize more vigorously
than at any other time in their lives,” and that its genesis at Harvard also lent it an elitist aura that made it a
status magnet for early users.
Much of Facebook’s history — from a lawsuit brought by three Harvard students who claimed that the
original idea for the site belonged to them, to attempts by Viacom and Yahoo to acquire the company for
hundreds of millions of dollars — is well known by now. But Mr. Kirkpatrick still does an animated job of
evoking the collegiate atmosphere that reigned at the company, even after its move to Palo Alto, Calif.: the
all-nighters, the dorm-like lifestyle, the Red Bull-fueled work sessions and the beer-fueled parties.
At the same time, he reminds the reader of the smart and fortunate design choices — like the site’s clean,
minimalist look, and the momentous 2005 decision to add photo hosting to the site — that drove the
company’s astonishing growth around the world to the point where it is now closing in on 500 million
users.
So far, Mr. Kirkpatrick says, Mr. Zuckerberg has pursued “growth over money,” but asks what guarantee
Facebook users could get that the chief executive’s “good intentions will last indefinitely.” In a worst-case,
Frankensteinian scenario, Mr. Kirkpatrick ominously adds, “possibly in some future when Zuckerberg has
lost control of his creation, Facebook itself could become a giant surveillance system,” as the company
“will always be able to see our data,” no matter what protections it might “offer our data from the potential
depredations of others.”
----------------------
AP
(Syndicated in the Detroit News:
http://www.detnews.com/article/20100607/BIZ04/6070405/1013/biz04)

'The Facebook Effect' shows site's origins, impact

By RACHEL METZ (AP) – 4 hours ago
"The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World" (Simon &
Schuster, 372 pages, $26), by David Kirkpatrick: Many of us use Facebook nearly every day — some of us
multiple times a day — without giving much thought to how the world's most popular social network came
to be.
As it turns out, the story is fascinating, and somewhat complicated. Fortunately, journalist David
Kirkpatrick is an able guide, taking readers on a mostly swift tour of the company that started as
"TheFacebook" in founder Mark Zuckerberg's Harvard dorm room back in 2004 and has since
mushroomed into a global company connecting a community that now approaches 500 million users.
"The Facebook Effect" opens not with Zuckerberg but with the tale of Oscar Morales, a civil engineer from
Barranquilla, Colombia, who in 2008 formed a Facebook group protesting the Revolutionary Armed Forces
of Colombia. The Facebook activity quickly inspired massive, real-life protests against the leftist rebels the
U.S. State Department calls a terrorist group. Though the story may sound a bit dramatic to the average
Facebook user, it helps Kirkpatrick make an important point even before delving into the main narrative: In
just a few years, Facebook has had a huge impact on people and institutions around the world,
fundamentally changing how we communicate.
From there, Kirkpatrick backtracks to Zuckerberg, circa September 2003, when the then-sophomore
installed an 8-foot whiteboard — "the geek's consummate brainstorming tool," as Kirkpatrick puts it — in
the hallway of his four-student suite.
At the time, Zuckerberg was experimenting with several online projects: Course Match, a way to let
students choose classes according to who was already signed up for them; and Facemash, which let people
compare two people and decide who was more attractive. The winner would then be compared to
increasingly more attractive people.
These programs got some attention — and criticism — at Harvard, but it was in early 2004 that Zuckerberg
really lit a fire by launching TheFacebook. According to Kirkpatrick, Harvard had said it would build
something like that itself, by stitching together the different "facebooks" that houses at Harvard printed
with photos of their students. But since the school hadn't gotten around to it, Zuckerberg did it himself.
As Kirkpatrick recounts, the website quickly spread throughout Harvard's student body, and then
Zuckerberg and sometimes-forgotten co-founders Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes and Eduardo Saverin
feverishly rolled it out at other schools. In 2006, it was expanded beyond universities and high schools to
the general population.
Kirkpatrick's telling of the early days of Facebook is exciting, packed with details like an early offer for the
site ($10 million from an unknown financier four months after its launch) and a cringe-inducing description
of the broken glass in the pool and zip line above it at the first house Zuckerberg rented in Palo Alto, Calif.,
in the summer of 2004.
Kirkpatrick, a longtime reporter for Fortune magazine, isn't always the most spellbinding storyteller —
"The Facebook Effect" loses steam in the last 100 pages, and the immense number of interview subjects
can be overwhelming and confusing at times — but his reporting skills are impressive.
The book is packed with interviews from all the key players, including Zuckerberg and Moskovitz.
Kirkpatrick's subjects open up about everything from Zuckerberg's personality quirks to Facebook's
dealings with investors including Microsoft Corp. and billionaire Li Ka-shing. You get the impression that
all, including Zuckerberg, are earnestly trying to be as transparent as the social network they've built.
Zuckerberg, 26, is, of course, both the face of Facebook and of "The Facebook Effect." Through
Kirkpatrick's eyes, he comes across as sympathetic, incredibly smart and committed both to getting users to
share their lives openly on Facebook and protecting their privacy — a contrast from the Zuckerberg that
has been portrayed recently in the media as being more cavalier about privacy.
Kirkpatrick doesn't shy away from conflict, though, detailing Facebook users' often outraged reactions to
changes on the site, as well as a lawsuit (settled in 2008) in which three former classmates accused
Zuckerberg of hijacking the idea for Facebook from another social site he was helping them build.
"The Facebook Effect" is about much more than Zuckerberg's and Facebook's growing pains, though: It
wants to show over and over again how the social network is rapidly changing the world, helping us be
more open but also presenting questions about how much we really want to share.
Copyright © 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
-------------------------
Wall St. Journal:
(http://online.wsj.com/article/SB20001424052748704002104575291330385856628.html)

 BOOKSHELF
 JUNE 8, 2010

Status Update: Megasuccessful

From behind the corporate privacy walls, tales of hits and errors.
By PAUL BOUTIN
Facebook founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, at age 26, claims that he hasn't sold his privately
held company—valuations fluctuate in the $10 billion to $20 billion neighborhood—because, more than
getting ever richer, he wants to lead the world to become more connected through the sharing of personal
information. In interviews and on his blog, Mr. Zuckerberg pushes a philosophy of beneficial social
information-sharing as fervently as Bill Gates once preached the power of the PC.
Still, it's a surprise that Mr. Zuckerberg encouraged his employees to join him in peppering the company's
officially sanctioned history with the sort of anecdotes that most CEOs would rather not share. Despite the
company's heavy involvement, David Kirkpatrick's "The Facebook Effect" chronicles Mr. Zuckerberg's
missteps in addition to his genius.
The story begins as Mr. Zuckerberg arrives at Harvard as an undergraduate in 2003. The kid mounts an 8-
foot whiteboard on a wall for charting his complicated ideas. Within a week he has developed a software
program that lets students see who has signed up for which class. It's a social-network way of looking at the
Ivy League: What matters most is not a class's curriculum and syllabus but the links to everybody else in
the room.
Then Mr. Zuckerberg moves on to something bigger: a girl-rating program that lonely guys (like him) can
share and revise. "Thefacebook"—named for the student and faculty guide at Mr. Zuckerberg's prep school
—soon morphs into a more generally shareable site for Harvard students. Then it grows to include all Ivy
Leaguers, and the boundaries quickly expand from there until Facebook—officially launched just six years
ago—girds the planet, with nearly 500 million users posting photos, personal profiles and messages for
their virtual (and sometimes real-life!) friends.
In Mr. Kirkpatrick's narrative, Mr. Zuckerberg comes across as a Gatesian underage overachiever. Like Mr.
Gates, he is smarter and harder-working than most of his Harvard classmates. Like Mr. Gates, he becomes
obsessed with a new way for everyone to use the computer. Like Mr. Gates, he is hard to work with.
A former Fortune magazine technology writer, Mr. Kirkpatrick interviewed more than 100 people,
including Mr. Gates, AOL chief executive Tim Armstrong and 39 Facebook employees. Mr. Zuckerberg,
who did not cooperate with Ben Mezrich for last year's unflattering "The Accidental Billionaires," seems to
have been generous to Mr. Kirkpatrick with his time and honest about his mistakes.
Yet some anecdotes make you wonder how Mr. Zuckerberg still has a job. There is the day in 2004 when
Zuck and business partner Sean Parker, formerly known as one-half of Napster, scheduled an 8 a.m.
meeting at Silicon Valley power-player Sequoia Capital, investors who were interested in Mr. Zuckerberg's
promising venture. It was a set-up by the two young entrepreneurs: Mr. Parker and Mr. Zuckerberg, feeling
that Sequoia had undermined Mr. Parker at another recent startup, were bent on revenge.
The pair rolled up Sand Hill Road extremely late to the meeting, dressed in T-shirts and pajama
bottoms. Messrs. Zuckerberg and Parker then presented some of Silicon Valley's most powerful venture
capitalists with a slide show of sophomoric jokes that ridiculed Sequoia for trying to horn in on their
company. "It's not a story I'm very proud of," Mr. Zuckerberg says in the book.
Mr. Kirkpatrick doesn't coddle his subject, yet he presents Mr. Zuckerberg's point of view much more
comprehensibly than we have seen it before. Most Facebook followers already know that Mr. Zuckerberg
aligned with, and then cut off, several early collaborators. The author lets you get inside Mr. Zuckerberg's
head and understand that he could almost taste Facebook's potential to be the next Google, but he didn't
think he had a team he could trust to make it happen.
Mr. Kirkpatrick also makes it clear that Mr. Zuckerberg is hardly a full-time genius. He is scornful of
employees— usually older ones—who try to separate their work and play identities online. "Mark doesn't
believe that social and professional lives are distinct," says friend and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman.
"That's a classic college student view." Mr. Zuckerberg initially resisted creating a profitable advertising
system atop Facebook, certain that the ads would chase away members. The geezers who championed it
were right on that one. More recently the company has created at least a major public-relations headache
for itself with what has been decried by many change-sensitive Facebook users as a cavalier attitude toward
their privacy settings.
The best chapter in "The Facebook Effect" recounts Mr. Zuckerberg's most controversial decision. As
Facebook relocates to Silicon Valley and grows from 100,000 users to a hundred million, a parade of
graying, well-dressed executives from Yahoo, Microsoft, News Corp., MTV and other companies visits the
Facebook offices. The callers' goal: Buy Facebook. Install senior management.
As the bids climb well past $1 billion in 2006, and as pressure increases from Facebook investors
clamoring for a fast, rich exit, Mr. Zuckerberg—who controls three of the five board seats and thus can't be
overruled—reluctantly comes to a realization: "I don't want to sell the company."
Investors are enraged. Employees eager to cash in their stock feel cheated. (The company takes pity and
arranges a pre-IPO sale for some employee shares.) Corporate suitors are insulted by this punk who dares
to turn down their billion-dollar offers. Yet for Mr. Zuckerberg, the company's ascendancy is a chance to
step up as a leader. He spurned the offers, he explains at the time, because "we have so much more
opportunity to change the world than this."
Mr. Zuckerberg can't imagine a life of leisure. He doesn't want to join the tech sector's self-made, semi-
retired gazilllionaires, who putter around with promising startups and prattle at boring conferences in scenic
vacation spots. Facebook users who think that they are addicted to the site don't have anything on Mark
Zuckerberg.
Mr. Boutin writes about Internet business and culture for VentureBeat, Wired and the New York Times.
--------------------------
FT:
(http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/1991c8dc-7400-11df-87f5-00144feabdc0.html)

Timely airing of Facebook’s private story

By David Gelles
Published: June 9 2010 23:47 | Last updated: June 9 2010 23:47
The Facebook Effect The Insider Story of the Company that is
Connecting the World

By David Kirkpatrick

Simon & Schuster, $26/Virgin Books, £11.99

For a company bent on “making the world more open and connected”, a
good bit of mystery shrouds the early days of Facebook.

Mark Zuckerberg, who founded the site as a Harvard student in 2004,

reached a settlement with two former classmates who had accused him of
stealing their idea; he has also been accused by Facebook co-founder
Eduardo Saverin of unfairly pushing him out.

Even now, new unflattering details about the company’s early days
continue to trickle out. A transcript of instant messages recently surfaced
that allegedly show Zuckerberg describing users in critical terms for
entrusting Facebook with their data.

Many questions remain about Zuckerberg himself. Who is this young man
in control of so much of the world’s personal data? And as the company
comes under fire from critics over privacy issues, the persistently sketchy
understanding of Facebook’s DNA has compounded its woes.

For that reason alone, the publication of this book, which promises “the
inside story” could not be better timed. David Kirkpatrick, a Fortune
magazine reporter , presents the first authoritative account of Facebook’s
founding, its early days, and Zuckerberg himself.

What emerges is a picture of adolescence, rather than arrogance or

conniving. Both the company and its founder had enormous expectations
and responsibilities foisted upon them at an early age, and both have
endured very public scrutiny of their growing pains.
In a company run by 20-somethings, some immature missteps are perhaps
inevitable, and Kirkpatrick captures the heady early days with detailed
reporting and entertaining anecdotes. In one, Zuckerberg and his cohort
purposely sabotage a meeting with the partners at Sequoia Capital, one of
Silicon Valley’s pre-eminent venture capital firms, as revenge for a friend’s
bad experience with the investors. Zuckerberg showed up late for the
meeting wearing pyjamas, and pitched them a side project.

But for the most part, Zuckerberg has proved deft at navigating the often
treacherous world of venture capitalists and eager buyers. Both Yahoo and
Microsoft wanted to buy Facebook for enormous sums of money, but he
refused.

From the outset, Kirkpatrick reveals, Zuckerberg has been motivated by

his zeal to make Facebook a transformative company. “We’re going to
change the world,” Zuckerberg says. “I think we can make the world a
more open place.”

In the past six years, he has done as much. Political campaigns now rely
on Facebook. Small businesses and large corporations alike advertise on
the site and use it to communicate with customers.

But Facebook also continues to challenge, often making changes that

leave users uncomfortable with how their personal data are used.
Kirkpatrick skirts round these issues at a time when they warrant a much
fuller treatment. But he does not dismiss concerns that Facebook may
overplay its hand, and warns that making more personal information public
“could make Facebook feel more like a place for marketing and less like a
place for friendship”.

Kirkpatrick was among the first mainstream journalists to follow the

Facebook story closely. He won Zuckerberg’s trust early on, and was even
encouraged to write the book. His access and obvious affection for
Facebook does not, however, make the book a whitewash. Plenty of un-
seemly details are revealed, and Kirkpatrick holds Zuckerberg accountable
for his early gaffes.

For all the anecdotes, however, the book is not about simple gossip. There
is another one for that: The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich, is a
sensationalised retelling of Facebook’s early days. Dismissed by
Facebook, Mezrich’s book is nonetheless the basis for a film, The Social
Network, due for release this year.
By contrast, The Facebook Effect is a well-reported account of the first six
years of one of the most important companies on earth. As Kirkpatrick
writes, “The company is increasingly embedded in the fabric of modern life
and culture. Facebook’s social impact continues to broaden.”
---------------------

Business Week:
(http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-06-09/facebook-founder-has-
nothing-to-hide-except-privacy-blind-spot.html)

Bloomberg
Facebook Founder Has Nothing
to Hide Except Privacy Blind
Spot
June 09, 2010, 12:02 AM EDT
MORE FROM BUSINESSWEEK

Review by Rich Jaroslovsky

June 9 (Bloomberg) -- Just what is it with Mark Zuckerberg and
privacy?
Maybe it’s that, at age 26, the Facebook founder and chief executive
officer hasn’t been involved in enough things that he’d rather keep to
himself. Then again, he surely can’t enjoy being at the center of all
those constantly recycled stories about the messy origins of his
multibillion-dollar empire.
Or perhaps it’s that to members of his age cohort -- and calling it the
Facebook Generation isn’t too much of a stretch - - the concept of
“privacy” seems as quaint as a rotary-dial telephone. They
understand the idea, but it just isn’t relevant in an always-on, always-
connected world.
Whatever it is, to see Zuckerberg in action -- whether in his sweaty
on-stage performance at last week’s D: All Things Digital conference
in California, or in the pages of David Kirkpatrick’s engrossing new
book, “The Facebook Effect” -- is to see a man who seems to believe
that the burden rests on the individual to take steps to keep personal
information private, and not on the corporations seeking to make use
of such information.
Kirkpatrick’s portrayal of the young Harvard University dropout is far
more sympathetic, and rings far truer, than the elusive figure in the
hooded sweatshirt who dominated Ben Mezrich’s “The Accidental
Billionaires,” published in 2009. Unlike Mezrich, Kirkpatrick, a former
Fortune magazine journalist, had access to Zuckerberg, though the
company had no say over the manuscript.
Scrupulously Fair
The author offers a detailed and scrupulously fair history of
Thefacebook, as it was then known: how Zuckerberg, already
notorious on the Harvard campus for a sexually tinged website,
partnered with a wealthy classmate to launch his college-based social
network; how he signed up to help, and then let down, three other
Harvard students working on their own social site, later spawning
heated and costly litigation; and how he moved to Palo Alto, split with
his business partner and was ushered into the world of big-time
finance as practiced by Silicon Valley’s venture-capital community.
Those capitalists were quick to grasp the dazzling marketing
possibilities of a site acting as the repository for so much personal
data. In one of the book’s most compelling scenes, Zuckerberg
excused himself from a dinner hosted by Accel Partners’ Jim Breyer
to discuss a lucrative investment in the company. A friend found him
on the floor of the men’s room, sobbing because accepting the deal
would mean backing out of a commitment he had made to
Washington Post Co. and its chairman, Donald Graham.
Whose Money?
It speaks volumes about Zuckerberg that, at age 20, he called
Graham directly to discuss the dilemma created by the venture-
capital offer. It also says something that, in the end, he took Accel’s
money, not Graham’s.
As Facebook explodes into a phenomenon rivaling Google for the title
of most-visited website, a pattern emerges in “The Facebook Effect”:
Almost every time a major new feature is rolled out, it is done in a
way that makes member information more accessible, rather than
less.
If there’s an outcry, the company may scale back, but it never seems
to learn the lesson for the next time. Even the release of updated
privacy-control features becomes, for many users, an exercise in
privacy damage control when the new defaults make more
information public.
The Mark Zuckerberg of “The Facebook Effect” genuinely believes in
the power of transparency to make the world a better place. He also,
insists author Kirkpatrick, holds “a near- religious conviction about the
importance of helping people protect their most sensitive personal
data.”
But he combines a firm belief in his own good intentions with a blind
spot toward the sensibilities of a user base that is no longer
dominated by college students and by now encompasses a sizable
chunk of the global population. And that should be a giant concern to
those of us who want the power to decide for ourselves what
information we want to share, and how we’ll let it be used.
“The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is
Connecting the World” is published by Simon & Schuster (372 pages,
$26). To buy this book in North America, click here.
--Editors: Laurie Muchnick, Jeffrey Burke.
-----------
San Francisco Chronicle:
(http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/06/11/RVU41DNKF8.DTL)

'The Facebook Effect,' by David Kirkpatrick

G. Pascal Zachary, Special to The Chronicle
Friday, June 11, 2010

the facebook effect

the inside story of the company that is connecting the world

by david kirkpatrick

(simon & schuster; 372 pages; $26)

David Kirkpatrick sets a difficult task for himself in writing a

definitive account of one of the great technology stories of all
time. Facebook - hatched by Harvard students and enormously
popular since moving beyond elite colleges a mere six years ago -
is one of the most controversial companies in the world.

In "The Facebook Effect," the company's chief executive and

guiding intelligence, a 26-year-old East Coast transplant named
Mark Zuckerberg, comes across as a reclusive know-it-all, an
irascible rebel prone to sophomoric pranks. Kirkpatrick
profusely thanks Zuckerberg for his cooperation, but his is not an
authorized account. In these pages, Zuckerberg so often shops
Facebook for sale to big-name media tycoons, only to reject deals
at the last moment, that his manner seems insulting, even
humiliating. Yet Kirkpatrick finds these failed deals irresistible
copy, so much so that his book might be better titled, "How
Many Times Can One Man Offer to Sell His Company for Billions
of Dollars and Then Renege?"

Kirkpatrick, a superb technology journalist who worked for

Fortune magazine for two decades, is most interested in financial
issues - and especially how rich Zuckerberg will become if ever
he does pull the trigger and sell the company for cash.
Kirkpatrick rarely provides any explanations of how Facebook
has achieved its vaunted "effect" technologically; software
complexity is sacrificed for business simplicity, but Kirkpatrick
doesn't demystify the mechanics of how Facebook created "a
fundamentally new form of communication."

Typical is Kirkpatrick's treatment of Facebook's astonishing

translation tool; the system operates in at least 70 languages.
While Kirkpatrick calls the translation tool "among the
company's greatest product innovations," he never explains what
makes it so. The absence of any such technical explanations is a
shame, especially because, in the early going at Facebook,
Zuckerberg apparently wrote spectacular code. The parallels
between him and Microsoft's Bill Gates - another Harvard
dropout who wrote code - are obvious and yet unexplored.

There is plenty of business drama in "The Facebook Effect,"

because although Zuckerberg may be famous for igniting
firestorms over the privacy of Facebook users, he seems
ambivalent about capitalism and surprisingly sophomoric about
business.

"We'll figure that out later" is Zuckerberg's standard answer to

hyperventilating financiers who insist that Facebook sits atop
untapped riches. Rather than chasing revenues, Zuckerberg
chases users; his desire to expand his social network seems
insatiable - and is as close as anything to the real secret of his
success.

Throughout this fast-paced book, Zuckerberg holds center stage,

the one constant amid a bewildering array of supporting but
ultimately disposable characters. The story of how Zuckerberg
hatched Facebook from his Harvard dorm room - and managed
to overcome largely spurious complaints over code theft by
jealous Harvard undergrads - makes for gripping reading.

But once Zuckerberg drops out and relocates to Palo Alto,

Kirkpatrick struggles to maintain his tale. Zuckerberg, it turns
out, is no business whiz; he doesn't talk much to his colleagues
and he cycles through senior managers about as quickly as
Raiders owner Al Davis sours on coaches. Having spawned one
of the biggest social movements in the world, built around an
Internet-based software system, Zuckerberg has yet to figure out
how to balance the tensions between promoting human
community and earning significant profit.

Befitting a writer whose journalism appeared in a magazine

devoted to the rich and super-successful, Kirkpatrick views
Facebook as a singular pursuit of the Big Score. Yet earning large
profit - indeed any profit - from Facebook has proved difficult for
two reasons.

First, fans of Facebook span the globe; 70 percent of the 500

million people who use it at least once a month live outside the
United States. The far-flung and polyglot nature of Facebook
users makes marketing to them difficult and not especially
attractive.

Then there is the more profound problem that experiencing

Facebook is more like watching a movie than doing a Google
search. Facebook seems like entertainment, a way of passing the
time. Google improves productivity, helps a person get stuff done
faster. Though new features on Facebook are starting to offer
more productivity options, the core attraction remains social.

To be sure, the Facebook story is unfinished. The company seems

balanced between finding business wealth from its service and
imploding, abandoned by frustrated fans who shift their
allegiances to other idle pursuits - or are concerned about
protecting their user information.

Zuckerberg, no longer a neophyte, is clearly shrewd, brilliant and

wildly ambitious. Don't bet against him finding a way to achieve
both a stable business and a distinctive social good - an
achievement that will surely spawn more books about him.

G. Pascal Zachary, a former writer for the Wall Street Journal, is

the author of "The Diversity Advantage: Multicultural Identity in
the New World Economy." E-mail him at
books@sfchronicle.com.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/06/11/RVU41DNKF8.DTL
This article appeared on page SN - 1 of the San  Francisco Chronicle

-------------------
Newark Star-Ledger
http://blog.nj.com/entertainment_impact_arts/print.html?
entry=/2010/06/the_facebook_effect_book_revie.html

Home > Arts > Books

'The Facebook Effect' book review: The
face behind Facebook
Published: Sunday, June 13, 2010
In 2004, student Mark Zuckerberg sought Harvard’s permission to put the
student directory online. Harvard, worried about the legal issues of
disseminating student information, refused. So Zuckerberg designed
Thefacebook, where students could post their own information and photos.
One month later, Thefacebook had 10,000 members, including Harvard
alumni.
Hmmm, mused Zuckerberg in his dorm room.
Recruiting friends, he expanded the program to other Ivy League schools, and soon it exploded onto
campuses across the U.S. Four months after its launch, Zuckerberg turned down an offer of $10 million for
his online directory.

This fascinating book — with access to all the players — traces Facebook’s rise from its college origins, to
raising capital, to how the news feed came about. Now a 1,200-employee operation with annual revenues of
more than $500 million, Kirkpatrick says Facebook’s next frontier is global expansion.
As for the current debate over privacy, Zuckerberg says if you want something to remain private, “keep it
in your head.”

The Facebook Effect

David Kirkpatrick
Simon & Schuster, 334 pp., $26
Reviewed by Carolyn Hinsey
Carolyn Hinsey is a freelance writer from Manhattan.
-----------------------

Forbes

Commentary
The Problem With Facebook
Quentin Hardy, 06.23.10, 6:00 AM ET
Writing recent history is risky. If the events are momentous, they still need the impact of years and decades
to be judged. To be sure you are marking a fundamental change in human society borders on the
impossible--such events happen just a few times a century, and (barring things like ecological collapse)
rarely with anyone's ability to see at the time that anything has changed.
That doesn't mean you are wrong. You just need to bring your best evidence, and your best skepticism.
A just-published chronicle of the first years of Facebook, The Facebook Effect, by David Kirkpatrick,
scores admirably on the evidence front. The social network has, in a little over six years, picked up 500
million users, sucked up a good bit of the world's free time, and not incidentally made possible new forms
of organization among strangers that have affected the policies of nations.
In addition, founder Mark Zuckerberg, whose thoughts and personality infuse Facebook, has quickly
become one of the few globally-recognized individuals. He and his cohorts, for the most part very young,
affluent, and privileged, also believe all of our doings should be visible to everyone, with a fervor redolent
of a late-night study session. The book does an admirable job telling the story.
As he learns a bit more about adult life's very real complexities, Zuckerberg--now a billionaire--may be
changing his thinking about full transparency across all life's roles, at least where he is concerned. He
squirms when his arrogant early e-mails are described, and has said he would rather not have a film made
of his life while he is still around.
Whether Facebook "now sits squarely at the center of a fundamental realignment of capitalism," as
Kirkpatrick states, however, remains an open question. I am inclined to agree, just because social
networking seems like a big behavioral shift. But so far, the numbers aren't there.
In fact, they are random. Kirkpatrick chronicles valuations for the company of $15 billion in 2007, $2.5
billion in 2008, $10 billion and $7.5 billion in two separate 2009 deals. Rather than note that investors
Microsoft and Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing, who came in at the high end, may have been snookered,
he concludes, "it's hard to say what Facebook is really worth." Revenues were maybe $500 million in 2009,
but there is no sense of possible profit margins. The 30% that Facebook retains on sales of virtual currency
for use in purchasing virtual goods--a cut that would shame a mobster--suggests the potential for fat profit
margins. (A recent news report from Reuters carried in the New York Daily News, citing "sources familiar
with the situation" put Facebook's 2009 revenues somewhere between $700 million and $800 million and
profits in the "tens of millions of dollars.") So much, on the other hand, for fat margins.
That serious venture capitalists and corporations are essentially throwing money at a force they can't
quantify may indicate Facebook's power. So also, perhaps, do a few other questions that are implicitly
raised, but not really answered, in this book, among them:
--Are the online connections in Facebook really authentic, or are they a series of relatively lightweight
emotional flickerings? Kirkpatrick's book shows the key aspects of Facebook's growth have been naming
friends, tagging people in photographs, and later joining groups that ranged from sheep throwers and
pretend gangsters, to a few select causes. Even the most impactful of Facebook-spawned social movements
consist largely of donation drives, or protests against one or another wrong (saying "no!" as loudly as
possible may be the political hallmark of our age). These are gestures, far more than collective, positive
commitments.

--Should Facebook guide its policies on privacy based on what people say they want, or on what users do?
People say they want privacy and control, but then Zuckerberg sees them seek publicity and exposure by
the millions. Which is the just thing for him to give them?
--Should our lives--working, married, filial, parental, personal, inner--really be visible to all, including
advertisers? Without a healthy level of artifice, what is society?
--Zuckerberg speaks of Facebook in the context of a potlatch, a form of ritualized giving that supported the
societies of some Indian tribes in the Pacific Northwest. In his anthropology student's zeal, however, he
misses the way these also led to inflation and the destruction of goods, and were sometimes akin to the
patronage of a Chicago ward boss. Can that really be extended to a global system?
--What is advertising in this world? Google is really not much different from age-old direct marketing, in
which a propensity for product interest is discerned, and a pitch made. Facebook's appeal to corporations
does not speak of such a direct moment of commerce, but rather of a deep involvement within their skein of
friends and passions. That is something beyond the aims of even expensive brand advertising.
That these questions cannot be answered may be a mark of Facebook's short history. That we can even raise
them seriously gives some indication of the company's continuing importance.
To read more of Quentin Hardy's stories, click here. Contact the writer at qhardy@forbes.com.
-------------------------

Campus Progress (project of the Center for American Progress)

Books:
Reviews of the latest books, political and otherwise.

Facebook, Love It or Hate It, Changed

the Game Forever
The outsized ambition of Facebook CEO Mark
Zuckerberg shows the advantages and
disadvantages of going ahead of the curve.

By Adam Peck
June 28, 2010

(Flickr/digitalbear)
On Jan. 4, 2008, Colombian citizen Oscar Morales,
tired of reading endless stories of kidnappings by
the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia
(FARC), began a group on Facebook as a sign of
opposition to the militant organization. Just one
month later, the group, Un Millon de Voces Contra
Las FARC, held a massive demonstration to voice
its anger. An estimated 10 million Colombians
participated.
The Colombia demonstration was a shining
example of what former senior editor at Fortune
magazine David Kirkpatrick calls The Facebook
Effect, the title of his new book. Kirkpatrick outlines
the meteoric rise of both Facebook and of
Zuckerberg himself. The Colombia event’s
grandeur and spontaneity echoed 26-year-old
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s own outsized
ambition.
Zuckerberg dreamed early on of turning Facebook
into a global platform. In early conversations with
Kevin Efrusy of Accel Partners, a Facebook
investor, Zuckerberg ignored advice to take it slow
on the platform idea. At the time, Facebook had six
employees. He responded to Efrusy’s advice by
holding a conversation with Microsoft CEO Bill
Gates.
The history of Facebook is the stuff of Hollywood
— so much so, in fact, that a big-studio movie
written by West Wing and Studio 60 creator Aaron
Sorkin based on the story is set for wide release
this fall. Zuckerberg built the earliest versions of
Facebook while a student at Harvard University,
only to pack up and move to California with a small
team of friends as the site began to expand beyond
Cambridge, Mass. In the following years, the site
underwent several big changes. First, the site
moved beyond a focus on students and opened
itself up opened to the broader public. Then,
businesses. Then Facebook allowed web
developers to create applications. Then Facebook
introduced the News Feed.
At each step, Zuckerberg aggressively pushed for
the changes, often against considerable opposition
from Facebook users. When the site underwent a
massive redesign in September 2006, there was
Zuckerberg, guiding users through the new layout
and new features. When applications were first
introduced to Facebook in 2007, a then-23-year-old
Zuckerberg was the one to take the stage in front
of some of the most powerful moguls in the world
to demonstrate the new features.
Almost every time, Zuckerberg emerged victorious.
The most notable exception came recently, with
the advent and implementation of new privacy
settings and the controversial “opt-out” policy,
where users were automatically assigned looser
privacy settings and had to manually change them
to limit what other users could see.
What stands out most in Kirkpatrick’s account is
the amateurish way Facebook came together. It
wasn’t until 2008 that Facebook brought on board
Sheryl Sandberg, a former executive at Google, as
Chief Operating Officer to give the company the air
of professionalism that perhaps many assumed
Facebook had possessed after it expanded beyond
a college audience.
Zuckerberg expedited the hiring of a COO thanks
in part to what has become commonly referred to
as the single biggest misstep to date by the
company; the so-called Beacon feature, a fairly
simple plugin that posted information about a
user’s conduct elsewhere on the Internet. Users
logged into their profiles to find their online
purchases or other interactions displayed on their
Walls without warning, for all to see. The damage
done by the bad publicity that resulted from
Beacon lingers to this day. It was the launch of
Beacon that spurred anti-Facebook activism by
individuals and groups like Move On.
Zuckerberg was on the front lines during the recent
criticism over its new privacy policies, drafting blog
posts and memos to users explaining why he felt
they were necessary, and ultimately acquiescing to
the mounting complaints of the site’s users. The
press took notice as well and began hammering
Zuckerberg and his company for breaching what
they saw as Facebook’s compact: A commitment
to privacy and user control of information.
Lawsuits, some still pending, have been filed
against the company and its CEO at a steady
pace. Much of media criticism remains cautious
about the intentions and practices of the company;
business transactions with the site now involve
monetary figures in the tens of billions of dollars.
Still, just barely seven years after its initial launch,
Facebook has about 500 million users, annual
revenue topping $1 billion, and is the second most
highly trafficked website in the world behind only
Google. It is endlessly expanding its offerings and
member rolls. And it shows no sign of slowing
down on college campuses either.
At some point down the road, after Facebook has
evolved further in tandem with our evolving
understanding of privacy in the age of the Internet,
or perhaps has been usurped entirely, students will
look back at what was a revolutionary platform and
a once-in-a-lifetime business and learn something
valuable. If this book does nothing else, it serves
as evidence to future generations that Facebook’s
ideas — criticized in the present as overreaching,
prying and even a bit creepy — may actually be
ahead of the times.
Adam Peck is an editorial intern with Campus
Progress.
---------

Blog on Books:

The Facebook Effect – David Kirkpatrick

(Simon & Schuster)
July 7, 2010 ·Somehow now seems like the perfect time for an all encompassing report on both the history
and state of social networking behemoth Facebook. Having experienced what can only be described as
torrid growth – closing in on a half-billion users – while still taking in private money prior to a much
anticipated eventual IPO (2011?), Facebook is unquestionably the most important social utility to ever hit
the web.
In the newly released, ‘The Facebook Effect,’ former Fortune magazine technology editor, David
Kirkpatrick takes a deep dive into the innerworkings of what made college upstart TheFacebook into the
dominant new media player on the web today. All the famous stories – from the ‘borrowing’ (stealing?) of
the original concept from ConnectU and houseSYSTEM, to the fever-pitched growth, through early stage
investor meetings, the move from Harvard to Palo Alto, important hirings along the way (did you know
Steve Chen worked at theFacebook for a few weeks before leaving to co-found YouTube?) to meetings and
partnerships with Fortune 500 advertisers and media companies are well documented here. Even examples
of competitive positioning (FB vs. myspace, Twitter, even Google) to recent acquisitions like FriendFeed
are part of keeping the story timely and up to the moment.
From what appears to be full cooperation from most of the key players in the still young Facebook
pantheon, including multiple interviews with Mark Zuckerberg himself, Kirkpatrick tells the story of a
young, ambitious company that experiences nearly every kind of growing pain known to man, while still
forging ahead on it’s stated purpose to ‘make society open’ while creating and maintaining the ’social
graph.’ Along the way, plenty of issues (privacy, advertising vs. user experience) and iterations are
revealed explaining why some features/apps worked well (Farmville exploded Facebook in Taiwan) and
why others met a dismal fate (uhh… Beacon).
More than anything what emerges is the story of young Zuckerberg’s coming of age. When investors
wanted more maturity infused into the company, the young leader reluctantly agreed. When he found a new
girlfriend, he negotiated for 100 minutes of time a week. Within this fast-paced read, it appears nothing of
significance was left behind.
What is most striking about the book is the even handed nature by which it is all delivered. Kirkpatrick
paints a deft portrait of everything that makes Facebook what it is today. In this respect, ‘the Facebook
Effect’, much like Ken Auletta’s excellent ‘Googled,’ is one of the best new media business books of the
year.
‘The Facebook Effect’s’ Facebook page
--------

Blogcritics and Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Saturday, July 10, 2010Last updated 10:56 a.m. PT

Book Review: The Facebook Effect: The

Inside Story Of The Company That Is
Connecting The World by David Kirkpatrick
By GREG BARBRICKBLOGCRITICS.ORG

Facebook’s growth since its inception in 2004 has been nothing short of
phenomenal. With a membership hovering at around a half a billion people
today, the ubiquitous site is an Internet success story like no other. In The
Facebook Effect: The Inside Story Of The Company That Is Connecting
The World, author David Kirkpatrick tells the remarkable tale of this
industry colossus, and of the man behind it all, Mark Zuckerberg.

As it was originally known, Thefacebook.com launched on February 4,

2004, out of Zuckerberg’s Harvard dorm room. The site was incredibly
exclusive, you had to have an email ending in Harvard.edu to join. It
became so popular that Zuckerberg and his “staff” (his roommates)
decided to offer it to other Ivy League schools shortly afterwards.
Thus began the snowball momentum that continues to drive Facebook
forward to this day. Soon the doors were opened to all U.S. colleges, then
high schools, and finally to everybody else. Zuckerberg and company
moved out to Silicon Valley “just for the summer” after their first year at
Harvard. They never went back.

Kirkpatrick was able to speak with the early players in the story fairly
extensively, including Zuckerberg himself. The account of these nineteen-
year-old kids building up a company valued at $15 billion over the course
of just a few years is stunning. The growth pains that accompany such
rapid success are also discussed, and Zuckerberg’s talent for getting
advice from older dot-com veterans has helped Facebook survive some
potentially fatal experiences.

The first two-thirds of The Facebook Effect trace the business’ growth from
2004 to 2010. It makes for fascinating reading. The last hundred pages or
so are devoted to chapters such as “Facebook And The World,” “The
Evolution Of Facebook,” and “The Future.” These speculative essays were
probably necessary to balance out the book, but they are the least
interesting portions of The Facebook Effect.

David Kirkpatrick is a former senior editor at Fortune magazine, and his

writing style is a winning combination of business facts mixed with the
quirky personalities of the key players. The Facebook Effect is informative
and fun, a rare combination in the world of business books. For up to the
minute information on the biggest social networking site the world has ever
known, it is recommended.
--------

New Scientist:

Is Facebook taking over the

world?
13:40 25 June 2010
Books
Jim Giles

Without Mark Zuckerberg, will Facebook be the same? (Image: Justin

Sullivan / Getty)

Here's one of the scariest passages from The Facebook Effect: "In
five years there won't be a distinction between being on and off
Facebook," says a former Facebook employee who claims still to be
"deeply involved" with the company. "It will be something that goes
with you wherever you are communicating with people."

Facebook's plans for world domination are born of its mission to help
people connect and share. It seems to be working. Its 400-million-
plus users have an average of 130 friends each. Many websites,
including New Scientist's, encourage readers to share content on
Facebook. Users play games that exist only in Facebook. They send
messages within the site rather than using email. Facebook is
creating an infrastructure so useful that its customers rarely need to
go elsewhere. More than half of its users log in every day.

Should we welcome Facebook's relentless expansion? Mark

Zuckerberg, the precocious and intense 26-year-old who built the site
during his first year at Harvard University, insists it exists to help
people connect and share. It's easy to feel cynical about such
pronouncements: Zuckerberg's share of Facebook is worth $4 billion.
But journalist David Kirkpatrick gained exceptional access to
Facebook's founder and reports that Zuckerberg consistently puts
these goals above short-term profit.

Kirkpatrick's account is convincing and engrossing. What is

frustrating, however, is his decision to place Zuckerberg's pureness of
ambition at the heart of the story, as if we should take the founder's
sincerity as evidence that Facebook is a force for good, rather than
question the impact the site has on our lives.

Zuckerberg, for example, is excited that political activists can utilise

Facebook to rally support. Kirkpatrick cites a 2009 study showing that
membership of political groups on the site encourages political
participation in the real world, but he fails to mention that the same
study also found that Facebook had no effect on people's political
knowledge. Facebook might foster political engagement, but by
exposing people only to their friends' ideas it could equally well
encourage groupthink.

A more troubling question is whether a private company should be

allowed to handle so much of the world's communications. Of course,
we already trust private postal firms and telephone companies. But
Facebook users are regularly confronted with unwanted changes to
the site that many feel expose too much of their personal information.
Facebook describes these updates as steps in its mission for
openness, but one can't help noticing that each change is attractive
to advertisers, who can use the information to better target their
messages.

Facebook also retains control over the content on its site. Pages
relating to criticism of pro-Beijing political parties in Hong Kong were
allegedly removed without reason this February. Around the same
time, the Argentinian author of a satirical book about Facebook is
reported to have had his profile removed, as did two others involved
in the publication. According to critics, in all these cases Facebook
reinstated the pages only after media protests, though the company
says that the accounts were disabled in error.
If Kirkpatrick's account of the firm's ethos is accurate, it seems unlikely that the removal of the
pages was part of a larger plan to censor criticism or bow to Beijing's will, but in a sense that does
not matter. One day Zuckerberg will leave Facebook, and the company's moral compass may
shift. Facebook may by then be even more central to our communications. Before that day
comes, it would be worth asking whether we want to place a commercial organisation at the heart
of our social interactions.

---------

Nonfiction review: 'The Facebook Effect' by David

Kirkpatrick
Special to The Oregonian
Posted:  06/26/2010 11:02 AM
   
Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg, a geeky Harvard
undergraduate, Facebook has become the second-most-
visited site on the Internet (after Google), with more than 350
million active viewers worldwide. Already available in about
70 languages, the social network is growing at a mind-
boggling rate of 5 percent a month -- and having a profound
impact on communications and connectivity in the 21st
century.

In "The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company

That Is Connecting the World," David Kirkpatrick, senior
editor for Internet and technology at Fortune magazine,
draws on unprecedented access to Zuckerberg to provide a
fast-paced and fascinating account of the company's
phenomenal success and an early-days assessment of the
ways in which it is changing the values, interests and
behavior of the "Facebook using hordes."

Kirkpatrick, it's clear, is a fan of Facebook. Zuckerberg, he

believes, is a brilliant, high-minded, visionary CEO who
refused to make his company's bottom line a priority.
Kirkpatrick shares his view that it's good for society to
encourage people to openly acknowledge who they are and
act consistently with their friends. Like Zuckerberg, he hopes
that Facebook can restore the kind of intimacy eviscerated
by modern, post-industrial life and, at the same time, create
what media theorist Marshall McLuhan called "the global
village."

Noting that Facebook users want to share information about

themselves and somehow control access to it, Kirkpatrick
acknowledges that software cannot provide ironclad
protections against invasions of privacy. But it helps, he
points out, that Facebook provides mechanisms for users to
put friends into groups and decide what to disclose to whom.
And he gives "some credence" to the argument that in a
more open and transparent world, people will behave more
responsibly because they know they'll be held to the
consequences of their actions, and standards about
indiscretions will be relaxed.

Kirkpatrick may be right. For better and worse, Zuckerberg

may turn out to have been right as well that if he built it (a
company that connects the world), they (the marketers)
would come. Although it has yet to turn a profit, Facebook
recently was valued at $10 billion. With more -- and better --
data about users than any other website, it's become a
magnet for investors and advertisers.

Facebook staffers often joke that the company aims at "total

domination." The "reason it's funny," Kirkpatrick concludes,
"is that it evokes a surprising truth."

THE FACEBOOK EFFECT

David Kirkpatrick 
Simon & Schuster
$26, 384 pages 

-- Glenn C. Altschuler
---------
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/jul/18/the-
facebook-effect-david-kirkpatrick-book-review/print
The Guardian/Observer, UK 7/18/10

The Facebook Effect by David

Kirkpatrick
David Kirkpatrick was handed the keys to the Facebook kingdom – the result is the definitive account of its
phenomenal rise
o James Harkin
o The Observer, Sunday 18 July 2010
o
o Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, views his creation as a
social movement. Photograph: Paul Sakuma/ASSOCIATED
PRESS
Last month Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer, stood in front of an industry conference in
Las Vegas and announced that email was on the way out. Figures showed that only 11% of teenagers use
email on a daily basis, she said; most preferred to send messages via social networks such as Facebook.
Even though she herself couldn't imagine life without it, she predicted that email "is probably going away".
Sandberg's figures weren't quite right; they referred to data on how many American teenagers
were using email to communicate with their friends on a daily basis, not how they were using it in general.
Given Facebook's enormous success in colonising our online activity, however, there's every reason to take
her hubristic ambition seriously. A good way to understand that ambition is to read David Kirkpatrick's
new book. In the summer of 2006 Kirkpatrick, a former technology writer for Fortune, found himself
invited to dinner with Facebook's youthful CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, as part of the company's charm
offensive. He subsequently won unprecedented access to Zuckerberg and 39 of his top employees to gather
material for this book, a kind of official history of the company and the most comprehensive account of its
rise yet.
Facebook began life in a student room in 2003, and its original function was to enable Zuckerberg and his
fellow Harvard students to rate each other's attractiveness and flirt with each other electronically; thus was
born Facebook's signature double entendre, the poke. Before long Facebook had morphed into an all-
purpose public facility, allowing students to huddle together in groups and forge whatever electronic
connections they liked. To Zuckerberg's surprise – he suspected it might be a fad – Facebook rapidly spread
to other universities, then to schools and then to everyone else. The statistics are mind-boggling. In January
of this year Facebook claimed 350 million active users, who spend a collective 8 billion minutes there
every day.
Facebook's arrival was timely, coming as it did just as more of us got used to spending time hooked up to
fast internet connections. Kirkpatrick shows us how brilliantly Zuckerberg polished his new machine,
constantly cleaning its minimalist look and cultivating its hunger for ever more data. The site's real engine
of growth, though, was its built-in network effect. Like any other communications network, Facebook's
usefulness grew as more people signed up and found each other; that, in turn, became a powerful incentive
for new arrivals to pass the word on.
Previous books about Facebook, such as Ben Mezrich's The Accidental Billionaires (the film of which, The
Social Network, hits the screens in October), have focused on the squabbles and personal relationships of
those involved in its early life. Kirkpatrick's wide-ranging access allows him to pay more attention to what
Zuckerberg was trying to achieve. In his sometimes oafish determination to realise his vision, Zuckerberg
turns out to be as much ideologue as engineer. For him, Facebook is primarily a social movement, not a
publishing platform: as he tells it, he is motivated not by money (he consistently refuses to sell up) but by a
passion for radical transparency. Sharing our data and making our lives publicly available to each other
turns us, he believes, into better people. A narrower gap between public and private reduces the potential
for hypocrisy and connivance, making it harder, for example, for people to cheat on their partners.
But as critics point out, such "radical transparency" also makes it easier for Facebook to monitor what we're
up to, and many people are uneasy with this. "As the service's engineers built more and more tools that
could uncover such insights," Kirkpatrick records, "Zuckerberg sometimes amused himself by conducting
experiments. For instance, he concluded that by examining friend relationships and communications
patterns he could determine with about 33% accuracy who a user was going to be in a relationship with a
week from now. To deduce this he studied who was looking at which profiles, who your friends were
friends with, and who was newly single, among other indicators."
Although Facebook now seems an established fixture of the net, the company is more fragile than it
appears. Companies powered by a network effect tend to wilt as quickly as they flower. Concerns about
privacy have plagued Facebook for the past few years; if another social networking universe were to come
along with a credible guarantee to protect our data, it could wither as quickly as did Bebo and Friendster
before it. The company now finds itself sandwiched between the sensitivities of its users and the
commercial imperative.
Kirkpatrick's story ends with the arrival of Sheryl Sandberg, whose job it is to make Facebook more
attractive to advertisers. She has done well. Facebook makes the bulk of its money by helping companies
target potential customers more effectively than mainstream media, and last year – the first that it began
turning a profit – it took an estimated $800m (£530m) in revenues. The effect of all this on the marketing
and advertising industries has only just begun to be felt.
Kirkpatrick has written the definitive account of Facebook's breathless rise to power. But the story of how
it tries to wield that power without scaring away its 350 million users is going to be even more of a white-
knuckle ride.
James Harkin is the author of Cyburbia (Little, Brown)

The Facebook Effect by David

Kirkpatrick | Book review
This article appeared on p41 of the The New Review section of the Observer
on Sunday 18 July 2010. It was published on guardian.co.uk at 00.04 BST
on Sunday 18 July 2010.
 guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2010
-----------------------
http://thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100716/REVIEW/707159984/1042

The National, Abu Dhabi

The Facebook Effect: beyond privacy

Last Updated: July 16. 2010 12:24AM UAE / July 15. 2010 8:24PM GMT

A new history of Facebook portrays the company's founder as an idealist devoted to the cause of total
transparency. But the digital revolutionaries may not understand their own rhetoric, writes Evgeny
Morozov

It used to be that highly idealistic young people – those starry-eyed mavericks burning to change the world
– were attracted to studying politics, learning their Trotsky and Gramsci, and dreaming of the worldwide
triumph of justice, if not equality.

What could seem more quaint today? In our innovation-obsessed society, political science no longer
commands the respect of adolescent revolutionaries, who would rather become venture capitalists than
public intellectuals. Having abandoned their Molotov cocktails for cans of Red Bull, they flock to computer
science departments instead.

The Facebook Effect

David Kirkpatrick
Virgin
Dh66
And for a very good reason: among recent social innovations, it is the development of the internet – rather
than some new political ideology – that holds the greatest promise for reshaping how we live, vote and
govern. Francis Fukuyama got it all wrong: history didn’t end: it just took a temporary refuge in
cyberspace.
The previous generation of digital visionaries, like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, saw themselves as hackers
fighting the system, before they launched their own multibillion-dollar empires. Their successors, having
made their money much faster, still fashion themselves as genuine revolutionaries, with highly idealistic
plans for the rest of us. They don’t shun profits, but financial considerations often take a back seat to their
ambitious agendas for social engineering.

Such rhetorical flourishes, particularly the growing buzz about “Internet freedom”, are, of course, very
helpful in creating a favorable political climate in Washington and Brussels: who wants to regulate the next
Gutenberg or Edison? But the idealism emanating from Silicon Valley is not fake. Unfortunately, all too
often it rests on a rather delusional reading of modern politics: Google’s China gambit, where the company
believed in its ability to outmaneuver the Communist Party and democratise the country by letting citizens
search for whatever they want,is a case in point. The problem with all this digital hubris, usually wrapped
in revolutionary rhetoric, is that it’s matched by an uncanny ability to influence public life: today’s
technology giants are not just idealistic, they are well-armed.

No entity embodies this new revolutionary urge better than Facebook, the six-year-old behemoth that has
come to dominate the world of social networking. The odds that it would succeed were tiny: Facebook was
a late entrant into an already overcrowded market (remember Friendster?) while its main competitor,
MySpace, had all of Rupert Murdoch’s money to burn. Besides, a company run by nerdy college drop-outs
sounds like the worst possible place to entrust one’s private data.

Why did Facebook succeed? Not least because Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s youthful founder,
understood that in order to be popular, any social networking site needed to be a hormone stock exchange.
And what better place to trade in hormones than a university campus? By initially limiting the site to
college students, Facebook tapped into a market that was active, hip and very appealing to advertisers.
Soon it was growing thanks to what economists call the network effect: the more users it had, the more
useful it was, and the more incentives there were to join.

Facebook then took off globally, often with minimal effort from its headquarters in Palo Alto; before long
the site was used for all kinds of dubious purposes, from killing time with the numerous games that have
sprung up on its platform to joining Holocaust denial groups. (Facebook’s management decided to let most
of those stay). Other web entrepreneurs might have laughed at such serendipitous uses of their site and
moved on, but Zuckerberg took Facebook’s success to mean that the world had radically changed: the
internet was poised to play a new and increasingly important role in our lives, and he was convinced his
creature could spearhead that revolution.

According to The Facebook Effect, a new book by the technology reporter David Kirkpatrick, Zuckerberg
is a strong believer in the benefits of transparency fostered by the Internet. “A more transparent world
creates a better-governed world and a fairer world”, Zuckerberg says. That this mission happens to be
lucrative is just a coincidence. In Kirkpatrick’s account, Facebook is a social phenomenon first and
business phenomenon second, despite the fact that Zuckerberg, who navigated the company to its $15
billion-dollar valuation, has become the youngest self-made billionaire in history.

But if there is a tragic hitch to Zuckerberg’s rise, it has less to do with his status as an accidental billionaire
(to quote the title of another recent book about Facebook) than his role as an accidental revolutionary, one
who lacks the intellectual grounding to wisely use the immense power he hass accrued. It’s as if the
president of a university “Save Darfur” club was appointed the UN envoy to the region.

Zuckerberg’s refusal to acknowledge that there are negative sides to his transparency revolution is
particularly glaring, if only for the banality of his excuses. His musings on politics would make even Sarah
Palin blush: “These things [social networking sites] can really affect people’s liberties and freedom, which
is kind of the point of government.” It gets worse on the subject of privacy. Zuckerberg believes that the
internet will push us to be better, more honest citizens: “The days of you having a different image for your
work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty
quickly”. This is a good thing, he thinks, since “having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of
integrity”.

But this is just plain wrong, even by Palo Alto standards. Those who feel it necessary to maintain two
“identities” might remind Zuckerberg that old prejudices persist even in the most liberal societies. Being
openly gay on Facebook, to take one example, is a luxury that people in more conservative countries (or
families or offices) still can’t afford. The digital revolutionaries may lack nuance, but they certainly excel
at moralising.

Zuckerberg wants the world to acknowledge the revolutionary status of his company before it becomes
subject to aggressive regulation, a possibility that looks increasingly likely. He often calls it a “utility”, a
rather risky move for any chief executive; akin, perhaps, to asking for more government oversight. But all
this “utility” talk is not for nothing. Most utilities simply satisfy basic human needs; they don’t create
demand for them. Who would blame the electric company for climate change? They are just the middle
man.

Facebook, too, wants to claim such privilege. Thanks to the internet, the world is becoming more social and
people are sharing more information. According to Zuckerberg, Facebook is only facilitating what would
be happening anyway. Like most digital revolutionaries, he holds technology in awe, seeing it as an
autonomous force that can’t be stopped or regulated. Such views are a dangerous amalgamation of social
and technological determinism: Zuckerberg and his colleagues believe that neither human behaviour nor
the manner in which technology unfolds can be altered (even Facebook’s annual technology conference is
called “f8” – read as “fate”). It’s not surprising that there is no place for politics in the digital revolution:
for its leaders, the state exists, if at all, merely to provide cheap broadband.

But such determinism is as dubious as the view that Facebook is an innocent and powerless player
following rather than shaping privacy trends. The bouquet of barely visible behavioural modifications,
ranging from narcissism to voyeurism, that the Facebook panopticon encourages would require the second
coming of Michel Foucault to think through. It may very well be true that Facebook is making the society
“more open” in some very limited sense of “openness”, but surely it has other effects on public life. Of
those Facebook’s founders are conspicuously silent

Perhaps Zuckerberg is just confused about the social implications of his creation, for its intellectual
complexity has outgrown his own. Alternatively, he is simply playing dumb, hoping that his talk of an
impending transparency revolution will help to keep Facebook unregulated. And then there is the least
plausible thesis, the one favoured by Kirkpatrick: Zuckerberg is a seer, and he peeped into the future and
saw that privacy had become obsolete.

But even if the likes of Facebook do believe in the social usefulness of what they are doing, societies need
more than their blind faith to assess such claims. The promises and perils of innovation need to be assessed
through a value-laden prism of ethics. As it happens, this has been the bread and butter of philosophy and
political science, the two disciplines that digital revolutionaries were quick to discard in favour of computer
science. But one can’t cook a revolution, even a digital one, out of bytes alone; ideas are still its key
ingredient, and Zuckerberg’s, unfortunately, seem dangerously half-baked.

Evgeny Morozov is a fellow at Georgetown University. His book about the internet and democracy will be
published in November.
------------------------
http://www.buffalonews.com/2010/07/18/1116174/how-facebook-started-and-where.html

Buffalo News
NONFICTION
How Facebook started and where it’s
headed
The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the
World By David Kirkpatrick Simon&Schuster 372 pages, $26
By Stephen T. Watson
NEWS BOOK REVIEWER
Updated: July 18, 2010, 6:36 am /
Published: July 18, 2010, 12:30 am
Facebook has more than 400 million active users — 75 percent of them outside the United States.
“Facebook” by mid-2008 passed the word “sex” as a search term on Google, and it is now the second-most
visited Internet site after the popular search engine.
Users on average spend an hour on the site each day—a cumulative 8 billion minutes worldwide every day
— and they add 100 million photos each day.
Facebook, for better or worse, is part of the culture. It changed the meaning of “friend” and added
“tagging,” “unfriend” and other terms to the language.
This is pretty impressive for a company that began in a Harvard dorm room six years ago.
Facebook and its still-youthful founder, Mark Zuckerberg, have received extensive news coverage and now
are the subject of books that attempt to present the story behind the company’s fantastic success.
“The Facebook Effect” author David Kirkpatrick was given extensive access to Zuckerberg and other key
Facebook employees over many months. Kirkpatrick was the senior editor for the Internet and technology
at Fortune, and he has written a serious assessment of the company’s rise.
He wanted to explain how this small social-networking start-up came to change everything about the
Internet — commerce, socialization, communication, political organization and the preservation of
memories — and to question whether it’s good for one company to have so much influence.
The Facebook creation story, by now well-known, is the stuff of Silicon Valley legend:A solitary, nerdy
computer genius comes up with a world-changing idea.
Zuckerberg gave people a tool to find and interact with people they already knew in real life in some way
— classmates, friends and would-be friends. Users were assured that people on “thefacebook,” the site’s
original name, were who they said they were.
The site was exclusive at first, available only to people who had a Harvard e-mail address, and had a
simple, uncluttered look that it retains today.
It went live at Harvard on Feb. 4, 2004, and by the end of the month three-fourths of undergraduates there
had signed up.
Facebook enjoyed so much initial success because it started at colleges, where people have dense social
networks and they socialized enthusiastically, Kirkpatrick points out. The site spread to Stanford and other
elite schools before it was opened to all colleges.
Zuckerberg, at 20, was offered $10 million for his site, but turned it down. He moved out to the technology
hotbed of Northern California with a few close friends, dropped out of Harvard and built up the site and a
framework for the company.
The ambitious Zuckerberg steadily guided the company’s growth, producing innovations — photo sharing
and tagging, the News Feed—that made Facebook even more popular.
Kirkpatrick is good, perhaps too good, at going behind the scenes at the various meetings with investors
who wanted to grab a financial stake in the site.
The site reached 1 million users by November 2004 and 70 million users by spring 2008. Buyout offers
continued to flow in, and the Facebook team is tempted, especially when some value the company at $1
billion, but Zuckerberg vigorously fights to keep control.
His personality changes over the course of the book—Kirkpatrick, early on, is forced to explain the rules of
the beer pong game that is a company obsession — and as Zuckerberg matures, the company matures.
Zuckerberg has a vexing, peculiar charisma. He hides his true feelings and it can be hard to tell if he’s
really listening to you. He believes deeply that people on the Internet shouldn’t separate their personal and
professional identities, nor should they hide behind anonymity.
Changing the world by making it more open — not money — is Zuckerberg’s motivation. “Don’t be lame”
is the company’s motto, Kirkpatrick writes, a nod to Google’s “Don’t be evil.”
“The Facebook Effect” sees the company as an international force for grass-roots organizing whose
members span geography, generations and cultures. Totalitarian regimes recognize Facebook’s power, and
the company will confront difficult decisions as it seeks to expand internationally.
Growth is the key to Facebook’s future. All of its users provide a storehouse of valuable personal data for
Facebook — our likes, our dislikes, where we spend our time and who we are.
We trust Facebook to protect our privacy, and the company insists it always will. But Facebook has
stumbled repeatedly, angering users and backtracking on occasion, even though the changes never drove
away many members.
Facebook has been valued at more than $23 billion, but revenue has lagged behind. Kirkpatrick writes that
the company generated $550 million in revenue in 2009, and could reach $1 billion this year.
Advertising is moving onto the Internet, because that’s where people are spending their time. This is
changing the relationship between consumers and companies, and Facebook is positioned to take
advantage.
Facebook is now as much a part of the establishment as Google and Microsoft, both of which wish to usurp
its position atop the social-networking heap.
Has Facebook peaked? Will it join Friendster and MySpace — sorry, Rupert Murdoch — in the social-
networking graveyard? The company faces many threats, Kirkpatrick writes as he looks ahead, including
the possibility of increased regulation and competition from Twitter.
But perhaps the greatest threat looms from the teenager sitting in a dorm room who has an idea for the next
big thing.
Stephen T. Watson covers technology culture for The Buffalo News.