The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World by David Kirkpatrick
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
A lot of things about facebook are a mystery to me.
Not how to use the service or why it is so popular, but why the pages have so few ads on them; how were they able to scale so smoothly; why have they never listed publicly ?; how do they make money ?; why were they so ignorant of the privacy implications of what they did ?
Well this book went a long way to answering these questions.
The answer to these questions is Mark Zuckerberg.
Zuckerberg’s driving force with facebook was to `grow the site’. He hates banner ads, he isn’t particularly worried about making money, he has total and absolute control over every aspect of the company including 3 of the 5 seats on the board.
The desire to grow the site has driven the problems. They were willing to do almost anything to entice more users. This, I feel is the root of the claims of facebook being evil.
I didn’t understand this important point until I read this book.
Intelligent debate about Facebook is hard to find out there. For such a heavyweight in the internet, it doesn’t get talked about much. This book filled in a lot of the gaps for me.
So I felt quite satisfied after reading this book. My questions were answered by the central role that Mark Zuckerberg plays in facebook – it is HIS company.
If I had to critcize the book I would say that the author seems a little too fond of Zucks, a bit to quick to praise him or dismiss his faults. Almost sycophantic at times.
If you have a passing interest in facebook as a technology or as a phenomenon, then this book is for you.
digital davo on da web 