I took advantage of technology for this assignment. I downloaded and read The Facebook Effect on my Kindle. I’ve had the Kindle for almost a year now, but have never used it for school until now. It’s great, but there is a downside that I must mention. The Kindle doesn’t show page numbers, so you’re unable to cite any page numbers for reference.
Let me start by saying that this is, hands down, my favorite book of the semester. I think the best was saved for last. I love that this book is a biography. It’s such a great change from the other books we’ve read. It’s a book that I found very interesting, as a huge fan of Facebook, and because it’s all about something that’s a part of so many people’s lives.
The author of this book, David Kirkpatrick, was a former technology writer for Fortune. He was invited to have dinner with Facebook's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, in 2006. At that time, he won unprecedented access to Zuckerberg and 39 of his top employees to gather material for this book. The Facebook Effect is now considered to be an official history of the company and the most definitive account of Facebook's rise to power.
I love how Kirkpatrick grabs us right away, in his prologue. If you didn’t already know all about Facebook, you learn that it can be a powerful tool. Facebook can be used for something simple, such as keeping in touch with friends and family, but in the prologue we learn about the massive effect of a single post from one young man named Oscar Morales. Mr. Morales started a Facebook campaign from his bedroom through a midnight posting. He posted what was on his mind, logged off, and went to bed. His campaign was called Un Millon de Voces Contra Las FARC—One Million voices against FARC. Little did he know that his campaign against a Colombian guerrilla organization would lead to worldwide attention and protests. As a matter of fact, it led to one of the largest demonstrations ever, anywhere in the world. I find the impact of one man’s anger and disgust, and his venting on a social media website, to be just amazing.
Mark Zuckerberg is a creative genius. He knows all about timing, and how timing is indeed everything. He created Facebook just as people were getting faster internet connections. His $100 million donation to Newark schools was right around the time of the New York Film Festival premier of “The Social Network” which portrays an unflattering portrait of Zuckerberg as a selfish egomaniac. Love him or hate him, you have to respect him.
Facebook began life in a student room in 2003, as Facemash. Its original function was to allow Zuckerberg and his fellow Harvard students to rate each other's attractiveness and flirt with each other electronically. It was kind of a snobby website, exclusive to Harvard students. It then became “thefacebook,” and Zuckerberg’s out-of-pocket was originally all of $35.00 to register the domain name.
In June 2004, after a coincidental meeting with the former co-creator of Napster, Sean Parker, Facebook received its first investment of $500K from the co-founder of Paypal (another site I love), Peter Thiel. In 2005 Facebook granted access to members belonging to recognized academic institutions and other organizations in the United States, Canada and other English-speaking countries as long as they could provide a valid email I.D. associated with their institutions. In the same year, "the" was dropped from the name, and the domain Facebook.com was purchased for $200K. Two equity and venture capital firms (Accel Partners and Greylock Partners) then invested $12.7 million and $27.5 million, respectively. After few months, Zuckerberg, along with Dustin Moskowitz and Chris Hughes, two of his Harvard friends who helped him to build Facebook, dropped out of Harvard and moved to Palo Alto, California to run the website as their sole occupation.
Zuckerberg was determined to maintain independence, and not sell Facebook. (He continues to maintain that the money does not motivate him, even to this day.) He decided to launch it globally, allowing anyone who had a valid email address to sign up for a Facebook account. At this stage of the game, there was still strong competition from MySpace. In 2007, Facebook was approached by Microsoft, which subsequently acquired 1.6% of the shares of the company for the sum of $240 million. A month later, another a Hong Kong billionaire invested $60 million in the company.
Zuckerberg claims to have a passion for transparency. He believes that we'd all be better people if we shared our data with one another, making our lives publicly available to each other. He feels that when the gap is narrowed between public and private, the potential for hypocrisy will be reduced, and it becomes harder, for example, for people to cheat on their partners when everything is so public and out in the open. However, Zuckerberg's beliefs have raised concerns about privacy issues that have plagued Facebook for the past few years.
Facebook makes most of its money by helping companies target potential customers more effectively than mainstream media. It is a routine part of the lives of hundreds of millions of people around the world. Many people can be made aware of something almost simultaneously, and with ease. You don’t need to be a genius or have any specific skills to be on Facebook. Like on Wikipedia, everyone can be a content creator or an editor, in addition to a producer and a distributor. Facebook changes how people communicate and interact, how marketers sell products, how governments reach out to citizens, and even how companies operate. You can most likely find a Facebook page for your favorite brand, favorite food, or favorite store. Facebook is the second most visited site, after Google. Facebook claims more than 400 million active users as of February 2010, and it operates in 75 languages.
One final thought. Two famous high tech companies were founded by Harvard University dropouts in their dorm rooms -- Microsoft and Facebook. What are the rest of us doing wrong?
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