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…