The Facebook Effect by David Kirkpatrick feels like Kirkpatrick's confession to his love for the social networking giant. In the first half of the book, the author begins to tell the story of facebook from its humble beginnings that began as a website to rate girls. Of course, as we all know, Facebook ran into some legal trouble where Zuckerberg was being sued because he allegedly stole someone's idea. Zuckerberg is painted as an overachiever, who is hard to work with, but is extremely ambitious. Facebook starts out small, first just at Harvard, then Ivy League schools, and then more and more colleges are included. To Zuckerberg, facebook wasn't about making money. After all he did refuse an $10 Million offer for the company.
The book has somewhat of a skewed tone towards facebook, in the sense that Kirkpatrick seems to hail Zuckerberg and his accomplishments, and fails to describe them in an unbiased manner.
From the beginning, Kirkpatrik speak of the creator of Facebook in an extremely positive light. "He was captain and most valuable player on the fencing team...on his application to Harvard, he could barely fit all the honors and awards he won in high school. " (pg.20)
Unfortunately not everybody used facebook in the way the Zuckerberg had intended it to be. Many people, even to this day, use it as a way to accumulate the most amount of friends rather than to communicate and gather useful information.
I think much of Facebook's success has to do with luck. The fact that Mark Zuckerberg was in college,at Harvard no less, where social networks are the densest, definitely helped to position him in a way that made it so lucrative.
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