The long awaited book about the first few years of Facebook is almost over. You can pre-order David Kirckpatrick’s The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World for the Kindle here and in hardcover here.
I would summarize the best parts for you but, really, the whole thing is the best part. Kirkpatrick clearly got very deep access to Mark Zuckerberg and other Facebook execs, as well as relevant outsiders. He details Mark’s constant need to fend off venture capitalists and suitors, the raucous early days of the company (including a lawsuit by a very angry owner of a trashed house), and a whole lot more. Much of this has never been written about before.
Excerpt 1: The Early Days
In the first week of his sophomore year at Harvard, Mark Zuckerberg cobbled together an internet software program he called Course Match. The idea was to help students pick classes based on who else was taking them. If a cute girl sat next to you in Topology, you could look up next semester’s Differential Geometry course to see if she had enrolled in that as well. Hundreds of students immediately started using it.
His next project, in October, he called Facemash. Its purpose: figure out who was the hottest person on campus. He invited users to compare two different faces of the same sex and say which one was hotter. A journal he kept at the time, which for some reason he posted along with the software, suggests Zuckerberg got into this jag while upset about a girl. “______ is a bitch. I need to think of something to take my mind off her,” he wrote, adding, “I’m a little intoxicated, not gonna lie.” By the time the program launched, he had dropped the idea of also comparing students to farm animals. “Another Beck’s is in order,” Zuckerberg wrote as he continued his Facemash chronicles. By the time he returned to his room from a meeting the next day, his laptop was so bogged down with Facemash users that it was freezing up.
When he launched Facebook the following February (initially called thefacebook.com), it was a rudimentary site, but flirting on Facebook quickly became a sort of art form. One feature — the poke — made doing so absurdly easy. Poking was a particular fascination in those days, even among the supposedly sophisticated students of Harvard. What did a poke mean? Its indeterminate message was one of its appeals. Zuckerberg posted an insouciant answer on the site: “We thought it would be fun to make a feature that has no specific purpose… So mess around with it, because you’re not getting an explanation from us.”
This inside look at the early days of the world's largest and most connected social network, an excerpt from a new book by David Kirkpatrick, is both fascinating and frightening. The tales of amateurishness and immaturity, while a part of college-startup culture, are rather disconcerting when one remembers that this company has one of the largest and most valuable data-mines on a majority one of the most valuable consumer demographics.
I can only hope that Facebook's business face has gotten a bit more serious. They are, after all, playing with other peoples' fire.
