Much similar to the movie, The Social Network, David Kirkpatrick's The Facebook Effect; The Inside Story of the Company That is Connecting the World tells the story of nerdy, socially awkward Mark Zuckerberg as he discovers the social phenomena, Facebook. This first third of the book continues on a much similar path of the movie, in which Zuckerberg's personality is revealed and the beginnings of Facebook are documented. Kirkpatrick describes Zuckerberg as the quiet introvert type, although surprisingly enough, he seemed to attract girls because of "...his confidence, his humor, and his irreverence" (Kirkpatrick 20). He appeared as somewhat of an elitist, easily bored with the conversations of strangers and ridden with a super-ego; "... if you went (talked) on too long or said something obvious, he would start looking through you. When you finished, he'd quietly mutter 'yeah,' and then change the subject or turn away" (Kirkpatrick 20). This description of Zuckerberg remains consistent with that of the movie, in which he is portrayed as a cocky nerd, resentful to those who he either finds too boring, or to those who he feels don't pay him the proper attention.
Later in the first part of the book, Kirkpatrick describes how Facebook, or called in those early days, Thefacebook, derived from Zuckerberg's earlier project(s), Facemash. Facemash was similar to websites such as Hotornot.com, in which the viewer judges two different girls and decides which one is "hotter". However, after getting dumped by his girlfriend at a local bar, Zuckerberg went back to his dorm at the Kirkland House and created this new website Facemash, in which viewers judged two or more different girls and decided which one was hotter (very similar to Hotornot.com), however in this case the girls actually belonged to the university. Zuckerberg, or "Zuck", hacked into the Kirkland House's directory, and uploaded pictures of the girls who belonged to the house onto his site, and coded it so that students all over the university could judge these girls from Kirkland House and rate them (Kirkpatrick 24). The difference between random girls from other known sites and Zuck's Facemash is that the students who actually rated the girls, knew the girls in real life. Students were judging online girls that they possibly knew, or interacted with, or just saw, on a day to day basis around school. This local, and familiar aspect of Facemash was crucial to the development of Facebook. On Facebook, as most of us all know pretty well, the user interacts with people he or she knows in the real world, his friends. This aspect of Facemash built the fundamental social networking idea that Facebook is built upon.
The rest of this portion of the book describes how Thefacebook grew out of the Harvard campus, and by the end of the summer of 2004, was now on over 34 schools and over 100 thousand members (Kirkpatrick 41). Also, Kirkpatrick introduces Sean Parker (played by Justin Timberlake, the boy-band superhero, in the movie), one of the co-founders of Napster, and documents Parker's early contributions to Thefacebook.com. Although a little silly, one of the major contributions Parker made to Zuckerberg and his growing company was to drop the 'The" in Thefacebook.com.
I think that beyond a shadow of a doubt Facebook was driven to success by the ambitions of Zuckerberg, and also by his cocky and self-righteous attitude he had towards himself. Zuckerberg, already early in the makings of Facebook, would undergo a law suit filed by the Winkelvoss twins, who had come to Zuckerberg early in the 2003 school year to hire Zuck as a coder for their own idea of a social networking site. Also, he would lose his bestfriend and CFO of the company due to legal issues surrounding Saverin's shares in the company, and disputes Saverin had with Parker about control of Facebook (Kirkpatrick 87).
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