The Facebook Effect summary

Mark Zuckerberg was a tinkerer. As he was always messing around with coding projects, his Harvard classmates didn’t pay much attention to yet another project called Thefacebook in early 2004.

Zuckerberg named his project after college “face books,” booklets that listed students’ names, class years and profile photos. Initially, Thefacebook was accessible only to Harvard students, although Zuckerberg secretly suspected that the site could be hugely popular.

Facebook’s meteoric success may seem unbelievable. Yet the site’s quick growth and popularity had a lot to do with being in the right place at the right time.

Importantly, broadband usage rose dramatically around the time when Facebook and Myspace were launched. With faster loading times, social networking online has a lot more appeal.

Though Facebook started as a social website for college students, today its popularity has spread around the globe. Yet how did it evolve?

The site’s first significant milestone came in the fall of 2005. Early Facebook members liked that they could post a photo as part of their online profile, but as there was only room for one uploaded photo, users would frequently change their profile picture, even several times a day.
Facebook in response developed a photo-hosting service so multiple photos could be uploaded and tagged with key information or other Facebook members’ names. With search, you could find all the photos of a particular friend, regardless of the profile on which they were displayed. Users quickly took to the new service and uploaded an uncountable number of images.

Though Zuckerberg is famous for his online networking site, he was in fact also skilled in creating offline networks. 

Zuckerberg recruited some of his closest friends as supporters and early collaborators. While his college roommates were initially skeptical of the project, Zuckerberg eventually won them over.

Considering that Facebook connects more than 500 million active members in just a few clicks, it’s not a stretch to say the service has changed how communities communicate and political issues are addressed on a global scale.

We call this change the Facebook effect.

When we want to contact friends, we’ll often turn to Facebook without a second thought. However, the instinctive way we now use social media reflects a radical change in communications that Facebook has inspired.

Facebook has already begun to supplant communication channels that were previously the norm. For many young people, writing an email seems an archaic exercise.  

Do you want to be a journalist? With Facebook, you can report, write and publish as if you were one. And if your story’s interesting, your post just might go viral, reaching thousands of people.

Facebook users have come to exercise more influence over media content and how it is received. Traditionally, a newspaper editor would choose which stories were the most important; today, every time you “like” or share an article, it gets pushed to more and more readers.

What does your best friend know about you? What about your boss? What we share with others and what others share about us has changed considerably with the advent of Facebook. 

For many, Facebook has made separating the professional and the personal a challenge.