The Facebook Effect Book Summary - The Facebook Effect Book explained in key points

The Facebook Effect summary

Name: The Facebook Effect
Author: David Kirkpatrick

David Kirkpatrick

The Real Inside Story of Mark Zuckerberg and the World’s Fastest-Growing Company

Table of Contents

The Facebook Effect
Summary of 9 key ideas

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What’s in it for me? Learn how Facebook has changed how we communicate with each other.

While Facebook wasn’t the first online social network, it’s by far the first that comes to mind when you think about social networking.

From its early beginnings as a pet project realized in a Harvard dorm room to its status as one of the most popular websites in the world, Facebook has achieved both technological and business success.

Facebook has also spurred radical societal change. From how we consume media to how we communicate with each other and the world, Facebook’s influence is vast – and these blinks will show you how the social media site got so powerful, and what it means for you.

In the following blinks, you’ll also discover:

how Facebook helped bring police brutality to light in South Africa;
how U.S. President Obama used Facebook to help win the 2008 election; and
how a new form of journalism is being created when you “like” and “share.”

Before social sites Facebook and Friendster, there was the WELL and AOL.

Facebook didn’t invent social networks; in fact, the concept has been around since 1985.

Early social networks took the form of electronic bulletin boards. If you were a member, you could “chat” with other members online about common interests. One of the earliest online communities is the The Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link, or the WELL, which is still active today.
These early communities evolved rapidly as technology developed. Members could create personal profiles, establish private groups or even chat in real time in “chat rooms,” somewhat akin to today’s instant messaging. America Online (AOL) and Geocities were the first to offer such services.
Classmates.com was another site that helped you find and contact that good-looking guy from your graduating class: a feature still integral to modern social networks.

Strictly speaking, however, such virtual communities weren’t really social networks, according to the sociological definition of the term. In a true social network, a user can construct a profile, create a friend list, and use others’ profiles and friend lists to make new connections.

By this definition, the first real social network was start-up Sixdegrees.com. Its purpose was to map the relationships between people via member profiles that also listed friends and interests. The site’s draw was that you could “ find” someone in seconds through the site’s search engine.
Yet we all know the most satisfying part of finding a “friend” online is seeing what they really look like! It wasn’t until 2002 when Friendster was launched, a social network that allowed a user to include a profile photo. With this feature, the site was an instant success.

The following year, scores of new social networks popped up, including LinkedIn, Myspace, Spoke and Tribe.
So by the time Facebook arrived, the market was flooded with competition. Yet from day one it clicked and its success has been meteoric since.

What was its secret? Let’s go back to Facebook’s beginnings, starting in a college dorm room.

An idea dreamed up in a college dorm room quickly became one of the world’s most popular sites.

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.

Socially savvy co-eds and a boom in broadband use helped push Facebook ahead of competitors.

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.

Facebook stayed steps ahead of the competition by constantly evolving and improving its services.

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.

Famous mentors such as Marc Andreessen and Steve Jobs helped Zuckerberg fulfil his vision.

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.

Facebook has evolved to play a powerful role in politics, from online activism to national elections.

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.

Quicker and closer: Facebook has changed how we communicate with friends and strangers.

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.

Facebook users are changing traditional media by becoming their own editors and journalists.

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.

Our idea of what’s fit for public eyes and what stays private has changed with Facebook.

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.

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What is The Facebook Effect about?

The Facebook Effect reveals the inside story of social media site Facebook: its modest origins, its meteoric rise and its continued dominance in social networking. Author David Kirkpatrick shows how Facebook has not only changed how we communicate with each other, but also how we think about politics and the media – not to mention our attitudes toward privacy.

Best quote from The Facebook Effect

Having genius and ambition alone isnt going to get you there. Its really important to be lucky. But Mark had all three in spades. –Dustin Moskovitz

—David Kirkpatrick

Who should read The Facebook Effect?

Anyone who wants to better understand the impact Facebook has had on society
Anyone curious about the evolution of the world’s largest social network
Anyone who is still not a member of Facebook and is interested in how it works

About the Author

Journalist, author and conference organizer David Kirkpatrick is the developer of Fortune magazine’s Brainstorm Conference. His work has appeared in Fortune as well as in Forbes and Vanity Fair.

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