I first came to know about Facebook in early 2011 through my students at the university where I teach. I found that they were sharing my class notes and assignment questions on Facebook which was intriguing to me. I wished to know if it was deemed appropriate and "respectable" for a faculty member to be active on Facebook.
In May 2011, I bought Ben Mezrich's Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, a Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal (2009) from a local bookstore and read it through. Mezrich's book was a racy read bordering on sensationalism and attempted to portray Mark Zuckerberg (founder of Facebook) as an evil genius.
Nevertheless the book convinced me of the importance of Facebook as a communication tool and I opened a Facebook account in June 2011. I has served me well for the last six years.
Recently I read David Kirkpatrick's The Facebook Effect: The Real Inside Story of Mark Zuckerberg and the World's Fastest Growing Company (updated edition; 2011) and found it to be more mature and balanced than Mezrich's book. It must also be mentioned that Kirkpatrick's book was shortlisted for the FT/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award 2010.
Mark Zuckerberg started his venture in his dormitory room at Harvard University in early 2004. Thefacebook.com was a website that allowed Harvard students to check out profiles of fellow students and interact with them and was a big hit. Encouraged by the response at Harvard, Zuckerberg slowly expanded the service to other college campuses in the US.
Kirkpatrick says that Zuckerberg's website was not the first social networking venture. Long before the invention of the World Wide Web, there was the Usenet which enabled people to post messages to groups dedicated to specific topics. In early 1997, a New York-based startup called sixdegrees.com was launched which attempted to map real relationships between real people. The service was too early for its time since dial-up modems then were too slow. Moreover there were few digital cameras and the site lacked photo upload features. Nonetheless, by 1999 sixdegrees.com had reached 3.5 million users and was bought for $125 million. It was shut down in late 2000 in the wake of the dotcom bust.
Other social networking sites were Friendster launched in February 2003 and LinkedIn launched by Reid Hoffmann in May 2003. MySpace was launched in August 2003 and Orkut (by Google) in January 2004, just two weeks before Thefacebook.com.
In spite of all this competition, Zuckerberg's site expanded tremendously. By November 2004 (within ten months of its existence) Thefacebook.com had registered its millionth user.
Thefacebook.com was developed by a group of college dropouts and lacked much seriousness. In September 2005, the name was changed to Facebook.com and incorporated into a company. Kirkpatrick does a good job of describing how a group of Lord of the Flies-style kids transformed into a bunch of serious business minded executives.
In 2006, Zuckerberg made the first move to transform Facebook into a platform where software developers could develop applications for Facebook. This was a real game-changer and within six months 250,000 developers were registered operating 25,000 applications. As Kirkpatrick says: "The platform brought Facebook a gravitas it never before possessed. It caused both technologists and ordinary users to sense that this service was more than they'd reckoned. In Silicon Valley and among techies worldwide, it suddenly became uncool not to have your own Facebook profile."
In 2007, Facebook opened to all people over the world and not just students. By May 2007, Facebook had 24 million active users, with 150,000 new users joining every day.
Kirkpatrick narrates the Facebook story till early 2010. He shows that Zuckerberg, though still young, was a shrewd judge of people and the ones who he chose to be mentors - Marc Andreessen, Don Graham and Sheryl Sandberg - all older to him, gave him sound advice while the major decisions where still made by him alone. By 2010, there were 500 millions users of Facebook which was available in 70 languages.
The story of Facebook after the publication of The Facebook Effect is well known. Currently there are 2 billion active users on Facebook and the company has 18,000 employees around the world. Facebook went public in February 2012 and its market cap stands at $250 billion.
Zuckerberg has maintained that the objective of Facebook is not just social networking but to promote transparency and fairness around the world. It was amazing how the 2011 Arab Spring protests and demonstrations were considerably catalyzed and sustained by Facebook, Twitter and other social media.
What is more amazing is how Zuckerberg has succeeded in monetizing Facebook by clever advertising ideas. The business model has been very successful and Zuckerberg's net worth is estimated at $58 billion making him the fifth richest person in the world. Quite an accomplishment for someone who is just 32 years old.
In May 2011, I bought Ben Mezrich's Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, a Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal (2009) from a local bookstore and read it through. Mezrich's book was a racy read bordering on sensationalism and attempted to portray Mark Zuckerberg (founder of Facebook) as an evil genius.
Nevertheless the book convinced me of the importance of Facebook as a communication tool and I opened a Facebook account in June 2011. I has served me well for the last six years.
Recently I read David Kirkpatrick's The Facebook Effect: The Real Inside Story of Mark Zuckerberg and the World's Fastest Growing Company (updated edition; 2011) and found it to be more mature and balanced than Mezrich's book. It must also be mentioned that Kirkpatrick's book was shortlisted for the FT/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award 2010.
Mark Zuckerberg started his venture in his dormitory room at Harvard University in early 2004. Thefacebook.com was a website that allowed Harvard students to check out profiles of fellow students and interact with them and was a big hit. Encouraged by the response at Harvard, Zuckerberg slowly expanded the service to other college campuses in the US.
Kirkpatrick says that Zuckerberg's website was not the first social networking venture. Long before the invention of the World Wide Web, there was the Usenet which enabled people to post messages to groups dedicated to specific topics. In early 1997, a New York-based startup called sixdegrees.com was launched which attempted to map real relationships between real people. The service was too early for its time since dial-up modems then were too slow. Moreover there were few digital cameras and the site lacked photo upload features. Nonetheless, by 1999 sixdegrees.com had reached 3.5 million users and was bought for $125 million. It was shut down in late 2000 in the wake of the dotcom bust.
Other social networking sites were Friendster launched in February 2003 and LinkedIn launched by Reid Hoffmann in May 2003. MySpace was launched in August 2003 and Orkut (by Google) in January 2004, just two weeks before Thefacebook.com.
In spite of all this competition, Zuckerberg's site expanded tremendously. By November 2004 (within ten months of its existence) Thefacebook.com had registered its millionth user.
Thefacebook.com was developed by a group of college dropouts and lacked much seriousness. In September 2005, the name was changed to Facebook.com and incorporated into a company. Kirkpatrick does a good job of describing how a group of Lord of the Flies-style kids transformed into a bunch of serious business minded executives.
In 2006, Zuckerberg made the first move to transform Facebook into a platform where software developers could develop applications for Facebook. This was a real game-changer and within six months 250,000 developers were registered operating 25,000 applications. As Kirkpatrick says: "The platform brought Facebook a gravitas it never before possessed. It caused both technologists and ordinary users to sense that this service was more than they'd reckoned. In Silicon Valley and among techies worldwide, it suddenly became uncool not to have your own Facebook profile."
In 2007, Facebook opened to all people over the world and not just students. By May 2007, Facebook had 24 million active users, with 150,000 new users joining every day.
Kirkpatrick narrates the Facebook story till early 2010. He shows that Zuckerberg, though still young, was a shrewd judge of people and the ones who he chose to be mentors - Marc Andreessen, Don Graham and Sheryl Sandberg - all older to him, gave him sound advice while the major decisions where still made by him alone. By 2010, there were 500 millions users of Facebook which was available in 70 languages.
The story of Facebook after the publication of The Facebook Effect is well known. Currently there are 2 billion active users on Facebook and the company has 18,000 employees around the world. Facebook went public in February 2012 and its market cap stands at $250 billion.
Zuckerberg has maintained that the objective of Facebook is not just social networking but to promote transparency and fairness around the world. It was amazing how the 2011 Arab Spring protests and demonstrations were considerably catalyzed and sustained by Facebook, Twitter and other social media.
What is more amazing is how Zuckerberg has succeeded in monetizing Facebook by clever advertising ideas. The business model has been very successful and Zuckerberg's net worth is estimated at $58 billion making him the fifth richest person in the world. Quite an accomplishment for someone who is just 32 years old.
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