The Facebook Effect was by far my favorite book we read this year. It had a very interesting story line and kept me entertained the whole time. The beginning detailed Mark Zuckerberg early college life and experiences. It described him as being very technology oriented and could spend hours on end, without sleeping, designing and improving different programs and applications. He even got his room mates involved in his projects, brainstorming different ideas and writing them on the white board. Zuckerberg aimed to make life's tasks easy, convenient, and connected. He embodied this principle in the program he created, called Course Match, which allowed students to find out who was in their classes. From this idea he created Facemash. Facemash, although extremely popular, got Zuckerberg into quite a bit of trouble. Many people were extremely offended by a program that put Harvard students face-to-face, in a battle of looks. From these two ideas, Zuckerberg began to develop The Facebook.
I went to see The Social Network and I found that the first half of the book pretty much followed the plot of the movie. There were only a few instances where additional people involved with the creation of Facebook were mentioned. The later half of the reading got very technical and swayed away from the movie, going into detail about all the business aspects of Facebook. There was a lot more information listed here then there was in the movie, due to the fact that the movie was strictly for entertainment purposes.
It was odd reading about something that is so entrenched into my life and sometimes I forget there was even a time before Facebook. When these types of tools seem to come to us so naturally and with such ease, it is easy to forget how much work went into creating them. One harvard undergraduate student came up with a brilliant idea to connect people all over the world and has become a billionaire and a tremendous success.
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