Book Review #2 The Facebook Effect by David Kirkpatrick

If you are interested in startups, or how marketing and advertising are evolving, or just how Facebook is changing the world, buy this book. It’s very readable and gives great insights into how Facebook grew from a dorm room to a huge company. There’s no other book out there that gives such a complete history of the company and of Mark Zuckerberg.

But if you’re looking for an objective and true history of Facebook, this isn’t it. Kirkpatrick really, really loves Facebook. So much so that I’m not sure he’s even close to capable of being objective about the company.

The result is a book that not only celebrates Facebook’s truly amazing accomplishments, but it’s also a book that makes excuses for, or denies, Facebook’s stumbles along the way. And that’s fine. But it isn’t really the truth. What we need is a book that tells the absolute, brutal truth about Facebook.

Facebook isn’t just a social network or a potentially huge business, says Kirkpatrick. It might also bring world peace.

The two famous lawsuits that fell out of Facebook’s early days – ConnectU and houseSYSTEM – were characterized more as nuisance lawsuits than real questions about the integrity of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

We don’t need Kirkpatrick to shy away from the ugly details about the early days of Facebook. But he gives such a one-sided view of the story that it leaves me wondering what details are being left out.

“Zuckerberg clearly stole from the Winkelvoss brothers,” Kirkpatrick said this evening, “but the Winkelvoss brothers clearly stole from everybody else.”

That’s a great conclusion. I think most readers are intelligent enough to look at both sides of the story and draw the right conclusions.

They say that history is written by the victors. In the end The Facebook Effect reads more like an authorized biography than anything else. It’s the story of Facebook as Facebook wants the story told. It is a wonderful, if flawed, story about the creation of a company that half a billion people interact with regularly. I highly recommend you read it, and then wait for the book that will tell the whole story.

Thanks for reading!

Wei Jin