[Book Review] The Facebook Effect by David Kirkpatrick

Rating: 4/5

Genre: Non-fiction

Book Review

It is clear from the title that this book is about FACEBOOK. The most widely-used social networking website in the world. Out of curiosity, I read this book after watching the movie “Social Networks”, which is about Facebook. In my opinion, the movie is not based on this book. But based on another book “The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal” by  Ben Mezrich. So this book presents another point of view for Facebook, and unquestionably Mark Zuckerberg.
This book consists of two parts: The history of facebook and the effect of facebook on the world. Personally, I found both part interesting. It lays down the detailed history of Facebook (not in a boring fashion). If you watched “Social Network” or red “The accidental billionaire”, you might think that Mark was a bad guy, who’d care for nothing but himself. He betrayed people over and over to get Facebook to the top of the world. This book presents another perspective. It’s the missing piece of why he did what he did.

The book tells the story of Facebook to the very current time, long after the end of the movie “Social Network”. It also discusses about that happend in the real world before and after Facebook took off. For example, do you know that Facebook exploited attrition of Google and Microsoft to get good deals from them.

Overall, I like this book. The content is good. The writing style is engaging. But it’s a bit long. So I would recommend this book for those who have real interest in Facebook or similar social networking technologies.
In the audiobook version, this book is narrated by David Kirkpatrick himself. Although not my favorite one, he is a very good job. One good thing about self-narrated book is that the author usually know the emotion of the content. He can recall his feeling when he wrote a book. Listing to him is like you are writing the book with him.

Takeaway

There are few things that I learn from this book. They are not general things. They are specific to Facebook:

• The innovation of Facebook is the authenticity. Facebook does not force people to use their real name. But you get little benefits if you use fake names.
• Google is about information, but Facebook is about communication. It would be interesting to see which one will be the last man standing.
• Facebook is not a website. It is a platform. And, platform (e.g., MS-Windows) is a real big thing. Once you have a platform. People can start building things in your way. In short, you do not own a website. You own the world. 

Table of Contents

• Prologue: The Facebook Effect [Part 1] [ส่วนที่ 1]
• Chapter 1: The Beginning 
• Chapter 2: Palo Alto 
• Chapter 3: Social Networking and the Internet 
• Chapter 4: Fall 2004 
• Chapter 5: Investors 
• Chapter 6: Becoming a Company 
• Chapter 7: Fall 2005 
• Chapter 8: The CEO 
• Chapter 9: 2006 
• Chapter 10: Privacy 
• Chapter 11: The Platform 
• Chapter 12: $15 Billion 
• Chapter 13: Making Money 
• Chapter 14: Facebook and the World 
• Chapter 15: Changing Our Institutions 
• Chapter 16: The Evolution of Facebook 
• Chapter 17: The Future 
• Postscript 

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Book or Audiobooks?

Personally, I prefer audiobooks. It's fun, and I can listen when I'm doing something else. It also makes other activities (e.g., jogging) a lot more fun. For more detail about audiobooks, please read [this post].

There is one more reason that may encourage you to go for the audiobook version. You can get it now for FREE. Audible offers you a free trial for 14 days. Even if you get the book and cancel the subscription right away (so that you don't have to pay), you can keep the book. And, don't worry if you lost the audiobook file. Just log into audible.com. You can keep downloading the over and over again.

About the summary: It takes time to finish up a book. And, when you do, sometimes, you want to review what you learn from the book. If you do not make notes as you read, you might have to go through the book once again. This can be time-consuming when you are dealing with a book. But you can still flip through the book and locate what you are looking for.

However, when the material is an audiobook, it is extremely hard to locate a specific part of content. Most likely you will have to listen to the entire audiobook once again.

This book summary will help solve the pain of having to go through the book all over again.

I am leaving out the details of the books. Most books have interesting examples and case studies, not included here. Reading the original book would be much more entertaining and enlightening. If you like    the summary, you may want to get the original from the source here [ Audiobook ] [ Book ].