The Facebook Effect - Part 1

David Kirkpatrick gives an in depth story of how the creator of The Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, brought this revolutionizing social network to life. Starting off in his dorm room at Harvard University, Zuckerberg was constatnly finding new projects to develop. The idea for developing an internet social network for Harvard was something that he had been considering for a while. "Zuckerberg went online and paid Register.com thirty-five dollars to register the web address Thefacebook.com for one year. This site borrowed ideas from Course Match and Facemash as well as from a service called Friendster" (pg. 27). With just a merely cost of thirty-five dollars, he had first launched a website that would forever change his life. When reading this section of the book it reminded me of when I had gone to the Texts From Last Night event. The creators of the website TFLN had no idea that it would be such a success when they paid someone only two hundred dollars to design their website. Before TFLN, there were many sites similar to it such as FML.com, and same goes for Facebook, whose competitor was Myspace. Essentially, in the beginning Facebook and Myspace were similar in the sense of social networking. However, Facebook offered limited functions and a plain white profile page, while Myspace allowed you to customize your page. Facebook was also more secure, at first only allowing Ivy League students access to it. Unlike Myspace, Zuckerberg had created a social network where individuals were allowed to keep their profiles private and only viewed by friends they accepted, therefore allowing people to share more information when using the website. "Facebook is profoundly, centrally, about people. It is a platform for people to get more out of their lives. It is a new form of communication, just as was instant messaging, email, the telephone, and the telegraph" (pg. 16). There is no doubt that Facebook has become a great new way of connecting with friends, acquaintances, and sometimes even strangers.
Zuckerberg became a CEO of a billion dollar company at the age 20. It's crazy to think how someone my age could invent something so unique and hold all that responsibility, but clearly it can be done. When developing The Facebook, Zuckerberg took ideas from many other social networking websites and combined and used them for Facebook. Zuckerberg was also sued by his fellow classmates for allegedly taking ideas from "Harvard Connection," a project which he worked on for 10 hours, with no contract, and was never paid. (pg. 84). The book goes into detail about several of the lawsuits, and I know the recent film "The Social Network" was loosely based off of them as well. Even though I never saw the movie, from what I've heard and seen from the commercials, it portrays Zuckerberg in a bad light, while the book shows him in more of a positive light. Whatever the case may be, the many ideas that Facebook uses were already out on the internet, he just managed to bring them all together. I honestly do believe that Zuckerberg deserves the credit that he receives for the initiation of Facebook. However, is Facebook the social networking site that he sought out for it to be and a beneficial part to our society? Well, that could be questionable.