Facebook Effect pt 1

Reading Kirkpatrick's "The Facebook Effect" I immediately expected to read something similar to the premise of "The Social Network", not that there is anything wrong with this assumption (because Mark Zuckerberg is obviously important while discussing this topic), but I was glad to be somewhat wrong. The fact that Kirkpatrick begins the book with a story about a Colombian man who used Facebook to organize a group against FARC (terrorist group who were terrorizing his country) was honestly an amazing intro. Instead of focusing on the standard "college, girls, partying" that one would expect from Facebook, the reader is given a legit example of how powerful, useful, amazing a website like Facebook can actually be when used at it's full potential. The first chapter does eventually move into what is expected when talking about Facebook, and discusses how there are negative aspects to such a website existing (especially in a country like the US), "What does it mean that we are increasingly living our lives in public? Are we turning into a nation--and a world--of exhibitionists?" is the question that Kirkpatrick asks and I find myself wondering very often since Facebook has been a part of my life. The next 2 chapters in the book discuss the standard story that I was expecting it to begin with and I think because I was caught off guard with how interesting the first chapter was, it made me more interested to read these chapters. It was cool to hear about the white board and how Zuckerburg was being taken around New York City to meet big time investors while he was still a sophomore in college. It was also interesting to see how Friendster creator admitted his social network was not built on "new ideas" but rather just modified to enhance older ideas of social networking (which is essentially what Facebook does to dominate the market). The Chapter "Fall 2004" was the most interesting to me because it shows how powerful Facebook or "Thefacebook" was when it tells the story of Harvard's President Lawrence Summer's used the website to check out profiles of incoming freshman students. It goes on to say how it became a standard in many other prestigious schools (Stanford, Columbia, Yale, Dartmouth). In the first 105 pages of this book I believe that Kirkpatrick does a great job of first displaying the power that this website has on a worldwide scale which then gets the readers attention and allows him to begin explaining how the website has gotten to this point.