The Facebook Effect

The inside story of Facebook, told with the full, exclusive cooperation of founder Mark Zuckerberg and the company’s other leaders.

In August, 2008, Facebook signed up its 100 millionth user. Eight months later its 200 millionth user signed up. Today it is over 350 million users. This phenomenal growth rate is unprecedented and shows the allure and power of Facebook. It has become an essential part of the social life of a generation, all around the world.
David Kirkpatrick traces the Facebook story from its origins in Mark Zuckerberg’s dorm room at Harvard, where a handful of 19-year-olds devised a way for Harvard students to connect with one another, then with other Ivy League students, then college students more generally, and so on until it became the #1 social networking site on the internet that it is today.  This is the inside story of one of the greatest business and social tales of our time.

Reviews

“Facebook is becoming the dominant social networking tool, facilitating our online and offline worlds. The Facebook Effect effectively shows its rapid evolution, where it is going, and how it will increasingly affect our lives.” --Craig Newmark, founder of craigslist

“David Kirkpatrick recounts in fastidious and fascinating detail the breakneck development of this 21st century phenomenon. Facebook's capacity to galvanize human behavior has already had vast and irreversible consequences for society, politics, and marketing. There will be many more to come - accompanied, it seems certain, by some degree of turbulence. It's a fascinating story, and it's only 6 years old.” --Martin Sorrell, CEO, WPP Group

"It's fun to read this amazing story of how Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook and made it huge worldwide. It's also a brilliant window into what it takes to be a successful Internet entrepreneur." --Marc Benioff, founder and CEO, Salesforce.com