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“Facebook is founded on a radical social premise–that an inevitable enveloping transparency will overtake modern life.”

Dan and I met a VentureBeat writer at a bar who mentioned that The Facebook Effect was “actually good,” so we both ended up reading it on vacation. It was admittedly a fun and interesting read that was difficult to put down. Even though The Social Network movie is based upon the other much less credible book, The Accidental Billionaires, I’m now pretty excited to see it anyway. One of the weird (voyeuristic?) parts about reading The Facebook Effect was that I vaguely know some of the players. I also tried to hit on Sean Parker via Friendster back in college. I guess the online social communities were really small in those days. (Parker was kind of smug, and now that I’ve read more about him I can understand why I failed. Fortunately so, as he has a bit of a rockstar mentality and was also much more attractive in his professionally shot Friendster photos than he is in real life.) What was less weird and rather enjoyable was being able to visualize the action since much of it took place in Palo Alto where I lived for four years. Even though it’s a good story, the book is not particularly quoteworthy. Still, I have gleaned what interesting tidbits I could and provided some personal commentary below.

At one of those meetings in June [2004], a financier offered Zuckerberg $10 million for the company. Mark had just turned twenty. Thefacebook was four months old. He didn’t for a minute think seriously about accepting.

Anyone who is my Facebook friend knows that I am a huge Facebook user. Some may have teased me for it or stifled me on their news feeds (fortunately, I don’t have to know). Ever since I joined when Facebook opened at Stanford in early 2004, I’ve been a firm believer. I have had multiple friends–and by friends I mean real friends whose opinions I respect–tell me over the years that either 1) Facebook is only in it for the money or 2) Facebook isn’t worth anything anyway. I knew Facebook was getting offers to sell late in my college years (2006) but had no idea that an offer, which would have been a substantial win for Zuckerberg at the time and for such little work, had come so early. Reading about offer after rejected offer really reaffirmed by long-held faith in the Facebook leadership despite all the bad press it had received over the years. It’s possible that Zuckerberg is power hungry, but he wants that power because he wants to control the product and make it good. Which he has.

About a year ago, I was considering trying to get a job at Facebook even though the commute would suck because it seems that no matter what its valuation is, that valuation always increases (meaning there’s money to be made all around). At that point, some friends, even ones who considered themselves Valley insiders, were saying that it couldn’t possibly be a good place to move because it had already done all its growing. If anything, Facebook would implode. Time and again, the naysayers have been wrong. Just sayin’.

Zuckerberg preferred working with people his own age. He believed they were superior programmers, for one thing. Sometime later, at a small conference, he showed his stripes in talking to a bunch of other entreprenuers. ‘I want to stress the importance of being young and technical,’ he said, according to the VentureBeat blog. ‘Young people are just smarter. Why are most chess masters under 30?’ You can imagine how reading that made the growing number of Facebook executives in their thirties and forties feel.

Curious, does that mean 20-year-old Zuckerberg was smarter than 35-year old Zuckerberg will be?

[...] advertising should always be useful to the user.

Facebook’s ads have been immensely useful to me: all the way from finding Groupon before my friends to advertising for roommates in my college network.

[Moskovitz] and Zuckerberg were also closely following the outcome of Google’s acquisition in early May of Dodgeball, a company that used cell phones to help you track the physical location of your friends. ‘We saw that dodgeball was going to shit,’ says Moskovitz. ‘And Google was the mecca of start-ups. If an acquisition there was going to fail I didn’t feel great about going to a company [Yahoo!] that was known for being kind  of behind the times.’

Like I said, even when it came closest to selling, Facebook wasn’t really interested in letting its product get destroyed if that’s what it took to “cash out.”

Facebook was not meant to be cool, just useful.

He [Zuckerberg] recalls that in Facebook’s early days some argued the service ought to offer adult users both a work profile and a ‘fun social profile.’ Zuckerberg was always opposed to that. ‘The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly,’ he says. He makes several arguments. ‘Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity,’ Zuckerberg says moralistically. But he also makes a case he sees as pragmatic–that the ‘level of transparency the world has now won’t support having two identities for a person.’ [...] Zuckerberg, along with a key group of his colleagues, also believes that by openly acknowledging who we are and behaving consistently among all our friends, we will help create a healthier society.

That explains why Facebook has dropped the ball on “work” profiles. They are not part of the mission. I can’t say I 100% agree with this one. I think I’ve benefitted in some ways from the transparency that Facebook has introduced into the work world, but it’s easy (and naive) to say that you don’t need different identities when you work at a laid back internet company like Facebook.

As one expert in privacy law recently asked, ‘How many openly gay friends must you have on a social network before you’re outed by implication?’

On the bright side, at least you don’t really have to come out. It’s both a blessing and a curse that Facebook won’t really let you be anyone other than who you really are unless you actively lie.

If you are friends with someone on Facebook, you may learn more about them than you learned in ten years of offline friendship.

Feel free to make fun of me, but I have connected on a much deeper level with certain people as a result of the opportunity to get to know them online. One of my closest confidantes in high school was a friend who I chatted with late into the night on AIM but rarely spoke to in real life because he was shy. I think getting to know people online can also make it much easier to find the appropriate romantic partner and waste less time on people who are poorly-suited to you.

[...] more visibility makes us better people.

It’s interesting to see some old high school contacts being friendly and even downright nice to others who they wouldn’t have given the time of day way back when. While visibility probably makes us better people as adults (perhaps Facebook helps us recognize our common humanity), I wonder if this applies to present-day school kids. Facebook can bring all the problems that usually stay at school right into a tortured child’s home.

‘A more transparent world creates a better-goverened world and a fairer world.’ This is, for him [Zuckerberg], a core belief.

When readers log in to comment or interact on one of these sites or devices using Facebook Connect they are identified by their Facebook photo and real name. This addresses a huge problem that has afflicted blogs and news sites–the significant percentage of posts by readers that have been extreme, insulting, and anonymous. When discussants log in under their real names with Connect, the dialog becomes more civilized.

Until I read this book, I had forgotten how completely anonymous the internet used to be. Remember the early AOL experience which pretty much consisted of logging into chat rooms under names like BrownEyes42 and talking about nothing (or sex) with random strangers because they were the only other people online?

Filed under: Books, Technology Tagged: | AIM, AOL, Facebook, Friendster, Mark Zuckerberg, The Accidental Billionaires, The Facebook Effect, The Social Network, transparency