Good evening dear followers. This week we were asked by Professor Ferguson to start reading the book titled, "The Facebook Effect" by David Kirkpatrick. Kirkpatrick begins by telling us background information on a sophomore at Harvard University named Mark Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg never thought sleep was a priority as he scribbled daily on his life-size "eight-foot-long whiteboard"; while also innocently creating an internet software which he called Course Match (p.19). Course Match which I found rather interesting was a software that allowed students to see if their friends had enrolled in classes so then also knew if they wanted to sign up for them as well. Zuckerberg had created a program that students wanted to use. Zuckerberg was full of confidence, blunt, brutally honest and often meticulous. Mark became close friends with his hall roommates Moskovitz and Hughes; they later became known as "three eggheads that loved to talk about ideas" with their extreme confidence that they would rule the world (p.22).
Zuckerberg started another project by October of his sophomore year at Harvard, known as "Facemash". This website invited users to rate another as, "hot" or "not". The photos for the Facemash website came from "facebooks" from each of the different Harvard houses. The "facebooks" were "pictures taken the day students arrived for orientation" (p.23); the facebooks were not just handed over to Zuckerberg he went and did some illicit things in order to get them. After many complains of sexism and racism Zuckerberg was accused of violating the college's code of conduct--security, copyright and privacy were all issues that Marc broke. Luckily Marc was not expelled from Harvard as he claimed Facemash was a "computer science experiment and had no idea it would spread so quickly"(p.25). Zuckerberg continued through his college years making little Web programs that attracted students to use them.
Zuckerberg ended up going online and paying $35 to register the web address, thefacebook.com, for the time frame of one year. Thefacebook.com was a blended site with ideas taken from Course Match and Facemash; as well as Friendster which was a social networking site which allowed individuals to create a profile of themselves, complete personal data such as hobbies and interests, and then allowed their profiles to be linked to those of their friends. This same time, MySpace had come onto the social networking scene but did not make such a huge impact at Harvard University. Thefacebook.com was strictly open to Harvard University students who had a harvard.edu email address; it was growing bigger and bigger everyday' so big that Zuckerberg paid a private computer server to hold the website so it had no linking to the harvard.edu network. Thefacebook.com had grown so huge that students from other universities all over the country were sending emails, texts, and calling to add their school to thefacebook.com roster.
Thefacebook.com needed investors; so Reid Hoffman the founder of LinkedIn being impressed by the site wanted to invest but not be its sole investor. Reid pulled in Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal, as well to invest in thefacebook.com. Thefacebook met a need among students at Harvard and other colleges; "paper facebooks were handed out freshman year at most schools and typically showed photos of every student along with just their name and high school" (p.90); yet these had limitations. The online version allowed you to closely examine a future date, or acquaintance; while even searching your new acquaintances friends. Thefacebook.com became an obsession with the endless clicking and viewing of profiles set you into a trance. I can't wait to see how the rest of this book turns out.
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