David Kirkpatrick sets a difficult task for himself in writing a definitive account of one of the great technology stories of all time. Facebook — hatched by Harvard students and enormously popular since moving beyond elite colleges a mere six years ago — is one of the most controversial companies in the world.
In The Facebook Effect, the company’s chief executive and guiding intelligence, a 26-year-old East Coast transplant named Mark Zuckerberg, comes across as a reclusive know-it-all, an irascible rebel prone to sophomoric pranks. Kirkpatrick profusely thanks Zuckerberg for his cooperation, but his is not an authorized account. In these pages, Zuckerberg so often shops Facebook for sale to big-name media tycoons, only to reject deals at the last moment, that his manner seems insulting, even humiliating. Yet Kirkpatrick finds these failed deals irresistible copy, so much so that his book might be better titled, “How many times can one man offer to sell his company for billions of dollars and then renege?”
Kirkpatrick, a superb technology journalist who worked for Fortune magazine for two decades, is most interested in financial issues — and especially how rich Zuckerberg will become if ever he does pull the trigger and sell the company for cash.
Kirkpatrick rarely provides any explanations of how Facebook has achieved its vaunted “effect” technologically; software complexity is sacrificed for business simplicity, but Kirkpatrick doesn’t demystify the mechanics of how Facebook created “a fundamentally new form of communication.”
Typical is Kirkpatrick’s treatment of Facebook’s astonishing translation tool; the system operates in at least 70 languages. While Kirkpatrick calls the translation tool “among the company’s greatest product innovations,” he never explains what makes it so. The absence of any such technical explanations is a shame, especially because, in the early going at Facebook, Zuckerberg apparently wrote spectacular code. The parallels between him and Microsoft’s Bill Gates — another Harvard dropout who wrote code — are obvious and yet unexplored.
There is plenty of business drama in The Facebook Effect, because although Zuckerberg may be famous for igniting firestorms over the privacy of Facebook users, he seems ambivalent about capitalism and surprisingly sophomoric about business.
“We’ll figure that out later” is Zuckerberg’s standard answer to hyperventilating financiers who insist that Facebook sits atop untapped riches. Rather than chasing revenues, Zuckerberg chases users; his desire to expand his social network seems insatiable — and is as close as anything to the real secret of his success.
Throughout this fast-paced book, Zuckerberg holds center stage, the one constant amid
a bewildering array of
supporting but ultimately
disposable characters. The story of how Zuckerberg hatched
Facebook from his Harvard
dorm room — and managed to overcome largely spurious
complaints over code theft by jealous Harvard undergrads — makes for gripping reading.
But once Zuckerberg drops out and relocates to Palo Alto, Kirkpatrick struggles to maintain his tale. Zuckerberg, it turns out, is no business whiz; he doesn’t talk much to his colleagues and he cycles through senior managers about as quickly as Raiders owner Al Davis sours on coaches. Having spawned one of the biggest social movements in the world, built around an Internet-based software system, Zuckerberg has yet to figure out how to balance the tensions between promoting human community and earning significant profit.
Befitting a writer whose journalism appeared in a magazine devoted to the rich and super-successful, Kirkpatrick views Facebook as a singular pursuit of the Big Score. Yet earning large profit — indeed any profit — from Facebook has proved difficult for two reasons.
First, fans of Facebook span the globe; 70 percent of the 500 million people who use it at least once a month live outside the US. The far-flung and polyglot nature of Facebook users makes marketing to them difficult and not especially attractive.
Then there is the more profound problem that experiencing Facebook is more like watching a movie than doing a Google search. Facebook seems like entertainment, a way of passing the time. Google improves productivity, helps a person get stuff done faster. Though new features on Facebook are starting to offer more productivity options, the core attraction remains social.
To be sure, the Facebook story is unfinished. The company seems balanced between finding business wealth from its service and imploding, abandoned by frustrated fans who shift their allegiances to other idle pursuits — or are concerned about protecting their user information.
Zuckerberg, no longer a neophyte, is clearly shrewd, brilliant and wildly ambitious. Don’t bet against him finding a way to achieve both a stable business and a distinctive social good — an achievement that will surely spawn more books about him.
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