So Facebook... yeah. This social networking site has gone BEYOND being just a popular Internet outlet for people wishing to connect with friends. For some it has become a part of a lifestyle, for others it is life and for even more people is has become a second life. It is much more than your plain old social networking site. Never in my life have I seen something that makes people hate it so much and yet still use it... almost religiously. A friend of mine has deleted his Facebook three times now, always rebounding after about a week or so with some lame excuse like he doesn't know what events are happening when anymore. I find it really funny when people discuss things like how Facebook is so great, but dont understand how they can make money of the idea and keep doing all this stuff. You know that saying 'If you cant tell who the sucker is... than its YOU'? Well it works in this case too. If you cant figure out the product Facebook is selling, than its YOU!
So there's this website where you post all your personal information with a privacy policy that changes every two weeks that has been known to distribute the aforementioned personal info to advertising companies and government agencies. Try explaining that to someone thats never used to Facebook then convince them to join. I'm not too thrilled with the overwhelming popularity of Facebook and often wish that people would just let it go. By having most friends only communicate through this medium it has kept me on so far. Although I AM a Facebook user, I feel that at least I am not in denial about what it actually is and try to keep as little about myself on there as possible. This is has kind of been my personal outlook on Facebook and like most opinions could probably be totally argued against, but since no one comments on my blog I feel like I'm safe saying whatever I want. Let's move to the book.
The first section of The Facebook Effect by David Kirkpatrick tells the story of young Mark Zuckerberg as an undergrad student at Harvard who slowly developed one of the most influential pieces of Web 2.0. The first chapter is all about glorifying Zuckerberg as this greater-than-you, super academic mega-nerd that gets all the babes and loves his white board. This is the first problem I ran into while reading this book. It is SO apparent that Kirkpatrick loves Facebook. He's describing Zuckerberg as a hero of his time claiming that he's so creative and such a hard-worker and a 'deliberate' thinker. That having a conversation with the guy is a mind-opening experience. If you read any other objective writing about Zuckerberg, it kind of says the same sort of things, but he comes off as a huge jerk. As I am NOT a fan of Facebook, I all ready can tell that this book is gonna have some 'come on.... REALLY?!' moments in it.
My interpretation of the M.Zuck story would be more or less about how this privileged kid pissed off all his roommates by not cleaning up his garbage (its ok, he had a nanny when he was growing up!), then created some killer pieces of software that everyone loved. Proceeded to get his roommates involved with the creative process, thus gaining their friendship and then stole all their ideas and made a billion dollars. Definitely sounds like TIME's person of the year material to me. I suppose when the rest of the competition consists of people like LeBron James and Lady GaGa there isn't much hope left anyway. (TIME's Person of the Year 2010 Poll Results)
disclaimer: For those that couldn't really tell, this blog entry was sort of an experiment for me to be as bias on the opposite side of Kirkpatrick as possible and show that without objectivity it is difficult to create valid resources. Over the course of the hundred of so pages, Kirkpatrick makes some good points about the evolution of social networks and the technology behind it. I was just so struck by how he portrayed Mark Zuckerberg that all I wanted to do was write about how much he sucks. IRL I am much more willing to see both the positive and negative in any topic or situation , I assure you.
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