Book Review: The Facebook Effect, by David Kirkpatrick

I found this book to be a really good account of the early years of Facebook, from its inception in 2004 up to the point when it had grown to 500 million users worldwide in 2010. It's been ten years now since this book was published so, for sure, it is old, but it was nice to get a feel for Facebook's origin story before it started to consume other apps and really become a conglomerate.

The standout point for me from the book was the evolution of the product throughout those early years. The Facebook team seemed to introduce features into the site again and again which, call it skill or luck or both, just seemed to work. Some of these big increments were the following:

• Identity: In the early days, users had to sign up with their university email address and they had to use their real name. This ensured users were who they said they were. "Validating people's identity in this way made Facebook fundamentally different from just about everything else that had come before on the Internet."
• Photos: The ability to tag people in photos suddenly meant ordinary photos became more articulate and began to express and elaborate friend relationships. "In Facebook, photos were no longer little amateur works of art, but rather a basic form of communication."
• News Feed: It's hard to imagine now, but there was a time when there was no centralised news feed in the Facebook app; users had to tediously click around into their friends' profiles to figure out what was new. The News Feed changed that and brought the information that mattered most to a user to the user. "The conceptual model for the News Feed was a newspaper that was custom-crafted and delivered to each user." The News Feed also reversed the process of communication: "Instead of sending someone an alert about yourself, now you simply had to indicate something about yourself on Facebook and Facebook would push the information out to your friends... This new form of automated communications made it possible to stay in touch with many people simultaneously with a minimum of effort. It was making a big world smaller."
• Applications Platform: By opening up its social graph and allowing third party developers to build applications on top of Facebook, there was a new expansiveness to the site and it became the centre of an ecosystem of partners. "Turning it into a platform for applications began to make it feel a bit like being on the Web itself. Facebook was becoming its own self-contained universe."
• Translation Tool: Rather than asking its employees and contractors to translate the site's words and phrases into other languages, Facebook turned the task over to the crowd. Facebook's software presented volunteers with a list of words and phrases to be translated, and used a voting mechanism to decide on the best translations. This tool had a huge impact on Facebook's global growth and meant that it could translate its site into a new language in a matter of days – rather than weeks or months – and at almost zero cost.
• Facebook Connect: In making it possible for websites to log users in with their Facebook account, websites were enabled to tap into users' information but, crucially for Facebook, to also project information back into Facebook.

The author, in the closing chapter, put these continual product changes and innovations – and Facebook's disregard for whether users were comfortable with the changes – down as the single most important reason why he thought Facebook's growth was so rapid and why it was able to beat its competitors.