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.

Book Review: Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson

I enjoyed this book on two fronts – I thought it did a good job of capturing both Steve Jobs' achievements and the makeup of his character. His achievements are well known: building innovative products (the Apple II, the Macintosh, the iPod, the iPhone, the App Store etc) and building lasting companies (Apple and Pixar). With regards to his character, a number of traits were mentioned throughout the book but the most repeated and salient I thought were his charisma & magnetism, his sense of focus, his passion for perfection/simplicity/minimalism, his craving for control, his indomitable/stubborn will, and the intensity/relentlessness with which he pursued his work. Overall an inspiring read and one of the best biographies that I've read.

Below are some quotes from the book.

Isaacson: "… taking a long walk was his preferred way to have a serious conversation." 

Isaacson: "He knew that the best way to create value in the twenty-first century was to connect creativity with technology, so he built a company where leaps of the imagination were combined with remarkable feats of engineering. He and his colleagues at Apple were able to think differently: They developed not merely modest product advances based on focus groups, but whole new devices and services that consumers did not yet know they needed." 

Isaacson: "It was important, his father said, to craft the backs of cabinets and fences properly, even though they were hidden. 'He loved doing things right. He even cared about the look of the parts you couldn't see.'" 

Isaacson: "Wozniak would be the gentle wizard coming up with a neat invention that he would have been happy just to give away, and Jobs would figure out how to make it user-friendly, put it together in a package, market it, and make a few bucks." 

Kottke: "Steve is very much Zen. It was a deep influence. You see it in his whole approach of stark, minimalist aesthetics, intense focus." 

Friedland: "The thing that struck me was his intensity. Whatever he was interested in he would generally carry to an irrational extreme."

Jobs: "When you open the box of an iPhone or iPad, we want that tactile experience to set the tone for how you perceive the product." 

Jobs: "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication." 

Atkinson: "He can deceive himself. It allowed him to con people into believing his vision, because he has personally embraced and internalised it." 

Wozniak: "His reality distortion is when he has an illogical vision of the future, such as telling me hat I could design the Breakout game in just a few days. You realise that it can't be true, but he somehow makes it true." 

Jobs: "Products are everything." 

Isaacson: "The lesson Jobs learned from his Buddhist days was that material possessions often cluttered life rather than enriched it." 

Ellison: "I can't tell you the number of versions of Toy Story I saw before it came out. It eventually became a form of torture. I'd go over there and see the latest 10% improvement. Steve is obsessed with getting it right – both the story and the technology – and isn't satisfied with anything less than perfection." 

Jobs: "There's no yacht in my future. I've never done this for the money." 

Ellison: "Steve created the only lifestyle brand in the tech industry. There are cars people are proud to have – Porsche, Ferrari, Prius – because what I drive says something about me. People feel the same way about an Apple product." 

Jobs: "What we're trying to do is not highfalutin. W're trying to get back to the basics of great products, great marketing, and great distribution." 

Isaacson: "One of his core principles was that hardware and software should be tightly integrated. He loved to control all aspects of his life, and the only way to do that with computers was to take responsibility for the user experience from end to end." 

Jobs: "Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do. That's true for companies, and it's true for products." 

Jobs: "It takes a lot of hard work to make something simple, to truly understand the underlying challenges and come up with elegant solutions." 

Isaacson: "Putting on a great show piqued his passions in the same way as putting out a great product." 

Jobs: "If something isn't right, you can't just ignore it and say you'll fix it later. That's what other companies do." 

Isaacson: "… the iPod became the essence of everything Apple was destined to be: poetry connected to engineering, arts and creativity intersecting with technology, design that's bold and simple." 

Isaacson: "Some leaders push innovation by being good at the big picture. Others do so by mastering details. Jobs did both, relentlessly." 

Isaacson: "Like a pathfinder, he could absorb information, sniff the winds, and sense what lay ahead." 

Jobs: "… the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do."

Book Review: The People vs Tech, by Jamie Bartlett

I thought this was a good book highlighting the dangers of current and future digital technology (e.g. social media applications, the internet of things) and the incredible power that makers of these technologies are beginning to wield. From social media applications designed to cause addiction to targeted advertising designed to sway our votes, it's difficult not to feel a tinge of worry as you read. The author has done a good job of surveying the books and articles in this space and pooling them together. My only problem with the book was that I felt that the author was shoehorning the word "democracy" into the book as many times as possible and, most probably, simply because he had set out to write a book on "how the internet is killing democracy". There were a few places where I agreed with the author and felt that the danger which he was highlighting applied to "democracy" (e.g. election campaigns using data from our social media accounts to sway our votes). However, in other places I thought it was just a danger to governance in general (e.g. jobs being lost to AI) and not specific to democracy.

Book Review: iWoz – Computer Geek to Cult Icon, by Steve Wozniak and Gina Smith

I thought this was a nicely told story of the birth of Apple and the birth of the personal computer interwoven with the personal story of Apple's co-founder Steve Wozniak, the creator of the original Apple I and Apple II computers. As an engineer myself and as someone who is pretty much unfamiliar with the details of the Apple origins story I found it inspirational to get into the mind of a real engineer's engineer, to read what it takes to be a real good inventor and creator. I liked the book as a whole but if there's one chapter that really stood out for me it was the first and the impact that Steve's father had on him through exposure to electronics from a really young age. It's a good life lesson that it's not just what we build in terms of electronics and software that's important but also how we teach and inspire the younger generation to succeed us.

Below are some quotes from the book:

"He [my father] never started out by trying to explain from the top down what a resistor is. He started from the beginning, going all the way back to atoms and electrons, neutrons, and protons. He explained what they were and how everything was made from those. I remember we actually spent weeks and weeks talking about different types of atoms and then I learned how electrons can actually flow through things – like wires. Then, finally, he explained to me how the resistors work – not by calculations, because who can do calculations when you're a second grader, but by real common sense pictures and explanations. You see, he gave me classical electronics training from the beginning. For engineers, there's a point in life when you understand things like how a resistor works. Usually it comes much later for people than it did for me. By the fourth grade, I really did understand things like that." 

"But even with all of this – all the lessons and explanations a kid could understand – I want to tell you about the single most important lesson he taught me. Because this is what I have always hung on to, more than even the honesty thing. He drilled into me what it means to be an engineer. What I am talking about is what it means to be an engineer's engineer. A serious engineer. I so clearly remember him telling me that engineering was the highest level of importance you could reach in the world, that someone who could make electrical devices that do something good for people takes society to a new level. He told me that as an engineer, you can change your world and change the way of life for lots and lots of people." 

"... I remember watching all those engineers who just wanted to do the technical side, to just put some chips together so the design worked. But I wanted to put chips together like an artist, better than anyone else could in a way that would be the absolute most usable by humans. That was my goal when I built the first computer, the one that later became the Apple I. It was the first computer to use a keyboard so you could type into it, and the first to use a screen you could look at." 

"We [my and my parents] had discussions about science and truth and honesty, the first discussions of many that formed my values. And what he [my father] told me was, he just wanted things to be testable. He thought that to see if something is true, the most important thing is to run experiments, to see what the truth is, and then you call it real." 

"For me it's the engineering, not the glory, that's really important." 

"Sometimes I think, Man, I lucked out. It seems like I was just pointed in such a lucky direction in life, this early learning of how to do things one tiny little step at a time. I learned not to worry so much about the outcome, but to concentrate on the step I was on and to try and to do it as perfectly as I could when I was doing it. Not everyone gets this in today's engineering community, you know. Throughout my career at Apple and other places, you always find a lot of geeks who try to reach levels without doing the in-between ones first, and it won't work. It never does. That's just cognitive development, plain and simple. You can't teach somebody two cognitive steps above from where you are – and knowing that helped me with my own children as well as with the fifth graders I taught later on. I kept telling them, like a mantra: One step at a time."

"If you read the same things as other and say the same things they say, then you're perceived as intelligent. I'm a bit more independent and radical and consider intelligence the ability to think about matters on your own and ask a lot of skeptical questions to get at the real truth, not just what you're told it is"

"I think most people with day jobs like to do something totally different when they get home. Some people like to come home and watch TV. But my thing was electronics projects. It was my passion and it was my pastime. Working on projects was something I did on my own time to reward myself, even though I wasn't getting rewarded on the outside, with money or other visible signs of success."

"When I look back, I see that all these projects, plus the science projects I did as a kid and all the stuff my dad taught me, were actually threads of knowledge that converged in my design of the first and second Apple computers."

"I wanted to be like my dad, I remember his conversations with me; he would always point out all sides of an issue. I would know what he thought about it, but he would let me come to my own decisions, which very often turned out to be like his. He was a very, very good teacher. So I intended to be that way, too."

Book Review: The Mechanical Turk, by Tom Standage

This was an alright read. The book tells the story of the chess-playing automaton built in the late 18th century and its journeys across Europe and America from the late 18th century to the early 19th century. The automaton itself I didn't find too interesting but the characters it meets in its lifetime – from the analysts trying to crack its mystery to the engineers it would inspire – I found captivating. The author doesn't divulge the secret of how the automaton works until the penultimate chapter but I'll confess I jumped straight to the back after reading a few chapters because the suspense was killing me!

Here are some quotes from the book:

"... Babbage soon came to the conclusion that there was no reason why a mechanical device made of simple parts could not perform complex calculations. He was so excited at the prospect that it made him ill; his doctor advised him to take a holiday and not think about such things, so he went to stay with Herschel near Windsor for a few days. He subsequently drew up a scientific paper in which he announced that he was designing a machine capable of calculating any mathematical tables, including astronomical ones, automatically. This was the genesis of Babbage's first mechanical computer, the Difference Engine..."

"... Babbage struggled in vain for many years and spent the fortune he inherited from his father, along with a vast quantity of government funds, in an unsuccessful attempt to build this machine (the Difference Engine). Part of the reason why he failed was that halfway through construction, Babbage conceived an even more ambitious machine, the Analytical Engine, which would be capable of far more complex calculations..."

"... Such was the complexity of this new machine (the Analytical Engine) that it was inarguably the earliest ancestor of the modern digital computer: it had direct mechanical equivalents of a modern computer's processor and memory. Babbage even devised a symbolic notation with which to write down programs for it. But following the failure of the Difference Engine, he was unable to raise the funds to build it. Even so, his analysis of the Analytical Engine's theoretical capabilities prefigured many elements of modern computer science..."

"... 'You Americans are a very singular people,' Maelzel later recalled to one of this friends. 'I went with my automaton all over my own country – the Germans wondered and said nothing. In France, they exclaimed, 'Magnifique! Merveilleux! Superbe!' The English set themselves to prove – one that it could be, and another that it could not be, a mere mechanism acting without a man inside. But I had not been long in your country, before a Yankee came to me and said, 'Mr Maelzel, would you like another like that? I can make you one for five hundred dollars.' I laughed at his proposition. A few months afterwards, the same Yankee came to see me again, and this time he said 'Mr Maelzel, would you like to buy another thing like that? I have one ready for you.'..."

"... the illusion of intelligence is as good as the real thing..."

"... in 1769 Kempelen had conjectured that playing chess and holding conversations were the two activities that most readily indicated intelligence. Nearly 200 years later, the computer scientists of the twentieth century came to exactly the same conclusion..."

Book Review: Execute, by Drew Wilson and Josh Long

Inspiring! That's what this book sets out to do and that's what it does!! Great book - put together in just eight days - about the joys of executing on ideas and making stuff. Great reminder firstly about working smart (recovering between sprints etc) and secondly about the importance of having projects outside of 'work' on the go, keeping them simple and seeing them through (design, development, marketing, support) to completion.

Online presence and persona

I'm quite a fan of Behavioural Economist Dan Ariely's short monthly piece in Wired UK and found his extended feature in the August 2011 issue especially noteworthy. The piece was entitled 'You are being gamed - How online companies trick you into sharing more, joining more and spending more' and analysed briefly some of the ploys employed by organisations such as Amazon, Apple, Groupon, Zynga and Faceobok. Short article; worth the read.

About Facebook, I liked the point about the Wall which I guess applies to Blogging too: We want our Walls to reflect ourselves. Users want to display a self that is somewhere between their real self and how they would like to be perceived.