The Facebook Effect

Reviewed by Diario de un Inversor · UpdatedJuly 17, 2026

Our review

David Kirkpatrick achieved what no other Facebook chronicler did: the cooperation of Mark Zuckerberg and virtually the entire founding team. The result is the definitive inside history of the social network's first decade — from the Harvard student directory to five hundred million users — told with access but without servility. The best pages document the decisions that separated Facebook from MySpace and Friendster: the obsession with real identity over anonymity, opening university by university to preserve social density, the app platform, and News Feed, which triggered the first great user revolt and proved — by ignoring it — that protest and usage could diverge. Kirkpatrick also portrays Zuckerberg the businessman: his repeated refusal to sell (Yahoo offered a billion dollars), his near-absolute shareholder control, and his conviction that the mission mattered more than revenue. Published in 2010, the book predates the privacy and misinformation scandals; read today, many of its scenes prefigure them with involuntary clarity.

Key takeaways

• Real identity was the founding bet that differentiated Facebook: less freedom, more trust and — above all — better data.
• Growing university by university preserved the connection density that makes a social network useful; indiscriminate growth killed its rivals.
• Zuckerberg's refusal to sell at every possible window (2004, 2006) rested on shareholder control designed from the start.
• News Feed taught an uncomfortable lesson: users can massively protest a change while their usage data proves it works.

Fact

Kirkpatrick interviewed Zuckerberg repeatedly with Facebook's official cooperation; the book was published in 2010, when the network had about 500 million users.