For this week I will examine the conclusion of David Krickpatrick's book, The Facebook Effect. Kirkpatrick discusses the continuing development of the company and website in regards to making money, the new platform and ideas, and even proposes ideas for the future of Facebook.
One thing that I found to be extremely interesting is the development of new ideas within Facebook. Things that Facebook users take for granted. Things such as Events, and Photos, which we use every single day, were completely new ideas by the Facebook team. Zuckerberg explains that these applications were so good and so popular because "despite all their shortcomings they had one thing no one else had. And that was integration with the social graph" (217). The term social graph is used to describe essentially relationships among people within the virtual world. A better description is on page 217. But to be completely honest, I was shocked to realize this fact. I can't imagine not being able to create a Facebook Event next time I wanted to do something with my friends and these men created it. As I said in a previous blog, the people at Facebook didn't get lucky with one good idea. They have had hundreds of good ideas and that is what makes Facebook such an integral part of our society.
When it came to making money, I also couldn't believe how the Facebook team did it. Zuckerberg, who originally was against ads in order to promote the "cool factor" of Facebook, now was making billions of dollars off of them. What I found to be most interesting is that "Facebook displayed 53 billion ads in December 2009, or 14 percent of all online ads" (272). I couldn't believe what I read because that is a pretty startling statistic. To imagine how enormous the internet is and how one company can control 14% of the market just blew my mind. Also I was impressed to see that during the recent economic downturn Facebook remained profitable. They said that their ad pricing has remained constant while other websites are reducing their costs. I think this may be because people realize that with the economy so bad maybe people just spend more time on the computer, or maybe it's because Facebook is being accessed by so many people in many different ways. Either way, I am shocked again by the information that Kirkpatrick revealed in this book.
Zuckerberg would clearly not be outdone. Once the company started making money he immediately began seeking his competition and trying to find ways to be better than them. Examples include Twitter, FriendFeed, and other companies that were also social networking sites. In almost every instance Zuckerberg and his star programmers were able to succeed. Facebook is such a incredible website and the way it brings people together is truly unbelievable and this book definitely helped me realize how hard these people worked in order to give the user such a quality product.
In the last chapter titled The Future, it becomes clear that Kirkpatrick has a slight bias towards Zuckerberg. This led me to believe that perhaps Zuckerberg and his team may not be as perfect as they were made out to be. In the Acknowledgements section the first thanks is to Mark Zuckerberg and so while I do believe all of the information is factual, I can't help but feel like the truth may be twisted a little. Either way this was a great read. It was a good experience to learn something about the website I spend the majority of my day on.
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