Summer Reading – The Facebook Effect

I'll be taking a bit of vacation over the next two weeks, so I thought I would take the opportunity of highlighting a few books on my Summer reading list.

One of the good things about using a Kindle or Kindle on an iPad for reading is the ability to use highlights to create a running summary of a book's highlights. Even better is that these highlights are aggregated across ALL readers. So in effect, any book can have a built-in summary, generated by the wisdom of the crowds - pretty cool stuff.

So in my vacation posts, I'll highlight a few books I've enjoyed recently and some Kindle-generated excerpts to give you a snapshot of the contents.

The Facebook Effect

The Facebook Effect by David Kirkpatrick is a really fun book. Well worth reading, and actually reads like a novel. It's a great book for the beach (the audiobook from Audible is also quite good. The Facebook page for the book is also quite entertaining...

So here, from the Kindle "wisdom of the crowds," are a few highlights...

"And it did, just as have many of the great communications and software innovations of the last hundred years. A product or service is said to have a network effect when its value grows greater to all users each time one new user joins. Since every incremental user, thus in effect, strengthens the service, growth tends to lead to more growth, in a virtuous cycle. That was surely the case with Facebook, just as it was with instant messaging, AOL, the Internet itself, and even the telephone."

"A watchword over the years at Facebook has been “Don’t be lame.” Cox says it means don’t do something just to make more money or because everybody is telling you to. It is Facebook’s counterpoint to Google’s motto ‘Don’t be evil.’”

“When you combine four hundred million people with data about not only where they live, but who their friends are, what they’re interested in, and what they do online—Facebook potentially has the Internet genome project.”

“Conversations cannot be controlled. They can only be joined.”

“Once every hundred years,” he began, “media changes. The last hundred years have been defined by the mass media. In the next hundred years, information won’t be just pushed out to people. It will be shared among the millions of connections people have… Nothing influences people more than a recommendation from a trusted friend… A trusted referral is the Holy Grail of advertising.”

Check it out...a good read.