The Facebook Effect

Kirkpatrick, a Fortune technology journalist, had extensive access to Mark Zuckerberg and to Facebook's executives and wrote the first substantial history of the company, covering the Harvard origin through 2010, when Facebook had about five hundred million users and had not yet gone public.

The useful material is on the product and business decisions. Kirkpatrick documents the deliberate slow rollout school by school, which created density and scarcity simultaneously; the requirement of real identity, which Zuckerberg treated as the core principle and which distinguished Facebook from MySpace; the introduction of News Feed and the user revolt against it, which Zuckerberg refused to reverse and which became the product's engine; the Beacon advertising failure; the Platform launch; and the repeated refusals to sell, including the reported one billion dollar offer from Yahoo in 2006 that the board wanted to accept.

Kirkpatrick also documents Zuckerberg's stated position on radical transparency, that people having a single identity across all contexts is a better arrangement and that privacy norms are shifting toward openness, which was stated as a design principle rather than as a business necessity. That claim reads very differently now.

The book was written with cooperation and it shows: it is sympathetic, it accepts the company's framing of its mission, and it predates Cambridge Analytica, the 2016 election, the Myanmar findings and every subsequent controversy. It remains valuable as a documented account of the early product and governance decisions, and particularly for the record of what Zuckerberg said he believed before the consequences arrived.