Facing Facebook

Facebook has become, for many, home sweet home on the Web. It has nearly blasted My Space and other social networking sites into obsolescence. When last checked, Facebook was after, Google, the world’s second most visited website.

But more than just market share, Facebook has captured mind share. It’s astounding how, in the mere six years since its founding in February 2004, Facebook has become enmeshed in our daily routines. Get up, make coffee, check Facebook. Time for bed, but not before updating your status one last time. More than half of its 400 million users browse Facebook website each day, a jaw dropping visitor return rate. The average user now spends almost an hour per day there, scrolling news feeds, sending virtual gifts like flowers, and playing games like Farmville and Mafia Wars. Every leisure hour we spend on Facebook is one hour we’re not doing what we used to do with our downtime: reading a book, cooking a decent meal, consuming other media like TV, going for a walk in the woods (or at least to the 7-Eleven). If downtime even exists anymore.

As David Kirkpatrick writes in The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World (Simon & Schuster, 372 pp., illustrated, $26), Facebook has led to ‘‘fundamentally new interpersonal and social effects.’’ That’s some understatement. Facebook has not only triggered semantic shifts like twisting the word “friend” into a verb and coining a new term, “unfriend.” (Personally, I think the friend rejection process should have been called “de-Face.”) It’s also redefined what we mean by friendship. As Kirkpatrick smartly notes, when Facebook was first dreamt up in a Harvard dorm room, it was envisioned as a tool to complement relationships with real world pals, not create ones with people you’d never met in the flesh. Now it’s used as much for self promotion and political activism — think of the Obama campaign’s mastery of the medium — as for networking and tracking down old flames. At last count I had 756 Facebook ‘‘friends,’’ and another 591 ‘‘fans’’ of my book. But how many of these friends or fans could I count on in a time of crisis? In cyberspace, no one can hear you cry (unless you’re Skyping).

The Facebook Effect is actually two books in one. One part is the exhaustively reported story of Facebook’s founding and meteoric rise to near ubiquity; the other is a thoughtful analysis of its impact. We first see Harvard roommates and fellow computer geeks Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes transform two early projects into Thefacebook.com. One was called Course Match, a program that encouraged students to enroll in classes based on who else had signed up; ‘‘[i]f a cute girl sat next to you in Topology, you could look up next semester’s Differential Geometry course to see if she had enrolled in that as well.’’ The other was called Facemash, which took pairs of photos from Harvard’s online dorm facebooks and asked users to choose the ‘‘hotter’’ person. Both were essentially designed for hooking up, not Zuckerberg’s later and more lofty goal of making the world a more open place.

The narrative charts a nearly clichéd story of naive but idealistic college kids renting a house in Palo Alto in the summer of 2004 and immersing themselves in Red Bull-fueled, all-night programming binges. They incorporate their little project, at this point still called “Thefacebook.com” (the “the” gets dropped in 2005). The site experiences staggering membership growth: 5 percent per month. Facebook expands from Harvard to include other colleges, then by the fall of 2006, the rest of the world. Word gets out. Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo begin to drool at the incredible value of a community so willing to divulge its personal information. Being a senior editor at Fortune magazine, Kirkpatrick revels in recounting backroom negotiations with these tech companies and venture capitalists, each falling over the other to woo Facebook.

While the Machiavellian wheelings and dealings of Silicon Valley heavyweights might bore some readers, the interpersonal dirt shouldn’t. Kirkpatrick received full cooperation from Zuckerberg and many key players who sat for multiple interviews. We hear about personnel ousters, and lawsuits claiming Zuckerberg stole ideas from other social networking sites. While Kirkpatrick’s coziness with Facebook higher ups could have impaired his ability to be critical, we are thankfully given the occasional unflattering portrait of Zuckerberg. In one recreated scene, the newbie CEO is scolded by a colleague, ‘‘You’d better take CEO lessons, or this isn’t going to work out for you!’’

But far more interesting are the book’s efforts at social and behavioral commentary. Kirkpatrick raises the right questions, even if he doesn’t yet have all the answers. As the social network balloons --- Zuckerberg recently predicted he’d reach one billion worldwide users --- Kirkpatrick wonders if the site might make us not more global, but more tribal; not more individualistic but more conformist and vulnerable to marketing. The decentralization of information, relying on friends not institutions for news, seems like a positive democratic step. But in a world where, as The Facebook Effect observes, ‘‘everyone can be an editor, a content creator, a producer, and a distributor,’’ what is ‘‘news’’? Who are the gatekeepers? Users have already grumbled several times about Facebook’s disclosure of personal information to third parties. As recently as this May, Zuckerberg once again backpedaled for misusing user data, issuing more of an “oops” than an apology: “We just missed the mark,” he wrote. Facebook has since implemented new and clearer privacy settings.

If Facebook is warping our sense of privacy, at least it’s a community based on self-disclosure: You have to reveal the ‘‘real’’ you to join, and your identify is vetted by real friends. Most shenanigans found in anonymous online communities --- behaviors like flaming, griefing, and other anti-social quirks of online games and message boards ---aren’t tolerated. If someone becomes obnoxious, you can always defriend him. Not that there isn’t some degree of role-playing in all those clever status updates. For don't we all want to be seen as clever and ironic, witty and hip? To put our best online foot and face forward? Still, as Facebook increasingly melds with our selves, one can't help but question if it's become too easy to play the roles of voyeur, exhibitionist, and narcissist.

Ethan Gilsdorf is the author of Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms, which comes out in paperback in September. You can reach him and get more information at his website /.