the Facebook Effect part 1

In the first part of David Kirkpatrick's book, "The Facebook Effect," he talks about the background of Facebook's creator, Mark Zuckerberg and how Facebook came to be the number one social network website. Reading about Mark in the first chapter reminds me of the movie I saw for extra credit, The Social Network. It all started with a girl that Mark was hung up over and to keep his mind off of her, he created a small, "harmless" website called Facemash where the user has a choice to pick from two contestants based on their looks. This website became an instant hit, which led Mark to think of more projects that would essentially connect students online thus creating his own version of friendster, thefacebook.com. Zuckerberg soon realized that Harvard wasn't the only school that needed a social networking website, so he began to expand thefacebook elsewhere starting with Columbia, Stanford, etc. "So at Harvard, Dartmouth, Columbia, Stanford, Yale, and other schools, Thefacebook quickly became an essential social tool - a considerable advance over the outdated paper book" (Kirkpatrick 91). This type of expansion meant that he needed more money. Managing a website where the growth of its users were constant wasn't easy to do so he staffed his roommates. "In September alone they nearly doubled membership, to around 400,000. The number hit half a million on October 21, as growth began to accelerate" (Kirkpatrick 95). With constant popularity and traffic growing, thefacebook team desperately needed more money and funds. Thus, Y2M has made a partnership with thefacebook which placed ads on the website. This advertising income helped thefacebook team buy new equipments and servers to support the website's growth.