The Facebook Effect Quotes

“Facebook also has a fundamental characteristic that has proven key to its appeal in country after country—you only see friends there.”
― David Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World

“Mark has the most long-term perspective I’ve ever seen. This guy is uber uber uber on the long-term view.”
― David Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That is Connecting the World

“But like the best empire builders, he was both very determined and very skeptical. It’s like [former Intel CEO] Andy Grove says, ‘only the paranoid survive.”
― David Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That is Connecting the World

“This thrilled Zuckerberg, whose primary measure of the service’s success was how often users returned.”
― David Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That is Connecting the World

“In Friendster's wake, a throng of social networking sites blossomed in San Francisco attempting to duplicate its appeal. Each tackled the idea of connecting people in a slightly different way. One was Tickle, a service which, on observing Friendster’s broad-based appeal, altered its own service, which had previously been based on self-administered quizzes and tests. Two of the other new social sites—LinkedIn and Tribe.net—were founded by friends of Abrams.”
― David Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That is Connecting the World

“By early 2004 Tickle had become the second-largest social network after Friendster, with two million members actively connected to others and exchanging messages.”
― David Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That is Connecting the World

“For users, Facebook Connect offers what could turn into a universal Internet log-in. Over 80,000 websites use it in some fashion, as of February 2010, and 60 million Facebook members are actively employing it.”
― David Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That is Connecting the World

“Cohler advertised for summer interns, then sometimes told promising applicants when they came for an interview that Thefacebook was only hiring full-timers.”
― David Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That is Connecting the World

“Revenues were, according to well-informed sources, more than $550 million for 2009—up from less than $300 million in 2008. That represents a stunning growth rate of almost 100 percent. The same sources say that the company could exceed $1 billion in revenue in 2010.”
― David Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That is Connecting the World

“He sent Zuckerberg a letter proposing Viacom would pay $1.5 billion to buy the two-year-old company.”
― David Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World

“As Facebook kept evolving—and growing faster with every change—the established powers of the technology and media world began paying ever closer attention. This appeared to be the kind of irresistible consumer website every executive had dreamed of owning since the Internet took off in the mid-1990s. Mark Zuckerberg suddenly had a lot of new older, well-dressed friends from Los Angeles and the East Coast. But he didn’t think like the CEO of an established technology or media company. He barely gave a thought to profit and was still ambivalent about advertising. This wasn’t easy for his newfound suitors to understand. One senior executive from a tech company recalls a frustrating visit during that time with Zuckerberg, who seemed uninterested in increasing the company’s revenue. “He didn’t know what he didn’t know,” he says. “But when he opened his mouth he was very direct, very smart, and he was very focused on Facebook as a social tool, to the point of naïveté. It sounded just too altruistic at the time. So I asked him, ‘Is it a social tool as a tactic to get to the next point?’ And he says, ‘No, all I really care about is doing this social tool.’ So I thought, ‘Either this guy is being very strategic and not telling me what his next thing is, or he’s just got his sandbox and he’s playing in it.’ I couldn’t figure it out.”
― David Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World

“A few months later, Procter & Gamble tried something similar. Its CEO, A. G. Lafley, had begun talking about the need for P&G to get closer to its consumers. After reading about this, Facebook ad salesman Colleran did one of his masterful cold calls to find out if P&G was targeting any of its brands at the college market. It turned out that while P&G’s Crest White Strips teeth-whitening product had never been aimed specifically at college students, company data showed that the strips sold particularly well at Wal-Marts located near campuses. Colleran and P&G marketers came up with a Facebook campaign called Smile State. Much as Chase and Apple had done, P&G created a sponsored group on Facebook for Crest White Strips. It advertised the Smile State group only to users who were students at one of twenty large state universities located near Wal-Marts. Any student who joined got tickets to an upcoming college-oriented Matthew McConaughey movie called We Are Marshall. In addition, the schools that enrolled the most members in the Crest White Strips group got a concert organized by Def Jam Records. Over 20,000 people joined. To have 20,000 people explicitly expressing affinity for Crest White Strips using their real name is the kind of thing that gives marketers goose bumps. It was a huge win for P&G and for Facebook.”
― David Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World

“He makes several arguments. “Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity,” Zuckerberg says moralistically. But he also makes a case he sees as pragmatic—that “the level of transparency the world has now won’t support having two identities for a person.” In other words, even if you want to segregate your personal from your professional information you won’t be able to, as information about you proliferates on the Internet and elsewhere. He would say the same about any images one individual seeks to project—for example, a teenager who acts docile at home but is a drug-using reprobate with his friends.”
― David Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World

“in mid-2008 the word Facebook passed sex in frequency as a search term on Google worldwide.”
― David Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World

“One of my roommates was ‘Hey, I’ll help you!’ I said ‘Dude! You can’t program!’ So he went home for the weekend and bought the book PERL for Dummies and said ‘Now I’m ready.’ I said ‘Dude, the site’s not written in PERL.”
― David Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World

“Peter Drucker,”
― David Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World