Inside Facebook: the Facebook Book

Have any of you ever woken up on a Saturday or Sunday morning to discover that one of your friends has tagged 18 photos of you from the night before that you don’t quite remember taking? Have you ever received 15 comments on your wall from people you don’t know that well due to a change in your relationship status? Do you ever find yourself saying at least a few times a day “I hate facebook,” when really you check your profile every hour? If there is one thing that I learned after the first day of college, it is that facebook is an unavoidable evil. It is a great tool to stay in contact with friends and send invitations, but you pay a great price for such a tool: your privacy. However! The good news is that some of my most amusing dramas from freshman year came about because of facebook. I will describe briefly for you one of the most fascinating of these dramas: The Facebook Breakup.

When I went to college many of my friends (including myself) were in long distance relationships. Of course, most of these relationships ended within the first few weeks of college. The most memorable of these breakups happened with a friend down the hall. This breakup was memorable due to the classic “facebook war” she had with her ex in Colarodo the week after they broke up. This “facebook war,” as many facebook wars, involved 3 main steps:

1. Changing Your “Relationship Status”

Of course, the first thing you do when you breakup with someone on the phone is not to cry or call your best friend. Instead, you absolutely must change your facebook status from “In a Relationship” to Single. You may think I’m joking, but this is exactly what my friend (as well as many of my other friends) did after a breakup.

2. Changing Pictures

Not only do you have to change your profile picture of your with your past “love,” you also have to make sure that you have untagged all of the romantic pictures you had together. As my friend told me, the purpose of such an action was to “Make the other person feel bad.”

3. Writing Comments About What a Horrible Person Your Ex Is

For many people it is not enough to just end a relationship with a breakup. Many times your bitterness causes you to have a thought that goes something like this, “I’m going to make sure that everyone who is my friend on facebook knows what a horrible person my ex is.” Of course, such an action serves two purposes; to indirectly tell your boyfriend how much you hate him while at the same time thinking that if your publish your thoughts on your ex he/she will never be able to find a significant other again : )

AThought355
www.philisophicalhigh.blogspot.com

I will… “Make my niche social network a success no matter how long it takes.”

I will one day make reality out of my idea. And hopefully, there will soon be a book written as candidly about my ventures.

Facebook is an indispensable part of my life now, as I rely on it to update myself on what people I care about are doing in their everyday lives without having to make individual calls. It facilitates life-long bonds with people in a collegial-like environment. The most amazing, however, was cliching a fabulous part-time job through a mutual friend on Facebook. I now work at the American International Assurance and thoroughly enjoy at minute of my time there… all thanks to Facebook for connecting us!

Using the internet to change the way law is practiced in America. Allow the free flow of legal information to the public. Using blogs to change the face of political campaigns. Using web 2.0 apps to provide true collaboration from people around the world. Provide a place where you can post a problem or issue and someone somewhere in the world can answer it. Provide DRM free music that you own and can share with whoever you want. Provide a place for budding entrpreneurs to get info on starting up their own company and provide info on how to access capital via VC’s or Angel investors.
Posted originally by Chris Johnston any comments or additonal ideas feel free to send to [cmjohnston at gmail dot com]

[”How brave, to write!  One idea fleshed out in more detail, gets more practical traction than several.” -Karel

“Karel, you hypocrite (slap!).  You have 4+ sites, all only partly done.” -Baloun]

Thank you, early subscribers. We’ll have press next week, so you are leaders. Your encouraging comments and emails have meant a lot to us!

Ok so your awesome. Facebook is awesome. And so are the nice shades of blue on the site.

my paypal account is not active and i REALLY wanted to read this. i spend about 1-3 hours daily researching facebook and its really cool people….just like i do for google. yes i’m adicted to facebook….but not the pokes…or the photo display; but the awesomeness 3rd party aps…Zucks personality….and watching a company grow 10 fold each and every day.

thanks for this link, fbbook.com/p.php?p=random and the F5 key! (not recommended)

(don’t worry im going to pay the $39 fee when i get my account back up.)

Bryan
graphic designer
www.bkmdesigns.com

i am finsihing my protfolio and studies….after that i am going to apply to work for the best company in the world…facebook.

Facebook is one helluva story, and it’s great to hear a new insight into it.

What did I like:

a) correlation to motivation. How the methods mark and you guys used could be applied to any entrepreneur
b) some interesting pieces. ie- steven chen, mark really going there to grow wirehog,etc.
c) what made the company work. ie- mark and them knowing when to pull the plug, jeff rothschild’s vision.
d) unbiased and raw. I disagree with Liz. I’d rather see it in its current form, then obviously being edited in the manner she suggested and losing some of its realness. I could care less if the writing is perfect, I’m reading it for your story and the knowledge, not to pick out grammatical errors.

What I would have liked to see more of:
a) more information on Mark’s information flow theory. It’s something I personally am interested in.
b) more specific crisis situations ie- holy shit, what just happened.
c) more insight into Mark’s move out to silicon valley
d) more insight into the VC/ business side of things.

-Jason L. Baptiste
CEO of theWeblogWire Inc.

Hi,
I’m building a network of social web apps in latin america and this book its a god-send for me. The thing is: I live in Colombia, my credit cards are from this country.. and PayPal doesn’t me allow to use their service for buying the book because it isn’t in their list of countries. How can i get it? Please help me!
maybe can I buy you something in Amazon? Maybe another payment system? maybe you could help a third world entrepeneur sending the pdf address and hope that this business will be really great?

thanks in advance and *good luck* with your book!
Nicolas

[Nicholas: Please send an email to smile@fbbook.com, and we’ll help you out.  We learn something new about the world every day!]

It’s hard to get college students to want to read anything during the academic year: we’ve already got way too much to read, more than we ever really finish. It makes no sense to start a new book when you’ve got 3 books you haven’t read but are supposed to write papers on this weekend. For this reason, you need to do your marketing campaign just prior to Christmas vacation. Get some press in December, and when journalists call you to interview you, say something like “it’s a great gift idea for the college student in your life.” No one ever knows what to get us, and adults are intrigued by the Facebook, and they know we are too. That way, the people with money will be buying the book, and the people you want to read it will be receiving it. The college students will be on vacation, probably bored, and they will end up reading the book. This shouldn’t be too expensive–all you need to do is get some articles written about you, and that shouldn’t be hard considering how much the media love Facebook.