Inside Facebook: the Facebook Book

Over the last four months where I took a writing fast, I

• Completed a relaunch of ptrades.com, THE commodities trading community. Go look.
• Built a ton of infrastructure for mEgo.com, which will be out public in a few months.
• Completed planning for 3 new sites, which will come out around summer.  I know, you can’t wait.
• Thought about stuff.  So I’ll be posting again more regularly, until my next fast.

I like to hear your feedback and ideas, even more than I like to write my own.

cheers,

Karel

It’s my first “radio interview”, and I’ve love for you to call in.  I’ll be talking with Alan, about internet entrepreneurs, social networks and Inside Facebook.

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/hostpage.aspx?show_id=3923

Frankly, I write a lot of crap. Even when I am at my best. Almost never is every paragraph was important to me. Every reader, including you, needs something different from me in this book, so every piece can’t apply to everyone. So, don’t waste your time, and skip the crap. And forgive me, for sometimes writing for someone other than you. Did you skip this paragraph? Good. Don’t skip the next one.

There is an essential inverse to this rule. Attend carefully to the Gems. I’ve been told there are some in here, but more to the point, they are in many of the pages you read elsewhere. When you notice something that speaks to you, grab it, and integrate it into your life. Don’t just keep it. Use it.

I’m building a list of powerful quotations for myself, so that I have them near me when I need them. Then I review it when I feel I’m missing something in my morning meditation.

For instance, “An eye for an eye makes everyone blind” from Gandhi, is ever presently useful. But do I remember it when I’m annoyed? “I can do anything” is a great mantra, but how do I pull it to the front of my mind, say when I’ve just really, really messed something up.

From Inside Facebook Or any other source, comment with your favorite inspirational quotations.

Karel, … I see a big contradiction … On one hand you describe how Facebook is full of geniuses and people with superhuman abilities and you … conclude in several places, that it’s not that hard to build a social networking site …
Dear reader,
Thank you for that observation. You’ve picked out perhaps the most important theme in the book: what the facebook team achieved was amazing, and everyone showed their true genius as they did their part - AND, we can all do that.
I’m really not saying that lightly. I firmly believe that we all have unique gifts, and if we actively nurture them and ride them as far as they will take us, we can act like geniuses in what we are doing. Sometimes to billion dollar heights. Zuck is amazing, yet he is no different from many other people i’ve met. Anyone really doing their best, living at their peak, is Amazing.

No contradiction. We are all geniuses, once we find our unique talents and mission. Then the universe conspires towards our success.

Some amazing results are not financial, so I wrote the section on what is success. Mother Teresa or Gandhi didn’t have any unique ability that we don’t all share - yet they polished simple human qualities until they .. became amazing.
I don’t have all the answers on how to build a business, and they wouldn’t fit into one book. I’ve presented my unique contribution - the story of how one successful company did it. And I’m delighted my small piece has inspired and educated some readers, coming up on a thousand, who were already at a place in their journey where it was right for them.

On Mashable tonight, I discuss the possibilities of Yahoo or other buying Facebook.

http://mashable.com/2006/10/27/why-zuckerberg-wont-accept-just-1-billion-from-yahoo/

From Inside Facebook, pg 61:

“In general, social network websites have tremendous latent value, for two reasons. Both reasons are amazing, because all of the value is provided by the community, not by the site, or by anything the social network site does. First, within a social network, users want to demonstrate their status and value, and they will pay money for “pro” badges (flickr) or for virtual flowers (hotornot) or for other virtual digital goods. These, being completely virtual and unreal, have no tangible value whatsoever, but they accrue value from how they are used and viewed within the social network. Second, the members of a social network have a lot of knowledge and skills, which are inherently useful to others in the network and to outsiders willing to pay money for them. “

Almost a thousand people have read Inside Facebook, and you were drawn to it for similar reasons. Google analytics amazes me, showing you really are all over the world. Yet you share the some of the same interests, similar ambitions. You could all even find each other on Facebook, if you wanted to.

A key purpose of this book is to bring you together, so that you can work together to succeed. How? Well, the perfect tools for that don’t exactly exist yet. I’m working on some with my startups, and perhaps some of you are also. For now, I have a FB global group for you. Please join it.

I want you to talk to each other about your goals, ambitions and ideas. If nothing else, we talk about the tools we need, to make our collaboration on improving the world work. But that is too fuzzy to be practical, so in the book I sprinkled specific links back to this site, on these BIG topics:

What do you commit to do?

What is success on the web? How will you get it?

What should facebook do, better or different? (if they won’t, there’s on niche)

What are great internet ideas to improve the world? (no one will steal it if you run hard, and you can’t do it by yourself)

What is your facebook story?

Please use the easy interface to post and comment on any of these topics. I hope you all meet together here in a high energy environment, and take the talk away to whereever with each other.

Most people have valuable ideas, and noble dreams. But 80% just think or dream, and most of the other 20% don’t get help, don’t persist. Are you part of the powerful minority who will follow your dream? Don’t leave it to the people in power now, who don’t seem to have what it takes to fix problems faster than they arise. Tell yourselves, here out loud, what your part is in making it better. Even better, tell what you’ll do this week to figure out what your part is.

Independent, local, close to the ground media publications are able to look in new directions, unlikely sources. Michael and Techcrunch get so many scoops because they listen and take the time to look. I’m delighted that when they looked, they liked. Hope you all enjoy it too!

Comment below and let me know what you like, and what could be better.

“The very evening Zuck closed the initial funding round […] as he was going to some fast food joint in East Palo Alto, he was held up at gun point. The most exhilarating and terrifying moments in his life happened within hours of each other.” More important details of startup life, the social networking industry are in the blog & sample pages.

read more | digg story

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!]