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

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!

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.

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!]

So I finally finished reading your book, and I really liked getting an insider’s view of Facebook and startups. I agree with you about having seperate profiles for different types of networks/friends. For example, this summer, I added an intern that I worked with as my friend on Facebook. However, I cannot get myself to view his tagged pictures, because he’s drunk in most of them, and I will never look at him the same way if I go through all his drunk pictures. He’s ok with the fact that anyone can see these pictures, but if I were him, I wouldn’t be ok with that.

I want to comment on the following quote from your book, “So I told Zuck that older people have different personas to show different groups of friends.” I think this is very true, and not just for older people, but people of all ages. From a very young age, I have probably had multiple personalities for different groups of people. I’ve never been exactly the same person in front of my parents that I am in front of my friends, or when I’m by myself. However, these differences mainly consist of what kind of conversations and thoughts I have, and not necessarily my beliefs or morals. There’s certain things I can talk to my friends about that I can’t really talk to my parents about, but it’s not like I would go behind my parents back and do something with my friends that my parents wouldn’t want me to do.

I think I also have different personalities for my different types of friends. I have friends from high school, who I used to see on a daily basis and used to be pretty close with, and friends from college, who I will probably never be very close with. Since I have facebook friends who I am not best friends with, I don’t necessarily want them to know every detail about my life and what I do, but that doesn’t mean that I want to lose contact with them. Facebook helps me keep track of people I know, but I don’t need to know that my friend in Boston (or some other city far away from where I live) is attending an event that I wasn’t invited to, and I don’t necessarily want everyone to know when I’m going to a party.

I know that one of Zuckerberg’s goals is for people to know more about those that they care about, but there are different levels of caring. I don’t care if a friend adds a new movie that I’ve never seen or heard of as one of her favorite movies, but I do care if she graduates or has some other major change in her life, and that’s the whole reason why I became active on Facebook.

http://www.collegeiseasy.net/facebook.html

but they are not the best part of it

yours can be in it too. claim your 15 minutes of fame.