Author David Kirkpatrick traces the story of the most powerful social networking tool of our day from its humble beginnings to its role as an international phenomenon. He is in conversation with TechCrunch's Michael Arrington.
The Facebook Effect is the only book written with the full cooperation of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Started only six years ago, Facebook can now claim more than 400 million users and a potential valuation of $100 billion by 2015.
Is an IPO forthcoming?
Bio
J. Michael Arrington
J. Michael Arrington is an entrepreneur and the founder and co-editor of TechCrunch, a blog covering Silicon Valley technology start-ups and the wider technology field in the USA and abroad.
Wired and Forbes have named Arrington one of the most powerful people on the Internet. In 2008, he was selected by TIME Magazine as one of the most influential people in the world.
David Kirkpatrick
David Kirkpatrick, longtime senior editor for Internet and technology at Fortune Magazine, has written for two decades about the computer and technology industries, as well as the impact of the Internet on business and society. His book, entitled The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company that is Connecting the World will be published by Simon & Schuster in the U.S. June 15, 2010. The book describes Facebook's history and how this newly-dominant Internet force is changing behaviors across societies worldwide.
Kirkpatrick began writing about computing and technology for Fortune in 1991. He wrote cover stories and features about almost every major tech and Internet company. Known for his weekly Fast Forward column on a wide range of tech topics, Kirkpatrick is regularly ranked one of the world's top technology journalists.
He created Fortune's Brainstorm conference series in Aspen starting in 2001. Now, with a group of former Fortune colleagues, he is launching a new conference, Techonomy, at Lake Tahoe August 4-6.
Kirkpatrick appears regularly at conferences worldwide and on TV, radio, and Net video. He is a member of the World Economic Forum's International Media Council and the Council on Foreign Relations.
Body of law bearing on the world of computer networks, especially the Internet. As traffic on the Internet has increased, so have the number and kind of legal issues surrounding the technology. Hotly debated issues include the obscenity of some on-line sites, the right of privacy, freedom of speech, regulation of electronic commerce, and the applicability of copyright laws.
Publicly accessible computer network connecting many smaller networks from around the world. It grew out of a U.S. Defense Department program called ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), established in 1969 with connections between computers at the University of California at Los Angeles, Stanford Research Institute, the University of California-Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah. ARPANET's purpose was to conduct research into computer networking in order to provide a secure and survivable communications system in case of war. As the network quickly expanded, academics and researchers in other fields began to use it as well. In 1971 the first program for sending e-mail over a distributed network was developed; by 1973, the year international connections to ARPANET were made (from Britain and Norway), e-mail represented most of the traffic on ARPANET. The 1970s also saw the development of mailing lists, newsgroups and bulletin-board systems, and the TCP/IP communications protocols, which were adopted as standard protocols for ARPANET in 1982–83, leading to the widespread use of the term Internet. In 1984 the domain name addressing system was introduced. In 1986 the National Science Foundation established the NSFNET, a distributed network of networks capable of handling far greater traffic, and within a year more than 10,000 hosts were connected to the Internet. In 1988 real-time conversation over the network became possible with the development of Internet Relay Chat protocols (seechat). In 1990 ARPANET ceased to exist, leaving behind the NSFNET, and the first commercial dial-up access to the Internet became available. In 1991 the World Wide Web was released to the public (via FTP). The Mosaic browser was released in 1993, and its popularity led to the proliferation of World Wide Web sites and users. In 1995 the NSFNET reverted to the role of a research network, leaving Internet traffic to be routed through network providers rather than NSF supercomputers. That year the Web became the most popular part of the Internet, surpassing the FTP protocols in traffic volume. By 1997 there were more than 10 million hosts on the Internet and more than 1 million registered domain names. Internet access can now be gained via radio signals, cable-television lines, satellites, and fibre-optic connections, though most traffic still uses a part of the public telecommunications (telephone) network. The Internet is widely regarded as a development of vast significance that will affect nearly every aspect of human culture and commerce in ways still only dimly discernible.
I think we have a parallel question that is very much analogous to this:
"What regulations do we need to keep the market free?" So, the analogy for the facebook question would be," what imposed regulations will Facebook need to function according to the principles and aspirations of Social Media?"
wow i can't believe how much of a jerk the interviewer was, especially during the part about whether or not facebook was stolen. david kirkpatrick seemed very intelligent and insightful the whole time though.
Interview was interesting, particularly discussing the false notion that Mark stole original ideas for Facebook when concepts and even other Facebook-like services were around long before Facebook ever emerged, or ConnectU or whatever it may be from around that time.
Facebook was the social networking site that the most people joined. It wasn't the idea that was ingenious or original, it was simply the doing it and getting people to join.
member. 
