Facebook has become an absolute cultural phenomenon, and the average college student would be hard-pressed to scrounge up a name of a friend that doesn’t own a Facebook.  Ever since it appeared on the digital scene in 2004, college students, then high school students, and later the wider world, have been virtually addicted to Facebook and its social tools.  Even spending as much time a day on Facebook as we do, how often do we wonder about the story behind the site’s birth.

Ben Mezrich, in The Accidental Billionaires, provides the reader a complete picture of the story behind the founding of Facebook.  He writes of Mark Zuckerberg, the sophomore Harvard undergrad who dreamed up the revolutionary site in 2004, and his whirlwind journey from a geeky, socially awkward computer genius to the youngest self-made billionaire on the planet.

Mezrich writes that Zuckerberg “knew he was on top of something huge. This Mark Zuckerberg production was going to change the world. Like Napster, but bigger – Facebook was all about freedom of information. A truly digital social network. Putting the real world onto the Internet.”  At times, it seems that Zuckerberg had trouble distinguishing between the real world and the Internet, during the days when Facebook was just a new website, with merely a few thousand users.

Mezrich admits that he “employs the technique of recreated dialogue” throughout the narrative. Although, Mezrich does clearly take some very obvious liberties with the truth in his story, his dramatizations and fictionalizations only add flavor to an already exciting, and in Zuckerberg’s own favorite term, “interesting” story.  Mezrich avoids the technical, computer programming aspect of the story and focuses on the sexier side of the story, such as the tense, sometimes feuding, relationship between the friends and founders, how Zuckerberg managed to involve the fledging site in an expensive legal battle before it was even a fully incorporated company, and the scores of “hot chicks” that came the founders’ way when the site started to grow.

Facebook is the brainchild of Zuckerberg’s own obsessive computer hacker personality, and his failed attempt at his first, Harvard-based social network called FaceMash.  FaceMash was Zuckerberg’s attempt to universalize and streamline Harvard’s individual residence hall Facebooks. The site got him into a lot of trouble with the University and its students as FaceMash was a comparison site, essentially asking students to judge female undergrads and voting for the “hotter” girl.  Facebook, or thefacebook.com as it was originally termed, was Mark’s attempt at recovering his image as a programmer who could create a site that the Harvard student body would love.

After spending months creating the code for the site, and inviting his best friend at the time, Eduardo Saverin, another geek at Harvard with slightly more social connections than Zuckerberg, to be the CFO and finance the start up costs of the site, thefacebook.com went live.  It exploded at Harvard within the first few days, and Zuckerberg and Saverin expanded the site to other schools, still relying on the $1,000 Saverin initially invested in the nascent site.

The site’s growth was impressive, and Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard, and moved to California with two “interns,” fellow undergrads who dropped out with him, to take advantage of what Silicon Valley has to offer, in terms of Vested Capital, in order to bolster the site’s fast-depleting financial resources.  Saverin attempted to continue to run the business side of Facebook from New York, but was phased out of the company when Sean Parker, a notorious Silicon Valley bad-boy, and founder of Napster, teamed up with Zuckerberg and turned Facebook into the 15 billion dollar valuated company it is today.

Mezrich writes that Facebook “would always be, at its heart, a college experiment gone viral.”  Facebook seems to be the most far-reaching college experiment ever, one that affects all of our lives, sometimes dozens of times a day, depending on how many times we log in.  Mezrich provides a highly entertaining account of Zuckerberg’s rise from obscurity to fame as the man who revolutionized socializing.

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