I finished reading The Facebook Effect by David Kirkpatrick this week and I found it incredibly captivating!  I hope to do a larger review later, but in short it covers the company from before inception in Zuckerberg’s dorm room to his more recent World Economic Forum appearences.

You may not care about the details of the venture capital financing they’ve received, but you’ll be certain to find interesting the simplistic genius that exists in Facebook as it continues to grow into the role it plays in my, and your lives today.

Pick up a copy – you’ll be glad you did.

But don’t just take my word for it, below is a bit from Michael Arrington’s review at TechCrunch.

Here’s my recommendation: If you are interested in startups, or how marketing and advertising are evolving, or just how Facebook is changing the world, buy this book. It’s very readable and gives great insights into how Facebook grew from a dorm room to a huge company. There’s no other book out there that gives such a complete history of the company and of Mark Zuckerberg.

Related articles

• The Social Network Movie vs Facebook’s True Story (chasingthefrog.com)
• Live-blog: Zuckerberg and David Kirkpatrick on the Facebook Effect (Kim-Mai Cutler/VentureBeat) (techmeme.com)

I love reading. As one of lifes little ironies, I work for book company and I STILL got books for Christmas gifts! One of those gifts was The Forbes Book of Business Quotations: 14,173 Thoughts on the Business of Life. I’m pretty excited about it, so I thought I’d share the following quote with you from the business section to start out 2008. It’s by George Matthew Adams

There should be no age limits placed on ambition, alertness, creativeness, or in fact on anything that may mark the mental or spiritual progress of any human being…There is an old saying, Nothing ventured nothing gained. Obviously true, but on the other hand, even though many of our ventures come to no profitable end, the very fact that we ventured should be to our credit. People who stand still, or just watch from the sidelines of life, only partly live. To venture, and only to get fun out of it, has a constructive angle to it. Keep venturing and you’ll never grow dull!

To an year of venturing and ambition!