The Boy Kings: A Journey Into The Heart Of The Social Network (2012) - Plot & Excerpts
I care less about Mark Zuckerberg than I do Dave Eggers, which is not much. The book's unfruitful preoccupation with linearity made for flawed pacing, and otherwise felt oversimplified and impersonal. It's weird to have approached a book assuming that it would contain so much tempered bitterness and been right. With a little more narrative distance, I can see this having held weight as an insightful critique, and with less detachment, the relationships might have felt compellingly fraught. Instead, it stands the bland middle ground. I'm guilty of not paying attention to this book when it came out and only giving it a second look when that David Eggers book was released. This book turned out to be better than I thought, but it's not without its faults.Written in the perspective of a woman working in customer service during the early days of Facebook, it was different from something I would usually read. Maybe I'm showing my engineering bias here, but I thought she had too big of a chip on her shoulder about being 1.) a woman in a primarily man-dominated field, and 2.) a non-engineer. She almost made it sound like you could only be one or the other -- an engineer, or a woman. Not both.Losse's yearning to move from customer service to something more prestigious (in her eyes) is what drives most of the book. While that's not the most interesting story, I found some of the insights she had about the purpose of Facebook to various people in the company interesting.After reading this book, I'm curious to read what someone who started in engineering from the very beginning thought about Facebook. I imagine it would me a very different story than the one Losse has written.
What do You think about The Boy Kings: A Journey Into The Heart Of The Social Network (2012)?
Great insider story of the early days of Facebook from Katherine. Very interesting.
—louread
