Facebook has been credited for facilitating the Jasmine Revolution that began in Tunisia and has swept through North Africa, the Middle East and Asia, but long before that, it already helped a very important battle for freedom in Barranquilla, Colombia.
People in the South American country were sick of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerillas who often resorted to kidnapping civilians for their political gain. A Colombian man, Oscar Morales, decided that he had had enough and started an anti-FARC group on Facebook which, within months, grew rapidly and got 10 million people marching in cities throughout the country and two million more outside Colombia doing the same. The political storm that ensued greatly reduced the power of FARC.
This story is the prologue of the book The Facebook Effect by veteran technology reporter David Kirkpatrick, who has interviewed Mark Zuckerberg on numerous occasions and developed quite an insight into the world’s most famous computer genius. There is no shortage of books out there about this internet legend; add to this a blockbuster movie and numerous TV shows and you can be forgiven for thinking that you know everything about Facebook. But what makes Kirkpatrick’s writing enjoyable is that it does not seek to judge Zuckerberg or make arguments for who is right or wrong, it merely presents a well-researched story of how one Harvard student’s dorm room project became a multibillion-dollar corporation.
Some call Zuckerberg an accidental billionaire, but this book points out that Facebook’s success, like most things in life, has not been all by chance.
Reggie Ho
