The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook: A Tale of Sex,…

I would like to begin by saying this book makes me dislike Mark Zuckerberg. In general, people with poor social skills make me want to slap them and say, "Try Harder!" But this book makes it seem like Zuckerberg just doesn't care about other people...friends or not. He cares more about writing code.

Don't get me wrong, I like Facebook...but I do question Zuckerberg's ethical integrity. (Stealing ideas and dropping your supposed best friend from the company...really? That's not cool. And there are court proceedings to back up both of those stories...) Granted, it isn't fair to judge based on a book that was written without ever speaking to Zuckerburg, but his refusal to be interviewed says a lot.

I do wonder how this book can be categorized as non-fiction when the author even says he makes things up...didn't James Frey get boiled alive for that? ( )

I stayed with this as long as I could - I recommend finding a good article about these guys and this over-dramatized version ( )

When I read a book that has a great deal of biographical detail and where the subject refuses to co-operate and where there are too many phrases like, 'he must have thought', 'he could have surmised', 'maybe he felt', I think that even if the author is as well-respected as Mezrich, this is probably a load of balls.

Modern society, the media, cannot stand those who refuse to have a publicist, give interviews, employ a stylist and have a dozen employees referred to as 'my people'. It can't stand people who have done something that puts them in the public eye but they don't want the public attention. The media, journalists, papparazzi, editors all feel that they are entitled to make bucks off these people and need to have good sources of information and they hate those that just want to live a private life. So Zuckerberg always comes off worst.

It has become fashionable in the UK for randy footballers, thieving bankers and sundry assorted others we do not know of or cannot name, to seek superinjunctions at a cost of £150,000 to stop their misdeeds being published which might harm their families, show the public they are immoral criminals, or more likely in the case of all the footballer and actors, the bad publicity will harm the lucrative business of product endorsements. To me, they are fair game for the press. They can't get enough good publicity, every column inch is worth pounds and pence, so when the shit they do catches up with them, they should have to suck it up, like those who don't have a spare £150,000 for the lawyers.

But Zuckerberg is a private man, and his privacy should be respected and the envelope not pushed with what he might have thought or surmised, or whether he started Facebook because he was anti-social and bitter having been rejected by some girl or other. Authors like Mezrich rely on the fact that Zuckerberg probably wouldn't sue, so can continue to write this crap because he couldn't get an interview.

Other than that, the book was quite good for a business book, but without Zuckerberg's input and with the all-too-willing input of his enemies, it wasn't ever going to be the definitive book of Facebook. ( )

This is not a high energy book!

You'll have a much better time watching the movie The Social Network (I did, on the plane, from Munich to Singapore), you might even come away with a sense of who was nasty and who was nice, but reading the book is like eating white toast bread. Tasteless. And disappointing. Being a firm believe of the old cliche that the book is better than the film, I was expecting to come away with some tangible insights. I didn't.

It's nothing to do with Mezrich's skill as a writer. He remains dutifully even-handed from the first to the last page. It's simply because (oh no, I'm doing it again, placing the author in his social context, slap my wrist!) Mezrich belongs to the same set of people about whom he is writing, and while he's keen to tell a story, he's also minding his "p"s and "q"s.

You aren't going to get the real low-down on who did with what and stabbed whom how hard and for how much reading this book. You'll find out quite some background (and if you like that, I recommend the book), and you might be left with equal quantities of sympathy for all the players (insofar as they are depicted as being deserving of sympathy, which is an entirely subjective view-point). But if actions speak louder than words, watch the film. Zuckerberg has reinstated Savarin as co-founder publically, and Saverin has received an undisclosed pay-out sum, the WV twins are now arguing that the 2008 valuation of Face-book has left them short-changed, and meanwhile Sean Parker still smiling.

And while you're watching the film, keep in the back of your mind that Goodreads is a social network site. If there are privacy and potential misuse issues surrounding your use of Facebook, be sure the same issues are only a few profile pages away here. I know. One of my friends was just hauled off the site for being too close to the industry.

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Disappointing