The growth and impact of Facebook is mind blowing, even for an industry that considers "overnight success" to be a long-range goal. Founded in a Harvard dorm room on February 4th 2004 by 19-year-old Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook announced in July 2010 that had it reached the milestone of 500 million registered users. Facebook isn't just an American success story, most users are outside of the United States and half of them log on every day.Facebook has already made an irreversible impact on society, marketing and politics -- even facilitating political protests around the world in countries such as Colombia and Iran. Facebook is also changing our sense of identity: "I am on Facebook; therefore I am."
Longtime Fortune magazine technology writer David Kirkpatrick chronicles the rise of Facebook in one of the most anticipated books of 2010: "The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting The World." Kirkpatrick gained the full cooperation of Zuckerberg and his team in writing the book. The Facebook Effect is the first historically authoritative account of how a simple idea became one of the dominant ways to communicate on the Internet.
As part of its Net@40 series, the Computer History Museum is proud to present this one-of-a-kind evening of fascinating dialogue between Zuckerberg and Kirkpatrick on the past and future of Facebook. The moderator is Guy Raz, the Peabody award-winning host of NPR's All Things Considered.