The Boy Kings: A Journey Into the Heart of the Social Network

The Boy Kings: A Journey Into the Heart of the Social Network

by KatherineLosse (Author)

Synopsis

Kate Losse was a grad school refugee when she joined Facebook as employee #51 in 2005. Hired to answer user questions such as What is a poke? and Why can't I access my ex-girlfriend's profile? her early days at the company were characterized by a sense of camaraderie, promise, and ambition: Here was a group of scrappy young upstarts on a mission to rock Silicon Valley and change the world. Over time Losse started to wonder what this new medium meant for real-life relationships: Would Facebook improve our social interactions? Or would we all just adapt our behaviour to the habits and rules of these brilliant but socially awkward Internet savants who have become today's youngest power players?

Increasingly sceptical, Losse graduated from customer service to the internationalization team-tasked with rolling out Facebook to the rest of the world- finally landing a seat right outside Zuckerberg's office as his personal ghost-writer, the voice of the boy king. This book takes us for the first time into the heart of this fast-growing information empire and reveals what's really driving both the business and the culture of the social network- Losse answers the biggest question of all: What kind of world is Facebook trying to build, and is it the world we want to live in?

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More Information

Format: Hardcover
Pages: 256
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 26 Jul 2012

ISBN 10: 1451668252
ISBN 13: 9781451668254

Media Reviews
In her dark, hypnotic memoir of working at Facebook during its rising years, Katherine Losse tests Mark Zuckerberg's dogmatic belief in transparency's inherent good by removing the privacy controls on his own life. The result is a reluctantly Machiavellian guidebook to Silicon Valley - and a strong endorsement for maintaining a separate social life rather than a fully public pics or it didn't happen one. --The Daily
The Boy Kings needs a place on your summer reading list. Losse made me think twice about how I socialize with people, and how exactly that came to be--and it just might encourage you to hop offline and appreciate non-virtual reality. --Glamour
Author Bio
Katherine Losse was born in Phoenix, Arizona, and holds a master's degree in English from Johns Hopkins University. She lives in Marfa, Texas.