Social Networking

Printed works to illuminate a networked world.

 


 

The Accidental Billionaires The Founding of Facebook: A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal

Ben Mezrich

 

After hacking into the Harvard computer system to snag the photos of every female student on campus, Mark Zuckerberg set up a site for fellow male students to “rate” them. Mezrich chronicles how the social experiment led to the birth of Facebook and the changing of American life forever.

 

 

 

 

 


The Wisdom of Crowds

By James Surowieki

 

New Yorker staff writer Surowiecki explores the idea that large groups of people are often smarter than an elite few even if those few are experts in the subject at hand. He finds down-to-earth ways to investigate the idea in fields as diverse as psychology, economics, and artificial intelligence.

 

 

 

 

 


 

Here Comes Everybody

By Clay Shirky

 

Social media has completely changed the way groups work together in many ways and Shirky chronicles them all: from antiauthoritarian demonstrations in Belarus and bloggers bringing down Trent Lott to the complete surprise of Wikipedia working effectively. Shirky entertainingly deciphers what makes groups work in this Web 2.0 world.

 

 

 

 

 


 

Twitter Wit: Brilliance in 140 Characters or Less

Nick Douglas

 

Like a collection of hilarious and fascinating haiku, Douglas, the founding editor of Silicon Valley gossip site Valleywag, collects 158 pages of 140-character (or less) tweets from a slew of celebs such as Stephen Colbert and New Yorker staff writer Susan Orlean and everyday Joes that prove to be priceless.

 

 

 

 

 


 

Stealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America

Julia Angwin

 

MySpace’s founders weren’t tech geniuses. They were marketing guys who had dabbled in spam, pornography, and spyware before ripping off another social-networking site, Friendster. Pulitzer Prize-winner Angwin tells how one of the Internet’s most popular sites came to be and was eventually sold to Rupert Murdoch for almost $600 million.

 

 

Comments
by aa59 on ‎11-15-2010 09:27 AM

Social Networking is a useful tool to reconnect with old friends, but sometimes it can be an invasion of privacy. I have read a story about the negative uses of social networking and how past of someone's life can affect their future. The story is about a serial killer that finds people from his past and uses social networking to track and kill his victims that tormented him in the past. The story is called Encrypted, visit the website http://www.encryptedthemovie.com for more info.

May 18: Parade, the "first modern ballet," premiered in Paris on this day in 1917. The production was a collaboration of some of modernism's most famous -- music by Erik Satie, scenario by Jean Cocteau, costumes by Picasso,…

Ethan Rutherford and Matt Burgess (Dogfight: A Love Story) on the writing of Rutherford's surreal and fiercely funny story collection The Peripatetic Coffin

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