David Kirkpatrick brings us an open and honest view of the adventures of Mark Zuckerberg and friends, who started Facebook when they were students at Harvard University. The book would read like fiction, if you didn't know it was true.

It took only a few years for Facebook to become the preeminent online social networking site and a global business giant, reaching 500 million users this summer. It has affected the way we communicate personally, professionally and politically, across nations and continents.

Mr. Kirkpatrick, who has written extensively about the Internet and technology at Fortune magazine, had access to the principal players that no one else has ever had.

The story of how Facebook came to be (defeated competitors and opened up the world to a kind of scary connectivity unprecedented in any form in history) is among the most compelling business narratives of our time.

As a Harvard sophomore with a genius for computer programming and a keen interest in social psychology, Mr. Zuckerberg devised a program that would connect students at Harvard in a new way.

Yet Mr. Zuckerberg and his friends Dustin Moskovitz and Christopher Hughes did not begin their adventure by laying out a business plan. What they did was focus on who they wanted to be to their customers (college students), what those customers needed (to broaden their social networks), and how to deliver the goods.

Their focus on customers rather than profits put them miles ahead of the world of corporate strategy and precisely assured success wherever they broadened their constituencies.

In fact, it was Mr. Zuckerberg's lack of interest in money, beyond what was needed to buy equipment that forced his partners to prod him to accept limited advertising revenues. That started the ball rolling toward a level of success that would have corporations nearly begging the group to take billions for the product.

The beginning of Facebook was not without its missteps, but the partners' candor allowed them to reset and correct mistakes as they came.

The book, however delightfully and warmly presented, could have used a few charts and graphs to delineate the personalities that flew in and out of the picture before the company settled in 2009 into fairly normal offices in Palo Alto, Calif.

In the end, "The Facebook Effect" still leaves us wondering if this stranger in a strange land has true durability. How much candor will the public accept? Is confidentiality a thing of the past or something that can be managed to an individual's taste?

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