27 Amazing Things You Didn't Know About Facebook

2010-05-14T13:44:00.000Z

Former Facebook president Sean Parker — We learned all about Facebook president Sean Parker's scandalous departure from the company <a href="javascript:;" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">nrkbeta</a>

We just finished reading Fortune editor David Kirkpatrick's upcoming book The Facebook Effect.

It's a must-read.

The Facebook Effect is not a Gladwell-wannabe. It's a fast-paced, can't-put-it-down, story about Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook's founding.

The book is brilliantly-reported and full of details about how Facebook's biggest deals came together – and how some even bigger deals did not. It even features tales of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll.

We consider ourselves pretty well-versed in Facebook and Facebook's early days and we learned a TON reading this book. Go buy it now.

Correction: An earlier version of this post said that Mark Zuckerberg took two bonuses during Facebook fundraising. This fact is not in corrected versions of The Facebook Effect, publisher Simon & Schuster tells us.

26 Amazing Things You Didn't Know About Facebook

Facebook's first outside investor, Peter Thiel, sold half his stock in 2009 to Russian holding firm, DST

An early ad deal with Apple covered Facebook's expenses during a desperate stretch in 2004

Accel Partners pushed former Facebook president Sean Parker out after a cocaine-related arrest in North Carolina

Before opening Facebook beyond college students, Facebook planned FacebookHIgh.com for high schoolers. The domain was too expensive, though.

In 2006 a guy named Chris Putnam hacked into Facebook and made thousands of profiles look like MySpace profiles. Facebook hired him.

Remember that weird guy on TheFacebook.com? Turns out he's modeled after Al Pacino. Whoa!

At a house Facebook rented during the summer of 2004, "there was a fair amount of pot smoking, though Zuckerberg frowned on it and didn't partake."

During Facebook's first summer, Zuckerberg and his family spent $85,000 keeping the company afloat.

LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and Zynga Mark Pincus own a crucial social networking patent – and that's why they own some Facebook stock

At one point, Facebook planned to call its ad product "AdSeed" a ripoff of Google's AdSense

When Accel partner Jim Breyer invested $12.7 million in Facebook in 2005, Mark Zuckerberg, Sean Parker and Dustin Moscovitz each took $1 million bonuses

The day after the Accel investment, Mark Zuckerberg was at a gas station when a crazy guy with a gun came at him. Zuck jumped in his SUV and drove away.

Steve Chen worked at Facebook for a few weeks before quitting to do his own startup. It was called YouTube.

The company then known as TheFacebook bought the domain Facebook.com for $200,000

Mark Zuckerberg didn't want to add photo-sharing to Facebook, but Sean Parker convinced him to. Facebook is now the most popular photo-sharing site.

This isn't it, but the first photo uploaded to Facebook photos was of a cartoon cat. Then came lots of pictures of girls socializing.

After employees and investors began lobbying for his replacement, Zuckerberg took "CEO lessons" in 2005

The closest Zuckerberg ever came to selling was to Yahoo in 2006, after Facebook opened to workplace networks and nobody noticed

Before News Feed, "each time someone changed their profile picture, it led 25 new page views."

The very first reaction to Facebook News Feed was "Turn this shit off!"

Flickr and Hunch cofounder Caterina Fake couldn't join Facebook because it thought her name was…fake

Facebook can't talk to Google about an acquisition without telling Microsoft first, thanks to Microsoft's 2007 investment

There's an official "Facebook Phone" over in Asia

After a 2008 re-design, even Dell CEO Michael Dell joined a group called "Petition Against the 'New Facebook"

Facebook will launch an ad network, says cofounder Dustin Moscovitz

The average age of a Facebook employee is 31

Amazing details, right?

Here's some more amazing stuff we learned from the book…

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