Karel Baloun, a former colleague (and formidable speed chess adversary!) has written an interesting book about his experience at Facebook. It’s called Inside Facebook and it details his year there. He’s selling PDF copies for $9.98. Karel was one of the early engineers hired, and as a thirty-something he found himself as one of the old men of the company!
Karel offers many insights into the founding team members and the ethos that prevailed there, including a focus on customer support and the controlled code-chaos of an early stage technology start-up. He also discusses many issues facing social networking sites in general, such as public identities, various target audiences, data privacy, multiple friend networks, etc.
That’s just a small sampling of his insights, so check it out.
Here’s Andre’s review.
UPDATE 10/28/06: Looks like an article from Karel made it to the front page of Digg. The article is Why Zuckerberg Won’t Accept Just $1 Billion from Yahoo.