Real rating: 3.5 stars

What drew me to this book? Let's see...a recent English major grad joins the fledgling customer support team for a social network that just reached 5 million users? Sound familiar, Kara?

Though I could relate to some of the customer support stories, that's pretty much where the similarities end. Losse depicts Facebook as a fairly blatant [24-year-old] Old Boys Club, complete with graffiti of large-breasted women on the walls and a caste system based on technical knowledge. A More...

Sad. I look at FB as a fun, interesting way to stay in touch with friends.

Katherine Losse's "The Boy Kings" unfolded a story about "conquering" at any cost. A "Boys Club of Hackers and Elite Engineers from Ivy League Schools." Company before Country.........men in expensive suits waiting to invest money in the next big thing. The myth, that no one has access to our private information.....except for employees that work within the confines of FB.

So her others (including the founder) took her to More...

Oh, my. This was not a pleasurable read. Losse presents herself to the reader as a disinterested outsider, as if she went into this venture ("journey into the heart" of Facebook) with eyes wide open and almost as an undercover consumer advocate of some kind. Of course she was just young, out of work with an english graduate degree, and needed a job. The idea to write about her experiences apparently didn't occur to her until toward the end of her tenure in the boy empire.

And of course the subjec More...

Review by Megan Miller

A childish approach to life can be profitable. It has certainly worked well for the founders and backers of Facebook, as Katherine Losse demonstrates in “The Boy Kings: A Journey into the Heart of the Social Network.” The engaging and pithy book is a memoir of the author’s five years at the company, before it developed a slick corporate persona.

She describes the office shenanigans of Facebook’s Ivy League wonder whiz kids: games of hide and seek, all night hackathons and se More...

As I started to write this, I finally paid attention to the subtitle, and thought "Perfect." The way this book is written reflects exactly that: the heart. This book is courageously and carefully written, and offers the point of view that I often wondered about. I really liked it.
I also had to often pause and think of the contrast between my father's work life (going to work 8-4:30 everyday, half hour for lunch, if that, wearing a suit and a tie, shoes polished, overcoat and hat, offering respec More...

This was an interesting read. I would actually give it 3.5 stars if I could. Katherine chronicles her five years at Facebook and the early startup years resemble the working environment portrayed in Mad Men. It is not a tell-all book by any means. It is more of a memoir of the author's life while at FB and the constant inner struggle she had to "dominate" (as Zuckerberg often said at weekly meetings) and remain a humanist while employed there. Amidst this inner struggle, Losse provides interesti More...

Who would have thought that I would ever pick up a Business Profile book and read the entire thing in three days. One things for sure...not this girl. This was such a fascinating read. I remember when I signed up for Facebook spring semester senior year, it was new, clean looking, and upon refection I thought it was safe because of the way it was set up (especially compared to MySpace which at the time was the hot social network, where everyone was friends with Tom. If you were wondering like I More...

More like 2.5 stars. I really was hoping for a nuanced examination of Facebook and in particular Mark Zuckerberg. Losse had the ability to write so much more. Perhaps she was restrained by contracts she had signed, but this book largely fails. She attempts to write a anthropological and sociological exposé on Facebook, using her Johns Hopkins degree(which she never lets you forget she has) but as an English MA, she is ill-equipped to do a real analysis. Instead we get stories, with ill placed t More...

I read through this in a day span on my Kindle. I recommend it if any of the following apply:

-You enjoyed the movie "The Social Network"
-You are interested or intrigued by the hacking subculture
-You have ever questioned your online identity/privacy/security
-You have a love/have relationship with Facebook
-You are interested in individuals' accounts online of how/why they left Facebook
-You are concerned about Facebook owning your data or your identity
-You wonder about the future of Facebook or you More...

This is more like a 2.5 stars than a 3.

Where The Social Network tells the story of Facebook through the detached lens of a legal proceeding, The Boy Kings tells the story of FB through the first-person career-climb narrative of FB employee, Kate Losse. I liked the "inside story" for what it was. I also liked the personal story of a young woman out of college making it in the big boys' world all the while making fun of the big boys for their inability to stop being big boys. But, the repetitious More...

apparently mark zuckerberg wants facebook to help eliminate all personal boundaries between people, so we will all know what we are all thinking all the time.


I think i liked this book because I agree with the author's sentiments that the tech boom is filled with adolescent boys trying to take over the world, and bulldozing everything (and everyone else) in the process.

the author says "like so many" way too often ie "we hopped in the limo like so many high schoolers..."
that is a pet peeve of min More...

Katherine Losse's "The Boy Kings" is an interesting inside look at the early culture at Facebook, especially from the grunt level as opposed to the higher echelons. She delves into how technical vs nontechnical people were treated at the office, something I've seen firsthand during my years in the computer science field. She also exposes the sexism she had to face, both passive (exclusion from male-dominated field) and active (hitting on her and outright harassment).

Her thoughts on the cult-lik More...

Was this the worst book I've ever read? It's hard to say for sure. But from the opening pages, I felt a strange tingle of excitement with the growing realization of the awfulness of it. So bad was this book that I perversely could not stop reading it. In the intro, the author makes sweeping generalizations how people her age, her generation feel about this or that. She uses her own feelings as a proxy for everyone her age group. And every gesture someone makes is loaded with greater significance More...

The overwhelming feeling I got while reading this book was that Loss suffers from being in love with the sound of her own voice, a no-no for someone like me, who went to one of the best journalism schools in the country where that bad habit was derided. Some of her insights into Facebook were indeed interesting, but Losse's experience there wasn't enough to stretch to a 200+ page book. Her attempt to fill the narrative with her observations about how technology affects the way people relate to e More...

This is pretty fascinating stuff. I wish it'd been longer, more detailed, by which I mean MORE GOSSIP, but it's not really a tale-telling book. It's more of a meditation of her time at Facebook, how she thought and felt about it and how those thoughts and feelings changed as the company did. I mean, there are some good stories, but the focus is on her personal journey through a very strange place. Again, I wish it had been longer, but she gets a lot into 250-odd pages, and it's definitely worth More...

Katherine Losse, a humanist from Baltimore with a graduate degree in English Literature, was hired by Facebook when it was in its infancy. She started in a $20 an hour position in customer support. By the time she left in January of 2011, she had become Mark Zuckerberg's alter ego, responsible for writing the messages and announcements supposedly coming directly from him, and had the salary and stock options to go with it. She is extremely intelligent and her book is a valuable testament to the More...

Better than I expected, and more authentic than I would've thought. The book is at its heart a sort of memoir of the author's time at Facebook. It's a good read: honest, direct, and non-gossipy about the culture that Facebook and, more broadly, Silicon Valley have created and embraced.

She touches on some big questions through the book, but doesn't delve too deeply into trying to answer those questions. I suspect that will drive a few types of readers nuts, making it seem like the book ends up go More...

I enjoyed the book for being a window into the social network giant and the way it operates. In some way humanizes it and brings it down from that "magical place" concept some developers (especially in other countries) might hold it up to be. However I would have liked that window to be something wider or taller, like a door. Instead the author intertwines her own love story, which is good, but I felt it was not what I signed up for.

While it was interesting to get an inside view into the early days of Facebook, I didn't care for the author's point of view. She writes with a holier than thou attitude, like she's the babysitter in a room full of children, which I found really off-putting. The fact of the matter is that she was right there in the trenches with those childish engineers, and shaped Facebook into what it is right along with them.

She plays the game for a few years, and then decides that she needs to save her soul More...

This is the story of the early days of FaceBook written by one of the insiders who eventually became disenchanted with the Social Network. I appreciated this inside look, and as a librarian in a high school, I also appreciated that it was written in such a way that it would be appropriate reading for high school students.

Many Facebook users are beginning to confuse real life with their online lives but will ultimately find that casual Internet acquaintances are no substitute for real friends. "The moment we're in now is about trying to deal with all this technology rather than rejecting it, because obviously we can't reject it entirely."

I gave this book 4 stars. It offers a useful history of Facebook, especially the early years, and nicely contrasts the roles and statices of engineers and support staff. Losse writes well, as we would expect, given her background, and I appreciated her style and diction.

This book received a lot of flack for its harsh accusations of sexism against zuck & co, but dramatic ( paranoid, possbly ) language aside, I think it was a pretty insightful book. The sexism accusations were ultimately just one aspect of a generally astute view into the valley

I was hoping for a bit more of an exposé on Facebook - instead, I got the whiny musings of how the world is too digital now from a phd dropout, even as she partied in Tahoe, attended Coachella, and flirted with coders named Thrax. Not quite what I expected.

Decent story, and the author makes good points about how Facebook has weaved itself into our lives. But is it good for social interaction? That's the question that the makers of Facebook never bother to ask, but the author does.

I kept waiting for something to happen..it was a very slow-moving read, not an expose or tell-all. I was hoping to read more about Facebook's inner workings, but it was mainly about the author's interactions with her fellow employees.

3.5 stars
Interesting behind-the-scenes story of the early years of the facebook enterprise.
NOT a g-rated read, but nothing graphic either, and I found this to be quite a fascinating read.

If you really want to know how sexist and shallow the social networking biz still is, read this book. Nothing much I didn't already know but it's nice to hear a former insider say it.

Authy, as Kate would say.

Decent book that raises vald points about the hierarchy and class structure at engineering-driven companies, but much of this book is inside baseball.

meh. kind of boring, to be honest. i was hoping this would be more in the vein of The Social Network. no real climax here, and i had to make myself finish reading it.