Mezrich's story documents the rise of Facebook from a geeky dorm room project at Harvard University in 2004 inspired by hard-to-penetrate social clubs to its current state as a gathering place for a couple hundred million people and a business that Facebook board member Marc Andreessen recently said could generate $1 billion in this year if it pushed harder on selling ads.

The story is told largely via Eduardo Saverin, who befriended Mark Zuckerberg during their days at Harvard in 2003 and helped the tech brainiac behind Facebook (then called "thefacebook") get the Web site off the ground in 2004. Saverin handled the business side and provided initial funding. By the end of the book, Saverin has been pushed out of the company and is suing Zuckerberg.

In large part, the falling out between Zuckerberg and Saverin is blamed on Napster and Plaxo co-founder and larger-than-life character , who wows Zuckerberg in Silicon Valley and helps hook him up with venture funding. Parker too, though, is on the outs with Zuckerberg by the end of the book, after getting arrested at a party.

The story also includes a pair of hunky identical twin rowers at Harvard. They're never described as Zuckerberg's friends, but they did try to get him to work with them on a dating-oriented social network project while at Harvard. They argue Zuckerberg agreed to do so and then stalled their project so he could get thefacebook off the ground. They ended up taking against him.  

Unfortunately for Mezrich, Zuckerberg didn't agree to be interviewed for the book. To compensate, Mezrich takes in conveying the rest of the story, clearly stating at the outset of the book that he "re-created the scenes " based on his multiple interviews with direct and indirect witnesses. He uses his imagination to describe wild party scenes and sexual encounters in bathroom stalls that back up the book's subtitle ("The founding of Facebook: A tale of sex, money, genius and betrayal").