The NYRB looks at two books about Facebook. "The site was a lark. For all that it reduced personality to a series of "position takings" and changed the word "friend" from a noun, something defined by duration, to a verb—"I friended him," a one-off event—the early Facebook nonetheless appeared as a natural extension of the atmosphere of college, where everlasting friendship often seems as simple as making another late-night dorm-room acquaintance, and whether one names Jane Austen among one's favorite authors, or removes Charlotte Brontë from the list, can seem enormously important, deeply representative of one's shifting personality."