The Social Network

Jesse Eisenberg, Justin Timberlake, Andrew Garfield, Joe Mazzello

Facebook began the way so many things begin in this country, with a lot of alcohol and low self-esteem. In 2003, at Harvard University, a drunken, rejected sophomore wanted to compare ugly girls to farm animals. Not even a decade later over 350 million people are apart of the largest social network ever invented. I guess the more things change the more they remain the same. To put this number in perspective, that is 50 million more than live in the United States. Fifty percent of users log on to the site at least once a day. The average user spending 55 minutes a day Facebooking. More photographs are loaded onto the site each month, over 2.5 billion, than there were people on the earth in 1950, or basically the same number as people in this world who lack basic sanitation facilities. Coincidence, I think not. Every week, over 3.5 billion pieces of content (pictures, links, news stores, blog postings, notes) are posted. In other words, if the singularity is going to occur, Colossus is going to spend most of its time on Facebook. The only site visited more on the web is Google. (31 percent of Internet visitors use Google every day. Youtube is right on Facebook’s heels in the third slot.)

So if you a technology Luddite and have not joined this new-fangled Facebook machine, what is this Facebook I am talking about? I have often said that Facebook friendships with people you would not walk across the street to see are the lowest form of friendships possible, but it is really almost anything a person wants it to be. Some people guard and treat their page like it is the nuclear codes to the missile silos. There is a place to put as little, or as much, personal information as you want from your religious and political beliefs to favorite movies. There is a place to load pictures and a wall for your friends and you to write comments, post videos, share links, and other mishmash. The user can also type a few sentences next to their names to inform people what they are up to or thinking, known as the status update. Finally, Facebook allows it users to find out what their friends have been up to on their pages and email and message each other. After that, it is whatever you want it to be.

Some people spend hours playing mind numbing games like Mafia Wars, Yoville, and Farmville, where you pretend to be a virtual farmer. (I have seen the best minds of my generation lost to Farmville and I am sure Zynga, the company that makes the game, is going to come out with a game where you watch virtual paint dry on a virtual wall.) Other people send each other virtual drinks, hearts, food, buttons, and other junk. Some fill out surveys, join fan pages devoted to whatever celebrity they are worshipping at the moment, take quizzes to find out what Beatle or underwear style they are, and most people do what they normally do, lie. They are people who tell you everything that is going on in their lives and others who are as guarded as the Cincinnati Kid playing poker. Like mice running through a maze, Facebook is an anthropologist’s fantasy come true. It is amazing to see who rejects you as a friend and to speculate why (my own brother booted me as a friend), who becomes addicted to what, who is a phony, who is uptight, (and if you are lucky the beginning of affairs), children acting out, and relationships crumble. It is window peeping at its best. The real secret of Facebook is its logarithms which comb through the information on your page and friends and then suggests friends for you. This includes kids you went to elementary school with and relatives you are forced to see once a year. (btw, I need friends. Please be my friend.)

And it all began in the dorm room of a drunken sophomore at Harvard University who had just been dumped by his girlfriend. Harvard, like many universities at the time, had facebooks of fellow students living in your building, just a picture, the person’s name, and a brief bio, so that individuals could better recognize each other. Mark Zuckenberg was looking at these photos and commenting on how hideous most of the girls were. He thought it would be fun to put some of these pictures on-line, paired with the picture of a farm animal so that people could vote which one was more attractive. Finding hundreds of photos of farm animals and combing through them would be a little difficult and more important too time consuming, so Zuckenberg decided to simply pair photos together so that people could vote which girl was hotter. He then hacked into the Harvard server to obtain the photos of girls from nine sorority houses on campus. He then copied the photos, did his comparisons, posted them on-line. Within four hours, 450 visitors had looked at the photos with the girl’s real identities listed. They also forwarded much of Zuckenberg’s work to different list-server groups (early forms of message boards on the Internet) before the administration, after receiving complaints, shut the site down. Even though he had violated copyrights, violated people’s privacy, and hacked into the server, instead of being expulsed, the charges were dropped. Lesson children: crime pays.

Later that semester, Zuckenberg took everything he had learned that night and formed an art project where he posted images on-line with a comment regarding what it was and started thefacebook.com. “the” was later dropped after Zuckenberg paid $200,000 to buy the domain name Facebook.com from someone else. Born was a campus-wide way students could see pictures of and get to know each other, basically taking the sorority house picture books and making them universal for the whole campus. Within 24 hours, between 12,000 and 15,000 students had joined and by the end of the month, half the undergrad population had joined the site.

Knowing a good idea when he saw one, and joined by friends Dustin Moskovitz and Eduardo Saverin, Zuckenberg expanded The Facebook to Stanford, Columbia and Yale, and by the end of the school year to all the schools in the Boston area and the rest of the Ivy League. By the summer of 2004, it was open to almost every school in America and Canada. He moved to Palo Alto, California and incorporated Facebook. He developed a high school version and then expanded membership eligibility to several major companies, by the Fall of 2006 it was open to everyone over the age of 13. Even though countries like China, Iran and Syria and hundreds of companies have tried to block it, along with the ability to access it with one’s cell phone, Facebook has exploded. One little problem on the way to immortality, someone forgot to ask how are they supposed to make money on the thing. Even though the company is worth an estimated $16 billion, no one thought about how they were to make money on a site people could go to for free. It was not until last year that Facebook turned a profit.

Writer and producer, Aaron Sorkin (“West Wing”, Charlie Wilson’s War) takes a crack at telling the story of the early days of Facebook. Based on the book Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich, which details Saverin and Zuckenberg’s trials and tribulations as they rode a rocket to the top of the Internet world. Throw in Napster co-founder Sean Parker, who became the first CEO of Facebook, and conflict abounds. It is “West Wing” in the business world with young people not old enough to shave. It is funny and sad. Friendship is tested as they go from broke to billionaires in a heartbeat and ended up in court suing each other three years later.

Verdict: A Good Movie But It Is Interfering With My Facebook Time