from www.sonyinsider.com – Sony Pictures (Columbia) is steadily increasing publicity for The Social Network, which is based on Ben Mezrich’s Book: The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal.
The more I see about this I feel that the movie will be most likely known amongst society as “The Facebook Movie.” The film features an ensemble cast which consists of Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Justin Timberlake, Brenda Song, Rashida Jones, Max Minghella, Rooney Mara, Malese Jow, and Joseph Mazzello. The Social Network is set to debut on November 1st, 2010.
The plot summary for the The Social Network is as follows:
On a fall night in 2003, Harvard undergrad and computer programming genius Mark Zuckerberg sits down at his computer and heatedly begins working on a new idea. In a fury of blogging and programming, what begins in his dorm room soon becomes a global social network and a revolution in communication. A mere six years and 500 million friends later, Mark Zuckerberg is the youngest billionaire in history… but for this entrepreneur, success leads to both personal and legal complications.
from www.washingtonpost.com – Have you seen the preview for The Social Network? It is the movie based on the Accidental Billionaires, a book inspired by the early years of Facebook.
The book and movie bring to life a version of Facebook’s history that suggest its founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, may have stolen the idea from someone else. Moral considerations aside, my response? It is irrelevant.
Anyone who has ever worked for an early stage company will tell you that products are shaped by a million decisions, large and small, over time. External factors, and how leaders choose to react to them, also play a major role. But it’s a fallacy to suggest that merely having an idea similar to someone else’s means that execution would also be the same.
Facebook’s history itself makes this abundantly clear. I recently read The Facebook Effect, the story of Facebook as told by David Kirkpatrick. It was Zuckerberg’s commitment to a particular aesthetic, relentless resistence to ads that disrupt the user experience, the decision to create a photo application and so many other choices over time that led to the Facebook used today.