When I first heard that there was going to be a Facebook movie, I cringed and said to a friend, "I'd rather watch 30 A-Team remakes than see a movie about Facebook." To me, the creation of Facebook is a non story. The site is absolutely a great networking tool. There's no question about that. But is there really a story behind a site that was created entirely off of ideas stolen from other people (except the like button of course)? I'm not taking some self-righteous stance here and saying I would never use Facebook. I was late to the Facebook party but I still signed up and I've been able to get in touch with some great people that I lost touch with as well as people that I had hoped I would never see again. It's a great way to share my life with friends and also to kill some time. That being said, Facebook is not by any means an original idea and that's why I questioned the decision to make a movie based on it. Why should I care about some over privileged kids that stole other people's ideas and made billions of dollars? The answer to that question is I shouldn't and I don't, however, the movie was fantastic. It was put together in such a way that the monotony of the real story didn't seem quite as boring.
I've taken heat from some that don't agree with me when I say that Facebook isn't as revolutionary as many believe it to be. There are a few scenes from the movie that help prove my point. At the very opening of the film you hear Zuckerberg mention that unlike other schools, Harvard doesn't offer an online Facebook for its students. He even took the name from an already available service. Side note...when I was a freshman in college (1999) we were all given books with head shots of our classmates that we all called "The Facebook." That was 5 years before Zuckerberg's creation. Another example is when the Winklevoss twins are sharing their idea with Zuckerberg he asks how it would be different from Friendster or Myspace. Their answer? It would be exclusive. They wanted to create a site based off of Myspace but make it only available to Harvard users. Exclusivity is not synonymous with originality. Other instances in the film include the moments when Zuckerberg "thought" to add relationship status and photo galleries to the site. Both of these options were already available on Myspace before Z had what he felt were brilliant ideas.
Someone reading this might think that I'm a huge Myspace supporter. That's not true. In fact, I deleted my account around the same time that I signed up for Facebook. Even at that point, I hadn't been active on Myspace in quite some time.
Though much of Facebook was stolen from other ideas, it did change the game a little bit. Where Facebook succeeded was in its design. It took the disaster of images and videos that were on Myspace and simplified it immensely to make a much easier networking experience. When you log in, you're not instantly bombarded with a song or some ridiculous video that was posted in your comments. I also really enjoy the mutual friends section when you look at someone's profile. I have found many old friends simply because we had mutual friends on Facebook.
While movie critics across the board have been praising the film, the tech bloggers seem to have all teamed up to support the real Zuckerberg (Try THIS ARTICLE or THIS ONE as examples). Many say that it doesn't show Zuckerberg the way he truly is. That could be true. I've never met or spoken with the man so I can't comment on that. The people that have will clearly know that better. They have also complained that the film doesn't accurately show anything about social networking. There are two reasons for this.
1) The movie is about the creation and subsequent law suits stemming from Z's theft of the ideas. Not about using Facebook.
2) A 2 hour movie about people using Facebook would be the most boring thing to ever hit the big screen.
While we like to think what we're doing on Facebook is important (and to us, it is) it's actually not interesting in real life at all. Posting that you're heading to the grocery store could be important information to your friends, or burglars waiting to rob your house, but it's not important to the other 499,999,985 people that are on Facebook and thus, not important to the rest of the world.
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