Facebook - The Social Network Movie

Facebook – the movie – and cliché life lessons galore!

Is Mark Zuckerberg really that evil?

The main character, Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder and CEO of Facebook, is being sued by his best friend and by the Winklevoss twins, who initially came to him with a social network idea.

Mark’s own friends turned on him, and you might say they had a good reason – money. If the movie teaches one thing, well, it’s not that fun to be rich. It’s hard to see that movie and not say – the more money, the more problems.

The movie made Mark Zuckerberg look like an apathetic, yet greedy man. He seemed unconcerned that his best friend was suing him. He was so entangled in a web of messy problems. And his friends only wanted to ride his success. His character was portrayed like he didn’t seem human anymore.

Mark came off as being pretty cynical for the world’s youngest billionaire. Money can’t buy you happiness. Why? Cause the best things in life are free?

The stickiest situation was how the whole social network idea came about. The Winklevoss twins approached Mark to make a social networking site for college students only. Mark agreed verbally to make the project for them, but then he avoided them for over a month while he was developing his own idea that had spawn from theirs. The only difference was that Mark’s idea was bigger. He basically did the same idea but expanded and added on to it, while ignoring his verbal contract to help the Winklevoss twins.

This made Mark look bad. Straight up. And he knew his idea would be bigger than theirs and crush theirs. Nice guys finish last.

Did Mark steal the idea? Well, not sure. Creativity in the business world usually comes in the form of adding on to something existing.

Besides, his first website rated women against each other like objects. He set himself up for people to think he is someone of bad character. The movie did portray Mark Zuckerberg in a negative light though.

The movie overall probably just added to the snowball effect of the Facebook machine. Even if the movie made the creator, or co-creator, look bad, people still support products with bad creators all the time.

Will Facebook still give me what I want? Can it still benefit me?

Answer that question and you answer if its popularity will increase.

An even better question is: Do more people know about Facebook because of the movie?

Probably. Hard to say, but no publicity is bad publicity.

Mark Zuckerberg’s response to the film is good, but a lot of people, like me, don’t know that the movie is set up to be fiction. Obviously it was dramatized for Hollywood, but who knows how much. The movie came off as seeming like a documentary almost. Mark’s comments were useful for clearing that up – but how many people will see them?

“It’s a movie; it’s fun... I can promise you, this is my life so I know it’s not that dramatic. The last six years have been a lot of coding and focus and hard work, but maybe it would be fun to remember it as partying and all this crazy drama.”

Mark’s made comments about the movie being small, but it sort of implies that we don’t matter. He says, “We build products that 500 million people see… If 5 million people see a movie, it doesn’t really matter that much.” Although this is a good PR move to down play the importance of the movie.

His comments aren’t really necessarily important in the grand scheme of things, this movie isn’t going to make or break Facebook, but it was a silly PR move to give $100 million dollars to the Newark school system on the day the movie came out. People can see right through that sort of strategy if they think about it, but with that said, it still kind of works because it takes work to think about it.

Quotes: prpost.wordpress.com