Jesse Eisenberg is the actor that will be playing Mark Zuckerberg in a movie called The Social Network. The Social Network is a movie based on the founding of online social network Facebook. Facebook was founded by Zuckerberg in a dorm room when he was attending Harvard University. However the movie will not be filmed at Harvard. It will be filmed at The John Hopkins University.
“It feels degrading somehow,” stated John Hopkins student Diego Ardila while he watched movie scene workers remove the words “Latrobe Hall” from an engineering building and replace it with “Kirkland House.” The reason why Harvard would not allow The Social Network to be filmed there is because they have a policy that no commercial filming can be made on campus.
As the BaltimoreSun.com put it, John Hopkins felt like a “safety school” by the film because they could not get Harvard. Just like John Hopkins is considered a safety school for kids that also applied to Harvard. This is why many students that walked around the set made sure to wear John Hopkins shirts and hoodies hoping that it would end up being seen on the final cut of the movie.
Eisenberg recently starred in Zombieland with Woody Harrelson. The ironic part of Zombieland is that one of the lines stated by Eisenberg’s character is that one nice thing about everyone being zombies is that you no longer have to read Facebook status updates from friends.
Back in March Facebook filed a lawsuit against Sanford “Spamford” Wallace, Adam Arzoomanian and Scott Shaw over spam messages being sent on their social network. The claim was made under the CAN-SPAM Act which bans false and misleading marketing e-mails. The U.S. District Court of the Northern District of California ruled in favor of Facebook.
Judge Jeremy Fogel ruled that Wallace “willfully violated” a restraining order and a preliminary injunction that was issued in the case. “The record demonstrates that Wallace willfully violated the statutes in question with blatant disregard for the rights of Facebook and the thousands of Facebook users whose accounts were compromised by his conduct,” stated Fogel. The statement also ruled that Wallace no longer has the right to create a Facebook account.
Facebook’s lead counsel said that the social network does not expect to receive a majority of the reward, but the verdict of the case may serve as a deterrent for others who plan to spam the social network.
Back in May Wallace had to pay $234 million in a trial against MySpace. Wallace failed to turn over documents or show up in court on several counts when that case was taking place. Two years before that, Wallace had to pay $4 million as part of a lawsuit by the FTC and several other companies such as AOL. Last year Facebook was awarded $873 million from a Canadian man that was spamming the social network too.
MySpace and Facebook are rumored to be working in conjunction with each other on a new project. The new project involves MySpace users having the ability to share content on Facebook using Facebook Connect. The rumor was started by The Telegraph UK.
This deal is probably being set up by current MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta. Natta was the previous Chief Revenue Officer and VP of Operations at Facebook. This means that you may start seeing MySpace Videos and music being embedded on the Facebook News Feed. Last week Natta even said that he does not consider Facebook to be a competitor any more.
I think that this would be a good deal all around for both parties. Facebook users would see more artistic expression provided by MySpace users. Artists on MySpace would have a bigger audience.
Josh Elman was the former platform manager at Facebook. But now Elman is joining another California based social networking slash micro-blogging firm Twitter.com. Elman is joining Twitter at a time where the micro-blogging company is receiving a lot of interest from third party developers.
TweetDeck is one of the most used Adobe AIR applications and Tweetie is one of the most downloaded applications on the iPhone. When Elman worked at Facebook, he was responsible for Facebook Connect. Elman was also responsible for cleaning up the design of the social network after applications made Facebook look very cluttered.
Elman has also previously worked for LinkedIn, Zazzle, and RealNetworks. Louis Gray broke the news of Elman’s hire after spotting the Twitter official list of employees. Twitter has about 113 employees.
Last night I was sitting at the Good Time Charley’s bar watching the Michigan State vs. Iowa University football game in Ann Arbor, Michigan. All of a sudden I notice that a large crowd started gathering outside of the bar. When I walked out I saw smoke and fire spewing from the top of a building about one block down from where everyone was standing. The roof, the roof, the roof was on fire of a building that used to be known as Pinball Pete’s.
While the firefighters were battling the heat, students were busy taking pictures and updating their Twitter accounts. A couple of people next to me sent out some TwitPics immediately. Shortly after the pictures were taken, a video was uploaded on YouTube [embedded above] and Flickr user moto1986 uploaded a stream of pictures from the event.
When I was standing there watching all of the students sending out tweets and updating Facebook statuses while the firefighters were battling the fire, I couldn’t help but think about how far technology has brought us. Just imagine if this event took place about 10 years ago. Our friends would rely on how well we could describe the fire rather than having the ability to see our pictures on Twitter and our videos on YouTube.
Some of the tweets that were sent out are displayed below [click the image to enlarge]:
Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) has made a deal with Twitter and Facebook. The deal is non-exclusive. Facebook and Twitter will both integrate real-time feeds of status updates and tweets into the Bing search engine service. Twitter hit about 5 billion tweets yesterday and Facebook has the most number of status updates than any other service. Facebook sends out an estimated 40 million status updates per day.
Microsoft Bing’s market share will benefit from this deal as real-time news is becoming a preference for people. Traditional news agencies are suffering from this and are cutting staff and newspaper circulation. Google will have to step it up if they want to retain their customer base.
Facebook users will be allowed to decide whether they want their status updates to be public or not. The financial details of the deal are undisclosed, but it is expected that the Redmond-based software company will be paying both Facebook and Twitter millions of dollars along with revenue-sharing deals. Microsoft owns about 1.7% of Facebook through a venture capital deal and has an exclusive advertising partnership with the social network.
Amit Chowdhry | October 12, 2009 | 352 views | Comments Categorized under Facebook, Zynga
About 20,000 people have signed a petition to have the Indian flag added to Zynga’s Farmville game. Farmville is a popular game on social networks that allows users to manage and build a farm in a similar fashion as Sim City. After building a farm, players will be able to mark their farm by adding a flag. The United Kingdom and United States have flags available for planting, but nothing for India yet.
Indian people on forums and blogs said that they were disappointed that their flag was not available. One user said that they were even willing to pay to have the option. The petition even inspired people of different origins to start their own petitions to have their own flags added.
Farmville has about 56 million users. By adding a link to another Zynga game called Café World, about 10 million people have joined that game in a week.
Shan Sadiq | October 12, 2009 | 541 views | Comments Categorized under Facebook
Shannon Jackson of Hendersonville, TN was arrested for poking another woman (Dana M. Hannah) on Facebook. The poke apparently violated a restraining order the other woman had against Jackson.
Hannah printed a screenshot of the poke notification and called the police. The screen-shot was enough proof to get Jackson arrested. Jackson’s lawyer is trying to get confirmation from Facebook that the poke was in fact from her account. The possibility that someone broke into her account has not been ruled out by her lawyer.
The charge against Jackson is a Class A misdemeanor. She could be punished with up to one year in jail.
Many people believe that Facebook applications are losing appeal, but games made by Zynga are a major exception. Zynga has already banked on games such as Texas Hold’Em, Mafia Wars, and FarmVille. Now the social gaming company has another hit on their hands called Café World. Café World hit 10 million users in just one week.
How did Zynga do it? Cross-promotion. They linked Café World through FarmVille, a game that already has 56 million users according to AppData. Zynga has been making money by selling virtual goods in their games. Zynga will be making about $200 million in revenues this year alone according to Eric Eldon of Inside Social Games.
While Zynga is making a lot of revenues, one of the ways that they are making games is by taking ideas from others. FarmVille is considered to be a replica of FarmTown and Cafe World appears to be similar to Playfish’s Restaurant City.
Zynga is currently in a legal battle against another social gaming company called Playdom over company secrets. Four former Zynga employees are being accused for giving secrets to Playdom.
Jetstar Airlines was forced to apologize to a mother that said that a male attendant harassed her daughter. The unidentified mother is being referred to as Elizabeth in the media. The flight attendant supposedly added Elizabeth’s daughter on Facebook as a friend. The friend request was made a few hours after the Jetstar Airlines flight landed in Melbourne.
“Elizabeth said her daughters did not give the attendant their names but the younger one received a friendship request, followed by messages asking why she hadn’t added him as a Facebook friend,” wrote Australia’s News.com editor Angela Saurine. “While it was originally believed the flight attendant accessed her daughter’s details through the flight manifest, Mr Westaway [a Jetstar spokesperson] said he understood the girl’s name had been obtained through a flight boarding pass.”
Jetstar initiated an internal investigation to find out the full story. In the meantime, the flight attendant was banned from making additional Facebook friend requests. Jetstar said that the flight attendant has been with the company for 2 years and has been a good employee. A majority of Jetstar’s airplane attendant staff are under 40 years old and are encouraged to engage with customers.
This is a pretty disturbing incident. If a flight attendant kept sending me friend requests and messages, I’d block him or her as quickly as possible.
Jack Thompson is an activist and former attorney that lives in Coral Gables, Florida. Thompson is best known for speaking out against video game violence and/or sex in video games. Thompson claims that the anti-Thompson groups on Facebook has caused him “great harm and distress.” Thompson added that he felt threatened by some of the messages. And there are hundreds of these groups.
Below is a screen shot of one of the anti-Thompson groups.
Thompson compared his situation to the Barack Obama poll on Facebook which asked users whether the President should be assassinated or not. That poll was removed from the social network, but it had already spread pretty far. Thompson stated “Unlike our President, Thompson does not have the Secret Service to protect him.”
In July, Digital Sky Technologies (DST) bought $100 million worth of Facebook stock and gained a 3.5% ownership in the company. About 2 months later, Digital Sky Technologies invested in a Russian replica of Facebook. Now Digital Sky Technologies is showing additional interest in Facebook by buying up additional shares in the top social network. DST is buying the shares directly from shareholders.
“Their appetite with me is: ‘whatever you have, we’ll take it,’” stated a source with Reuters that is a Facebook shareholder. This shareholder agreed to sell his stock to Digital Sky. DST is offering about $14.77 per share in Facebook which is the same amount that they bought the stock for back in July. Based on this price, Facebook is valuated at $6.5 billion. Facebook has about 300 million users serving about 300,000 images per second.
Facebook invested $200 million in preferred shares back in May. Between this investment and the $100 million purchase of stock back in July, this gave the company the 3.5% ownership. Facebook revenues will surpass $500 million this year.
When Facebook launched Beacon in 2007, there was a lot of controversy. There were a good number of class action privacy lawsuits. This lead to the recent shutting down of Beacon. The settlement cost Facebook quite a bit of money too. Facebook plans to donate $9.5 million to an organization that advocates online privacy.
Facebook Director of Policy Communications Barry Schnitt said that the situation around Beacon “underscored how critical it is to provide extensive user control over how information is shared.”
“We look forward to the creation of the foundation and its work to educate Internet users on how best to control their privacy; engage in safe social networking practices; and, generally, enjoy themselves more online by having knowledge that gives them a greater sense of control,” added Schnitt.
Facebook Beacon started in November 2007 as a marketing campaign for advertisers. Beacon would find out what types of items and services you are buying on e-commerce websites and report it to the Facebook homepage. The service was opt-out rather than opt-in which made it even more controversial. Mark Zuckerberg personally wrote an apology letter to the users in order to calm the mob. But it was too late. Now Facebook is really paying for it.
Two students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have partnered up to conduct a study in determining one’s sexual orientation. The basis is that those that tend to have many homosexual friends will end up homosexual themselves. The two students even designed software using specific algorithms to predict sexual orientations. The software worked only for men, but not for women.
“When they first did it, it was absolutely striking – we said, ‘Oh my God – you can actually put some computation behind that,’ ” stated MIT computer science professor Hal Abelson in an interview with Boston.com. “That pulls the rug out from a whole policy and technology perspective that the point is to give you control over your information – because you don’t have control over your information.” The two students involved are Carter Jernigan and Behram Mistree.
Based on the concept, the computer software algorithm could technically make assumptions about a person’s political preferences and emotions. As a matter of fact, Professor Murat Kantarcioglu at the University of Texas-Dallas used a similar concept to predict political preferences. Kantarcioglu and a student used 167,000 profiles to make 3 million links.
In the case of the Gaydar project, the students used a sample size of 1,544 straight men, 21 bisexual men, and 33 gay men. The 33 gay men had a great proportion of gay friends than the straight men.
Jonathan G. Parker’s addiction to Facebook got him arrested. Parker broke and entered into a person’s house and stole two diamond rings. But before leaving the house, he decided to log into Facebook and check out the news feeds. Unfortunately for Parker he forgot to log out. The house owner discovered this and reported the crime to the police. Parker was charged with one count of felony daytime burglary.
Parker broke in through the bedroom window and he frantically searched for things of value in the open cabinets in the garage. There were two diamond rings missing from the dresser in the same room that the computer is in. The two rings were worth about $3,500. A friend of the victim knew where Parker was staying. Parker occasionally visited a friend in the area and asked the friend if he wanted to participate in the crime with him. But the friend refused the night before the burglary took place.
Parker is in custody at the Eastern Regional Jail in Martinsburg, Pennsylvania and is on a $10,000 bail. If charged, Parker could face 10 years of jail time.
