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.

ValleyWag posted the following screenshots of the movie set:

Facebook launched a new service as of yesterday called Facebook Lite. Facebook Lite is currently in the United States or in India. The user interface for Facebook Lite is much faster than the original. And on Facebook Lite, they put a major emphasis on birthdays because that feature is placed at the top.

Friend updates appear in real-time towards the bottom of the page when clicking on show more posts. The Facebook Toolbar has been removed in the Lite version, including Chat. I think disabling Chat in the Lite version is a good idea because it becomes redundant if you already have IM software that has Facebook Chat plugged in.

In Facebook Lite, there is also a major emphasis on events because there is a button prominently displayed at the top. In the regular version of Facebook, events have terrible screen real estate (small text in the bottom right). In this video, Mark Zuckerberg is conducting a gong ceremony with the team that built Facebook Lite.

Next month the movie The Social Network will star production and it was previously rumored that Michael Cera or Shia LaBeouf would be starring in the movie.  The Social Network movie will be based on the founding up until the current state of Facebook.

Now two more names have been thrown into the movie rumor mill.  The Script Shadow reports that the “cast is set” and Justin Timberlake will star as former Facebook president and Napster co-founder Sean Parker.  Mark Zuckerberg will be played by Jesse Eisenberg.

The Social Network movie will be based on the book The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal by Ben Mezrich.  Mezrich previously wrote a book called Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions which was made into the movie 21.

One of the sources for the book was Eduardo Saverin.  Saverin was an early Facebook employee and attended Harvard University with Zuckerberg.  Both Saverin and Zuckerberg supposedly joined a group called “Phoenix” at Harvard which was a secret underground fraternity-like Jewish society.

Since then Saverin and Zuckerberg have sued each other.  Saverin had supposedly attempted to freeze the Facebook company account.

Columbia Pictures is making a movie based on the life of Mark Zuckerberg.  The movie is called “The Social Network.”  Aaron Sorkin wrote the screenplay for A Few Good Men and wrote the TV show The West Wing.

The Social Network movie is based on the book The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich.  David Fincher, the Director of Fight Club will be directing The Social Network.  Supposedly the script of the movie is actually really good in case some of you out there are worried about whether the movie will actually be worth watching.

Even though the movie is based on Zuckerberg’s life, the Facebook CEO never gave his input.  As a matter of fact, none of the Facebook employees were allowed to give any input to the movie makers.

Facebook Inc. is planning to aggressively this year as a result of the economic slump.  “No one else has been hiring” stated Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.  “It’s been a great environment for us because the economy has helped out.”

Facebook plans to expand their employees by about 50% this year as there are a surplus of engineers available in the job market.

Facebook has around 1,000 employees.  But Zuckerberg also wants to maintain costs in order to reach positive cash flow by next year.  The company is still researching innovative ways to prove themselves to advertising companies.

Facebook has about $716 million in funding and has made a couple of acquisitions in the last two years.  Earlier this month Facebook acquired FriendFeed for $47.5 million.

Facebook has announced today that they will be acquiring FriendFeed.  This is not a shocker because Facebook previously made an attempt to buy out Twitter for $100 million in cash and the $400 million in stock.  Over the last year, Facebook has rolled several FriendFeed-like features into the social network.  One of the features they took from FriendFeed was the concept of “Like.”

One of FriendFeed’s popular features is that the more comments a story receives on the news feed, the more it floats up to the top.  This concept is similar to the Reddit and Digg homepage.  FriendFeed’s voting system is real-time, but Facebook’s news feed popular stories constantly has to be refreshed.

As part of the acquisition, FriendFeed’s team will be joining Facebook.  This includes Paul Buchheit, Bret Taylor, Jim Norris, and Sanjeev Singh.  Buchheit was responsible for early stage development of GMail over at Google.

Facebook sent out a press release regarding the acquisition.  Check it out after the jump:

(more…)

In late March, Facebook’s former CFO Gideon Yu had quit.  The rumor about why Yu left was that he was not getting along with Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg.  An internal memo went around that Facebook was looking for a CFO that has more experience with a public company.

This is where former Genentech CFO David Ebersman comes in.  Genetech is a biotech company that was bought out by Swiss company Hoffman-La Roche for $46.8 billion on March 26, 2009.  Genentech is also an investor in 23andMe, a genetics company that was started by Google co-founder Sergey Brin’s wife.  Ebersman worked at Genentech for 15 years, but Hoffman already had a CFO making his job much less important.

Below is the full press release from Facebook that AllThingsD was able to get their hands on:

(more…)

David Fincher was a movie director for Fight Club, Se7en, and Panic Room.  Now he is being considered to direct a movie that revolves around the growth of Facebook and the life of Mark Zuckerberg.  The working title of the movie is called “The Social Network” and Columbia Pictures is in advanced talks with Fincher.

The movie will start with Zuckerberg’s creation of the social network while at Harvard University back in 2004 to the point where it has over 200 million users today.

Scott Rudin and Michael De Luca would be the producers. Kevin Spacey and Dana Brunetti may also be involved.  The author of the script is Aaron Sorkin.  Columbia hopes to begin production later this year.  Another rumor about the movie is that Michael Cera and Shia LaBeouf are being looked at to play the role of Mark Zuckerberg.

[via Variety/Mashable]

The ability to create applications around platforms is what is driving social media today.  Developers are making a killing by developing applications for Facebook, the iPhone, Twitter, etc.  But what many people don’t realize is that AOL was one of the original platforms to develop applications around.  Sure there wasn’t a such thing as APIs back then, but a lot of developers today started by building software intended to modify AOL services.

I remember back in the late 1990’s, I knew at least 4-5 people that spent time on Visual Basic creating an application that enhanced AOL chat rooms.  That is around the same time when Warez groups on AOL started.  Each Warez group would team up on building different applications.  These applications would be similar in functionality but different in branding.  A lot of the functionality would have to do with requesting MP3s in chatrooms, punting users offline, and sending a lot of ASCII pictures in a chat room at once.  Those were the days.

Now look what we are stuck with today.  Some of today’s popular Facebook Applications revolve around taking quizzes, describing what music and movies you like, and what your zombie vs. werewolf score is.  Yawn.

However it is interesting to know that AOL was the inspiration behind Facebook’s application platform according to Mark Zuckerberg.

“I remember when I was a kid in high school, some of the first things that I built were add-ons to AOL. All of my friends were on AOL, and I built tools for IM or servers to run chat rooms, and I just had so much fun and that’s how I learned how to program. I just think it’s really interesting to see the new generation of college students that are growing up and building on top of this platform, and anything that we can do to encourage that is awesome,” stated Zuckerberg in an interview with InsideFacebook.

[via BizInsider]

“I know for a lot of companies the IPO is the endpoint or the goal,” stated Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg. “For us it will be an event on the path to where want to get eventually.”

Over the weekend VentureBeat reported that Facebook was close to raising $150 millionin capital to buy back shares from employees that want to cash out on their work.  A lot of the shares that were given to employees were valued at less than a dollar each, but the investors are rumored to be buying them for $10 each.

Before this round of funding, Facebook raised over $516 million.  Peter Thiel invested $500,000 as an angel round.  Accel invested $12.7 million in Series A.  Greylock, Meritech, and The Founders Fund invested $27.5 million.  And Li Ka-shing, Microsoft, and the European Founders Fund invested $375 million in Series C.  Lastly Facebook raised $100 million in debt from TriplePoint Capital to help pay for their server costs.

Given Facebook’s revenues of about $550 million for this year, the company has been reportedly turning down funding with term sheets that would valuate the company from between $6-$8 billion.

It will be a few years before Facebook goes public.  Facebook makes most of their revenue from advertising.  They are working with about 70 out of the top 100 advertising companies to earn their revenue.  Facebook’s revenue is expected to grow 70% higher this year compared to last year.  The company will also be cash flow positive next year.

[via Reuters]

Before Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard University, he attended a private boarding high school called Phillips Exeter Academy.  Education at this elite high school has a tuition cost of $37,960 for boarding students per year and $29,330 per year for day students.  The school was established in the 1780’s and has alumni that comprises of politicians, major executives, celebrities, etc.

When Zuckerberg was at Harvard he worked for a company on campus called ConnectU that was started by Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra.  He quit that company to start his own company called TheFacebook.com.  Zuckberg reportedly turned down offers to be acquired by both Microsoft and Yahoo! after it had started growing rapidly.  The origins of the name TheFacebook.com may have started at Exeter itself.

Below are a couple of images from Exeter of their annual student directory.  The student directory is titled “The Photo Address Book” but has the nickname of “The Facebook.”  David W. Farrant, a student at Exeter that graduated in 2000 confirmed with ReadWriteWeb that The Photo Address Book was called The Facebook by students because the original name was a mouthful.

When Zuckerberg was a senior, student body president Kris Tillery pushed to have the student directory published online in 2000.  It turned out that they did take the student directory online under the URL: http://student.exeter.edu/facebook.  This website is not online anymore.

While Zuckerberg was at Exeter, he developed an artificial intelligence music player software that Microsoft and AOL both had interest in.  Both companies also wanted to recruit Zuckerberg to their companies, but he decided to go to Harvard instead.   At Harvard, Zuckerberg also started a service called Facemash which was similar to Hot or Not, but pulled photos of student dorm photos.  Admins at Harvard were not happy with that service so they had him take it down.

And that is one of the origins of Facebook.  If Zuckerberg did not attend Exeter, there probably would not be a Facebook today and Friendster would still be the place to be.

[via ReadWriteWeb]

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently had a board meeting about accepting additional funding that would give the company a $4 billion valuation.  The company decided against the funding because they don’t need it.  Several reporters have been accusing Facebook of having a “high burn rate” so they need the funding, but all of these sources are “totally wrong” according to a source with VentureBeat.

The social network now has about 200-250 million monthly users that are uploading 2,000 photos per second.  Facebook has over $200 million in the bank as of right now which they can run off of for the next two years.  TechCrunch wrote that Facebook received several funding offers from private equity firms that were pegging the social network’s valuation at $2 billion.

Last year Facebook made $300 million in revenue and reported that this year they are beating their projections by 70% which would put revenue at almost $500 million.  This would make Facebook profitable.  The company also has a focus on cutting costs by having engineers publish reports on how infrastructure is managed.  Impressive.

This video is regarding the Facebook ToS mess:

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) is about to file a complaint against Facebook with the Federal Trade Commission.  The complain is about the new Facebook terms of service that reports that user data will be kept by the social network even after deactivation.  Zuckerberg explained that Facebook does this so that data such as sent messages don’t get deleted if a user deactivates their account.  I really see nothing wrong with this.  If people don’t like Facebook’s TOS, don’t share data.

“We think that Facebook should go back to its original terms of service,” stated EPIC Executive Director Marc Rotenberg.  The commotion around the controversy was started by the Consumerist.  Over 38,000 people have joined a group that object to the changes in the TOS.

However, other social media websites like YouTube, MySpace, and Twitter state that content distribution will cease if acconts are deactivated.  Perhaps they haven’t spelled it out in the proper legal terms that Facebook does.  I don’t know how MySpace messaging works, but if anyone has an account can they let me know whether they have messages in their inbox or friend requests pending from users that no longer have an account?  Leave it in the comments.

I knew there was something fishy about the Consumerist article that claimed Facebook had the rights to use your content for any reason even if you deactivate your account.  Gawker’s network built itself on stirring up controversy.  In this case, Consumerist took advantage of people fearing that Facebook is becoming too much of a “big brother” social network.  No need to freak out about your photos on Facebook as long as you can trust your friends.

“When a person shares information on Facebook, they first need to grant Facebook a license to use that information so that we can show it to the other people they’ve asked us to share it with. Without this license, we couldn’t help people share that information,”  stated Mark Zuckerberg on the Facebook blog. “One of the questions about our new terms of use is whether Facebook can use this information forever. When a person shares something like a message with a friend, two copies of that information are created—one in the person’s sent messages box and the other in their friend’s inbox.  Even if the person deactivates their account, their friend still has a copy of that message. We think this is the right way for Facebook to work, and it is consistent with how other services like email work. One of the reasons we updated our terms was to make this more clear.”

Facebook Beacon on the other hand was a blatant violation of privacy.  Sometimes it is good to keep Facebook on their toes about their TOS. Well done in spotting the changes, Consumerist.