I went into "The Social Network," a movie about Mark Zuckerberg and the rise of Facebook, reluctantly, as it smacked of work during the weekend, but ended up finding it entertaining and enjoyable. I also went in with the mindset that the movie took lots of liberties with the actual story about this global phenomenon, since Facebook reps have tried hard to point to Hollywood's ineptitude at accurately portraying living subjects.
Facebook employees did, however, attend a private screening of the movie, and they also set up a business page about the film. But it only lets you see wall posts of your own friends, so I couldn't get an overall sense of the employees' reactions to the movie. But it seems likely that this screening was also a chance for the company to figure out a plan of attack when it comes to addressing the movie.
Of course, when it comes to the actual dialogue and tone, who knows? But from the standpoint of company history, Facebook's genesis and fallings out seem to align well with the facts. Even down to the look of the original site, which you can still see on Archive.org's Wayback Machine. The early players, as well as the lawsuit by the Winklevoss brothers and Eduardo Saverin are public record. It's the back story, dialog, and emotional details that are open to speculation.
On a side note, there's been some speculation that Bill Gates himself made a cameo appearance. And while the portrayal was mighty convincing, EW.com's Popwatch asked director David Fincher if it really was the mogul of Seattle. After joking, "It was. We asked him," Fincher leveled up that it was actually a well-known Gates impersonator.
Business Insider also reminds us that Saverin, portrayed in the film Zuckerberg's estranged only friend, is actually a billionaire thanks to his stake in the company. For what it's worth, the Wikipedia article on Facebook states that Saverin owns a 5 percent share in the company, and his depicted nemesis, Sean Parker, actually has a smaller share, at 4 percent.
But Saverin was a consultant on the 2009 book on which the movie was based, "The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal," pointing to some potential bias in the film. And in the movie, Saverin does come off as a totally sweet guy, and there is no references to the innuendo of Brazilian mafia ties that show up after a little Web surfing on the topic. Nor do we see how Saverin tried to place ads for his own jobs site on Facebook, or how Zuckerberg considered Saverin to have failed at his assignment with the company to get funding and create a business plan. In fact, Business Insider makes the case that the book and the movie were basically a hatchet job by the spurned Saverin.
In a seemingly transparent effort to shore up his reputation as a good guy, Zuckerberg recently donated $100 million to Newark public schools. And in an echo of a "Curb Your Enthusiam" episode, he later said that he almost decided to make the donation anonymously, but Newark Mayor Cory Booker (and Oprah) apparently convinced him otherwise.
Though a lot of talk about billions in net worth is bandied about, no one outside the company actually knows how much profit Facebook makes, and though it dominates Web traffic, its ad click-through rate is one-fifth the rate of the rest of the web at just 0.04 percent, according to Valleywag. By comparison, a DoubleClick white paper states 0.10 percent, and PCMag's ad folks tell me that an industry benchmark for a good ad campaign is 0.2 percent. And once Facebook goes public, there will likely be pressure to make more ad profits.
Facebook will likely be around a long time, but don't forget that just a few short years before it, MySpace was the ultimate cool social network, and is currently just hanging on, having recently been passed in traffic by Twitter. So as with any tech phenomenon that rises in a short time period and at the moment seems dominant, there's no guarantee that something won't come along to supplant Facebook.