The Social Network Movie discussion post

I managed to watch the movie the Social Network on Thanksgiving Day and I must say I was entertained. Having heard a little bit about Mark Zuckerberg's story ahead of time, I was intrigued to find out more about him. I had heard rumours that he was a jerk, that he ripped people off, etc etc, but I found that the movie didn't necessarily paint him in that light.
I felt that he did what anyone would likely do if they had the talents and smarts that he did, and all is fair in love and war. He had some great ideas and a passion for getting people to connect in cyberspace, and although other people had some good ideas that he borrowed, Zuckerberg greatly improved on these ideas in a way that might have taken his competition years to catch up anyway.
On the prpost.wordpress.com blog titled "Zuckerberg, Hearst and Hollywood: PR Lessons Learned From the Past," Zuckerberg is quoted as saying that the movie is "fun" and that his life over the last 6 years has not really been that exciting, just writing code and such, and this doesn't surprise me. To achieve the level of success that his company has achieved, it would certainly take a lot of dedication and sweat equity to get it off the ground.
If anyone was painted in a bad light, it would have been the Sean Parker character, but even he was an important force in the creation of the social networking conglomerate that is Facebook.

As far as any impact on Facebook's popularity goes, I looked for some statistical figures on the matter but came up empty handed. They have so many members already, I can't see this movie improving these statistics in a dramatic way. If I had to guess, I would say that there are people out there who have joined Facebook because of the movie, and people who have left Facebook because they saw something they didn't like in the movie.

Referencing Zuckerberg's comments about the fact that they didn't properly portray him in the movie,(see the prpostwordpress site referenced earlier) I thought his critique was appropiate. I can't imagine what my life story would look like on the silver screen, but I'm pretty sure the boring parts would have been dramatisized a little more than what has actually happened. Writers do what they do to make movies entertaining to watch, and so some things just get shaped and moulded to fit into the context of an interesting story. As far as his comments having any impact on the audiences' perceptions of the site or its founders, I guess you'll win some and you'll lose some. Having this coupled hand in hand with a large $100 million donation announced on Oprah is one thing, but the fact that Zuckerberg mentioned that it was only a coincidence is a little hard to swallow.
It makes sense to have an announcement like a large charitable donation to be made on a show like Oprah, that's good PR. But to say that it wasn't planned to coincide with the movie's release just takes all that goodwill and throws it out the window.
But all in all, I think Zuckerberg deserves the success he's achieved, and in my opinion he should make sure he has someone on his team who can help him with his PR.