RICK WILKING
The poster child for social networking is facing yet another blow this week. However, this time around the issue at hand is not the privacy of 400 million Facebook users, but the online world is turning its attention to the private life of the site's co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
The 26-year-old entrepreneur is depicted as a sex-crazed nerd in a new movie scheduled for release this fall. The Social Network is based on Ben Mezrich's novel The Accidental Billionaires, a story about the world's number one Internet hang-out and its ivy league roots. Recently, the film's script, written by Aaron Sorkin, leaked online, spreading juicy details about Zuckerberg's college quest for hot girls and cold cash.
To the average reader, news reports lead us to believe that The Social Network is part documentary, but as my colleague Leo Laporte said during an interview we did with Mezrich last summer, the movie is more "geek fiction." During our chat the author also talked about how he tried to interview Zuckerberg for the book, but Facebook decided that it was too risky, referring to Mezrich as "the Danielle Steele of Silicon Valley."
Mezrich revealed he had a lot of reliable sources to put the story together, but says that it's written in a cinematic way to keep the plot moving along. Unfortunately for Facebook, the timing of this leak couldn't be worse. Just on the heels of tech early adopters publicly quitting Facebook and users demanding more privacy controls, it's tempting to believe that Zuckerberg is truly the naughty character portrayed in the upcoming flick. And with well-known actors such as Justin Timberlake playing key roles in the movie, it's bound to get some box office attention.
Despite Mezrich taking the billionaire along for a wild cinematic ride, he doesn't deny that Zuckerberg is a smart kid with a clear vision, "I think he's a genius, I think he's going to be the Bill Gates of the generation coming up." By the time The Social Network hits theatres, one can only hope that Facebook cleans up its privacy vision and makes some time to give fans a status update on what was on Zuckerberg's mind during the very early days of his successful online creation.