Facebook first came out in 2004 as a local social network site for students at Harvard University. From that humble beginning, the site has grown in popularity to become the most popular social network in the U.S and now the world. Facebook was designed as a site for college students, then expanded to include high schoolers, and has expanded to include now the general public. Facebook users range from ages of nine years old to eighty year-olds. Although it wasn’t until the fall of an earlier social network, MySpace did Facebook becoming the 21st century phenomenon that it is today. Now it’s a movie.
The movie, "The Social Network,” was released in theaters this year, and it has become a box office hit. I saw this movie recently. This movie was not about social networks in general, but rather, about the king of all social networks, Facebook. It amazes me personally that social networking has become so popular. We can’t seem to get enough of it. We want to watch and learn about the story of the formation of Facebook. We are documenting history even as we still make it. That last time a new form of media was turned into a movie was "You've Got Mail." Just as we are fascinated with our own fascination of social networking, we were similarly interested in watching a story about e-mailing. We are not that different from earlier generations who saw movies where the plot turned on mail delivered by a postman. "The Social Network,: the movie, goes deep into the beginning of how Facebook began--"Facemash" as it was first called. Created by the 20 year-old prodigy Mark Zuckerberg, has become the youngest billionaire due to his superior knowledge in programming and his creation of Facebook.
I had always wondered what it is about Facebook that made it so distinct from all the other social networks. Obviously there has to be something unique about Facebook that makes it special and more appealing to its users than all the other previous social networks. The movie, which is made like a documentary, takes us from an idea in Zuckerberg’s head through the early start-up of the company he created. In the movie there is a scene where another student asks Mark if he knows whether one of the girls in their class has a boyfriend or not. Mark responds in a sarcastic tone, "I don't know man; people don’t just go walking around with a sign on them saying their relationship status." After this exchange, he runs back to his dorm to add the relationship feed to Facebook and says to his partner, "It’s done." It’s simple genius, but genius no less. Previous social networks missed the mystery and intrigue of humans nature. MySpace let you post photos, but Facebook created an online biography about people’s lives. Facebook is a virtual scrapbook of a person’s life and interests. With the ability to know almost everything about a person, friends and family can follow your life, keep in touch, and even comment on things that go on in your life, and you can do the same to friends and family. The amount of information you want to see, have seen, or share is limited to your own imagination. Of all the flowers that have blossomed on the internet, Facebook is the biggest and most colorful flower in the garden.
Facebook continues to grow continuously adding new items. Facebook has added an honesty box, the "like" button, which is now on many other sites, instant messenging chat, and the ability to download videos. I'm not saying there was just one reason for why Facebook gained large popularity in the social network world because it was from a combination of things, including strategically marketing and advertising. As the movie documents, the founders of Facebook did not want to put ads on the site too soon because it would lose its "cool" factor, or become just another commercial site. When Facebook first started at Harvard it was hip and underground, and that’s what Zuckerberg did not want to lose. For this and his understanding of humans, he has become the youngest billionaire, and they made a movie.
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