Tag Archive for 'The Social Network'

“Great vampire squid” wraps itself around The Social Network.

Published on January 4, 2011 in Facebook, Twitter, business, politics, social media and technology. View Comments

I’ve wondered when this day would come. The start of a new decade is a fitting time I suppose. New decade. New blood.

On reading the news that Goldman Sachs has led a huge new investment in Facebook, I couldn’t help but recall with some amusement Matt Taibbi’s Rolling Stone article The Great American Bubble Machine, from April last year.

This rollicking take-down investigates how Goldman Sachs has helped engineer every major market manipulation since the Great Depression, including the tech stock bubble of the 1990s, the “housing craze” that lead to the global financial meltdown, the $4 a gallon petrol (or gas in American) bubble, and rigging the financial crisis bailout. The world’s most powerful investment bank is harshly described as:

a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.

Can you see why, after recalling this article, I seem to have this mental image of a vampire squid wrapped around a big, blue ‘F’?

Goldman Sachs seems to have been just about everywhere within capitalism, including  ‘dot com’, ‘web 1.0′ IPOs leading up to the tech wreck, and now, it’s into ‘web 2.0′, social media.

With that in mind, here’s another harsh evaluation of the bank’s (and government’s) long history from said vampire squid article:

The formula is relatively simple: Goldman positions itself in the middle of a speculative bubble, selling investments they know are crap. Then they hoover up vast sums from the middle and lower floors of society with the aid of a crippled and corrupt state that allows it to rewrite the rules in exchange for the relative pennies the bank throws at political patronage. Finally, when it all goes bust, leaving millions of ordinary citizens broke and starving, they begin the entire process over again

If you agree to any degree with this assessment, does that mean social media is about to be subjected to this? If you don’t, it’s all fine and dandy. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what happens. I’ll reserve my judgment for later, because I’m not as cynical as you lot.

Any any case, let’s take a quick look at what has just happened with the Goldman Sachs/Facebook deal.

  1. Facebook has just raised $475 million from Goldman Sachs.
  2. In addition, the company intends to raise another $1.5 billion through a “special purpose vehicle” that Goldman Sachs will be initiating, to let its clients indirectly invest in Facebook.
  3. The private sales would value Facebook at around $50 billion.
  4. The minimum investment from clients is expected to be about $2 million.
  5. Goldman’s offering of Facebook shares will surely be watched closely on Wall Street, as it could set an example for other private companies (who don’t wish to go public but still raise a lot of money) to do a similar thing.
  6. A potential investor has said that Goldman is taking about 4.5 percent fee from the money invested into the fund.
  7. By using Goldman’s “special purpose vehicle“, Facebook will avoid having its financial information disclosed to the SEC and published publicly. Its competitors won’t know the details of its earnings.
  8. Using the “special vehicle”, Facebook still gets around $2 billion to use, without going over the 500 shareholder limit for disclosure, by having Goldman Sachs represent the investors on their behalf. Did someone say loophole?
  9. The SEC may intervene and rule that the “special purpose vehicle” circumvents the Securities Exchange Act and require Facebook to then report its earnings.
  10. It so happens that the SEC just last month began an inquiry into the surge of trading shares of privately held Internet companies.
  11. As Mashable points out, if Facebook is required to eventually report it’s earnings, why would it not then just go for an IPO, after of course growing quite a lot more in the meantime?
  12. Goldman Sachs is in the prime position to lead the lucrative IPO, whenever that occurs. Big fees.
  13. As Dealbook points out, an eventual IPO would also unlock CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s huge paper wealth, which Goldman Sachs, as a lead Facebook investor, would have a “leg up” in the assignment of managing post IPO.
  14. No doubt Twitter and other social media companies, and their investors, will be watching this whole developing situation with interest.

‘The Social Network’ movie: “Like”, a lot [review].

Published on October 28, 2010 in Australia, Facebook and social media. View Comments

Not long ago I previewed The Social Network movie, so I thought I should see it as soon as it came out here in Australia and report back. Turns out the film lived up to my reasonably high expectations, given that it’s directed by David Fincher and written by Aaron Sorkin, and has had many good reviews.

The film really focuses on the relationship between co-founders Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin (who was forced out of the company but I understand still owns about 5%), and to a lesser extent the relationships between Zuckerberg, Saverin and Sean Parker. Sean Parker, who founded Napster, helped Zuckerberg during the early stages of the company and also owns a small but valuable percentage.

The film also deals with the case between Zuckerberg and the Winklevoss twins, the Harvard classmates who accused Zuckerberg of stealing the idea for Facebook from them and then sued him for ownership of it.

Jesse Eisenberg is brilliant as Mark Zuckerberg and Andrew Garfield is good as Eduardo Saverin. Beyond expectation, even Justin Timberlake is not bad at all in the role of Sean Parker.

Even if you’re not into Facebook and know or care little about the founding of the company, seeing the tensions between the characters involved is fascinating. Needless to say, I’m sure many of the situations never happened, or not in the way portrayed, but the elements of loyalty, envy and competitiveness certainly go together to make great drama viewing.

By the way, the first scene is brilliantly written and sets the tone for the whole film, so don’t be late if you’re going to see it at the cinema. Go and see it though, I definitely recommend it. “Like”.

The Social Network Movie

HaHa, Twitter Movie Trailer! [parody video]

Published on August 12, 2010 in Facebook, Twitter, blogging, social media and video. View Comments

Well by now you’ve probably seen the trailer for the much anticipated, and apparently quite dark, movie about the founding of Facebook, The Social Network. Now comes a new spoof (there are others) of The Social Network trailer, complete with an excellent parody soundtrack.

The Twit Network trailer relentlessly lampoons Twitter’s flood of minutiae from people’s everyday lives. It begins with Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey having a conversation with a friend which goes “I need to create a way to blog that is as random and incoherent as writing on a bathroom wall”. “Why”. “Because normal blogging is tedious and dumb and leads to fully formed ideas”.  I’m sure you get the picture. It’s funny :)

The parody trailer also begs the question, if  The Social Network turns out to be a box office success, will we one day see a feature film about Twitter too?

On a side note, as you can see from the tweet below, which is a quote from the video trailer, Twitter Co-founder Biz Stone seems to think it’s funny too.

Biz Stone Twitter

via Mashable

Mark Zuckerberg set to announce Facebook now has 500 million users, and launch Facebook Stories.

Published on July 20, 2010 in Facebook, business and social media. View Comments

After a fair amount of speculation over the past week, it looks like Mark Zuckerberg is finally going to announce that Facebook has crossed the 500 million users mark. He’s doing a rare interview with Diane Sawyer on ABC News tonight (Wednesday, July 21, 2010), which you’d think would be a fitting occasion to announce the milestone.

Facebook sign up

Zuckerberg doesn’t give many interviews, and perhaps with good reason, if this recent one at the D8 conference is anything to go by. He really looked uncomfortable when being questioned about Facebook’s much publicised privacy issues.

The upcoming announcement is also good timing for the reportedly pretty dark, soon to be released film ‘The Social Network’, which is about the founding of Facebook. In its marketing, the production uses the tagline (which you can see in the trailer) “You don’t get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies”. I doubt Mark will be looking forward to its release.

It looks like Facebook will be marking the occasion with an initiative called Facebook Stories, which looks to be a visual feast centering around the different ways Facebook has changed people’s lives. Facebook has already created a User Stories form for the launch.

This begs the quesiton, has Facebook changed your life? If it has, how? I’d say that, for me personally, Facebook has made it easier to communicate with some people I probably wouldn’t communicate with otherwise, and made it a little easier to communicate with some people I communicate with regularly. However, Twitter has changed my life more. I use it more, I find it to be more fun, and because of this I’ve built a bigger and stronger network of people I communicate with there.

Full trailer for much anticipated film ‘The Social Network’ is out [video], but will the film be any good?

Published on July 15, 2010 in Facebook, business, social media and video. View Comments

Well, the full theatrical trailer is out for the much anticipated film ‘The Social Network’. The film is based on Ben Mezrich’s 2009 book: The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook: A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal (Amazon Associates link). As you can see from the embedded trailer, it stars Jesse Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerberg and Justin Timberlake as Napster cofounder Sean Parker.

It remains to be seen whether the film will be any good, or whether it will be a hit with critics and the public. No surprises for guessing whether Mark Zuckerberg will like it or not! I’ll certainly reserve any judgment until I actually see it. On paper the film seems to have quite a bit going for it so far. It’s directed by (previously Oscar nominated) David Fincher, who has directed such films as The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Panic Room, Fight Club and Se7en. According to IMDB, also in pre-production is The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. That said, direction is one thing, the writing has to be really good too.

Surprisingly, the film has been chosen by The New York Film Festival to be its opening night film. The New York Film Festival is known for not choosing mainstream American films, so that’s certainly a vote of confidence. The selection committee chair and program director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center apparently said that ‘The Social Network’ is the rare film that “powerfully captures the spirit of its time”.

Going by evidence in the trailer, the film doesn’t shy away from dealing with Facebook’s widely discussed (especially in the tech media) privacy issues. And as an aside, I think the choice of soundtrack for the trailer is brilliant. It’s a version of Radiohead’s Creep by Belgium girls choir Scala.

The trailer certainly does its job of making me want to see it (as if I was ever not going to). How about you, are you going to see it? It’ll be interesting to see just how successful this film will be at the box office. No doubt it will do pretty well as a digital download, torrent or otherwise.

UPDATE: I’ve just noticed that the hashtag #SocialNetwork has appeared as a Promoted Trending Topic on Twitter. Well that should grab the attention of quite a few social media users! I wonder if Sony Pictures will want to run Facebook ads too? I’m not sure Facebook would allow that. Would you if you were Mark Zuckerberg?

The Social Network

UPDATE 2: It appears order has been restored in the wider world. The international version of ‘The Social Network’ trailer has been released, and it includes Radiohead’s original lyric “so fucking special”, instead of the more sanitized “so very special” in the U.S. version; otherwise, the trailer is the same. If I may say, the “so very special” version never seemed right, not even in Radiohead’s sanitized version. And another thing, Trent Reznor scored the film and says “it’s really fucking good, And dark!”. If he says it’s dark, well, it must be dark.

Hat tip to TechCrunch for the international version update.