At the time of the posting of this article, 24 hrs after the first showing at 12:01 AM 10/1/10, 50,035 like the movie’s Community Page and 43,233 have liked the movie’s website.

Tonight Nicole Miller and I went to see, The Social Network, (the story of Facebook) as part of a NY Tech Meetup special screening.  The NY Tech Meetup is comprised of 15,129 member of which I am one.  With monthly meetings that are always packed.  This evening at least 321 people were reported to have attended.  So packed that that we were watching the movie by looking up at about 60º.  It was great to be in a room packed with other nerds/technologists that understood when Zuckerberg (played by Jesse Eisenberg) said things such as “wget” or “Python“.

Writer Aaron Sorkin adapted his screenplay from Ben Mezrich‘s nonfiction novel The Accidental Billionaires (2009). No Facebook staff or employees, including founder Mark Zuckerberg, was involved with the project, although Eduardo Saverin (the original CFO/best-friend who then sued him) was a consultant for Mezrich’s story. The film is distributed by Columbia Pictures and was released on October 1, 2010, in the United States.

Aaron Sorkin was on Jimmy Fallon tonight.  He mentioned how the script page-length was longer than most production companies want but they kept the dialog fast.  An idea he had with the director David Fincher (think Fight Club, Seven and others).  The Fincher touch is really only evident in a stylized sequence during a regatta scene.  The score I might add is by none other than Trent Reznor.  Yes, the Reznor of Nine Inch Nails.  Don’t think it’s all pounding industrial, it’s not.  There is however some nice low-end frequency thumps that keeps the entire thing moving nicely.  The pace of the dialog is great but I can imagine that some others might find it too fast.

Facebook launched in February 2004 (then as thefacebook).  Originally only available to Ivy League schools then gradually to most universities in Canada and the US then to high schools and then to several companies including Apple and Microsoft.  It was not until September 26, 2006 that Facebook went public.  That’s only 4 years and 5 days.  Only four years for it to grow to what I like to refer to as “the second internet”.  According to the official Facebook stats, there are More than 500 million active users and we, our average 130 friends and everyone else spend over 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook.  There is a lot to watch for in the years to come.  The whole idea of the “Like” button is a game-changer for those of us in the marketing/advertising space.  Now Facebook users are become advocates of brands/products/place to their friends.  You might go a restaurant because someone you are “friends” with “Liked” it before you would Google it.

There has not been a computer movie like this for me since Wargames and The KGB, The Computer and Me. The former is the well-known film starring Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy about how Broderick’s character hacked the super-computer The Whopper and alost started WWIII by playing what he thought was a game called Global Thermal Nuclear War. The later is based on a book by the austronomer turned spy-hunter turned author Clifford Stoll.  The book The Cuckoo’s Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage was then turned into a documentary staring the author by PBS/Nova in 1990.  You can watch it in 6-parts on YouTube.  The book and the documentary were favorites of mine as I had just started to get into computers, networking and dial-up BBS’ (bulletin boards) around that time.

The Social Network is a fast 2 hours.  It did not feel like 2 hours at all.  I was shocked.  Thanks in part to the fast dialog and the driving music.  Everyone is well-cast.  Even Justin Timberlake who plays Sean Parker, the man behind Napster in 1999 who became a consultant then president of Facebook until a cocaine possession arrest forced him out.  Ironic that Timberlake, who has sold over 100 million albums would portray the man who some would say started the digital audio, download, MP3 movement that has crippled the music business.