Part one of a short series on a new film about Facebook-perhaps you've heard of it?

The Social Network is full of fibs, as everyone knows. The film is based on Ben Mezrich's The Accidental Billionaires, which tells a colorfully embellished version of the story from the point of view of Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, which tale, as it was written, was then adapted into the screenplay by Aaron Sorkin. The resulting account of the founding of Facebook amounts to a Hollywoodized game of Telephone. But the movie's lies aren't limited to those that blame Mark Zuckerberg for his rapacious and unscrupulous ambition (indeed, much of that stuff is [...]

Oh, you social media, you! With all that Twittering, messaging and geo-locationing, you do, you must generate some kind of revenue-and, per the big business thinkers of Web 2.0, it has to be ginormous. There are 300 million Facebookers out there, after all, and while Twitter is still in the modest 10-figure range, it operates at a staggering rate of increase; a March study of social media usage found that Twitter users were growing at a monthly clip of 1382%. (I realized that anything was possible in the Twitterverse when I awakened to the news this Sunday that I had acquired Reaganite direct-mail guru Richard Viguerie as a [...]

Lately I've been getting the occasional e-mails from MySpace and Friendster, those relics of social networking from a more innocent, Blingee-filled time, asking me to come back to the old hangouts and see what's new. The notes read like half-hearted booty calls filtered through a marketing department, with the vague dread that the old fun times are dead and buried lurking underneath every extra exclamation point. On that note, today comes news that the folks at Microsoft are on the verge of "reinventing Windows Live Hotmail," nipping and tucking the old webmail service in hopes that they can lure back those people who were enticed by Gmail's [...]

Hey, anyone want to go in and recolonize the increasingly user-free social-networking site MySpace? We can probably get some Blingees for cheap, if these numbers are any indication! "For the 30 days ending Feb. 19, it was only 18 million, a 6% decline from the previous 30 days. And the rate of decline only seems to be accelerating: The number of new unique users shrank 11%."