When it comes to making a movie, film makers have some idea of what makes a movie work. They need drama, that is, they need tension. They need easy-to-understand motivations. They don't need things that are highly technical or highly abstruse. Such things would only put the audience to sleep with nary a sense of the deep issues that they are completely missing.
Facebook started with Mark Zuckerberg, but the reality is, like most endeavors, it's too tough to write code on your own. As prolific as Zuckerberg might be, he can only code so fast, and he eventually needs a team that he can trust to do things. The story of Dustin Moskovitz (shown in the picture) and Chris Hughes are untold because, frankly, it's more interesting to make this the story of a handful of people.
Thus, Eduardo Saverin, the business guy, is the guy that is the foil for Mark. Saverin is the conscious of the film, and yet, the film posits that he lacks the vision to make Facebook as successful as it could be, and eventually, either Zuckerberg or Parker or both chose to exclude Saverin (although apparently through lawsuits, he still owns a reasonable chunk of Facebook).
What about Moskovitz and Hughes? What about the other technical folks that were part of Facebook? How did Zuckerberg interact with them? Did they have a sense this could be big? Did they know what it would take to make Facebook big? What did they have that, say, MySpace didn't have? Why did it work? Ultimately, such questions are sidestepped because the answers are perhaps not so pat, not so simple. Was the success of Facebook due to its technical prowess, or was it due to something simpler? Perhaps having a good idea at the right time?
Facebook started a bit like GMail. It ran on exclusivity. But exclusivity isn't be enough. Zuckerberg had created other sites at Harvard and those sites would not have taken off the way Facebook did.
You need a reason to visit the site whether you are exclusive or not. It may be enough to bait the first few users, but honestly, that's far from enough. The site has to be good enough to keep folks coming back over and over. To be fair, many websites could have been great had they had enough users. They could have made great decisions, had there been enough people to start it up, and yet, there wasn't enough. Maybe HarvardConnection (or ConnectU) would have been great. But it's highly possible it would have fizzled.
The Social Network cared primarily about the relationship of Zuckerberg and Saverin and also to the Winklevoss twins (and Narendra). The technical team behind Facebook was mostly pushed aside because, as movie makers, Fincher and Sorkin would have been hard-pressed to make that side of the story compelling. And, did the folks who invented Facebook really understand what made it different and what made it work? Perhaps they did.
To me, the reason it worked was because it flipped the home page around. Instead of the home page being about you, it was about your friends. You could have 100 friends, but all you need is 3-5 really active friends to keep you coming back to Facebook. Once you could add comments or look at your friends pictures or what have you, you have motivation to keep coming back. If it was just about you, you would get bored of yourself. Other sites like MySpace failed to make it easy to notify you when your friends updated anything. It was a huge labor to find out what your friends were up to. And they took advantage of microblogging since real blogging was far too time-consuming.
So while I enjoyed the film, and enjoyed how Fincher/Sorkin told the tale, I know that it misses on a lot of the technical aspects that would have made it more interesting to me personally.
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