So asks Mark Zuckerberg (MZ) in the film 'The Social Network'. Just because someone else suggested building a social-network via the Internet, it does not mean that Facebook was not an original concept. The argument was that Facebook was a different - and better - kind of social-network, not that it had stolen the original idea of 'social-networks' per se.
As an unashamed fan of Facebook, I think MZ had a point. As the film shows, even when MZ is being asked to prepare a Harvard social-networking site, he asks how this would differ from My Space and other similar concepts.
The Social Network does however pose interesting questions about the alleged treatment by Mr Zuckerberg's of co-partner and founder Eduardo Saverin. Having said that, how many businesses have there been where the initial partners fall out over one dispute or another?
However, what the film does demonstrate, is not just that inventions are usually surrounded by controversy, but also, the absolute genius of the Facebook concept. It is astounding how quickly the site became a success, spreading from campuses to continents and used by hundreds of millions.
To use another analogy - it seems that Mark Zuckerburg succeeded in inventing the web social-network equivalent of the car, after others had invented the wheel.
Many people may have an idea, but can everyone put it into practice, in this case creating the code to run it and thereby establish copyright. A better analogy would be search engines - who had the idea but many people created slightly different ones. But without the WWW the idea of social networking would go nowhere - that's the clever bit.
ReplyDeleteAs per the events of the film, the USP of Harvard Connection was that it would be a social networking facility accessible only to Harvard students, and the court case hinged on the notion that Zuckerberg had stolen that. I suppose that court case is part of the reason why they abandoned that concept and opened up the site to all users a few years ago, but it was a very different site before that.
ReplyDeleteWhat I thought was brilliant about The Social Network is that it presented every single point of view as if each was as valid as each other. I was able to leave the cinema thinking that every character had a reasonable point, even if that point was hampered by that character's own hubris.