While the Facebook movie seems to be doing rather well and might even get an Oscar or two, its subject, Social Notworking King Mark Zuckerberg, does not like it.
After initially telling the world+dog that he would not see the flick about his life, Zuckerberg's ego apparently got the better of him and he settled down with his popcorn to watch it.
Apparently he is miffed that the film made it look as if he started Facebook 'to get girls'
According to the Independent, In a stinging review of the film, he told a crowd of aspiring entrepreneurs at an event at Stanford University that its producers "just can't wrap their heads around the idea that someone might build something because they like building things."
The movie looked at the early days of the foundation of the website, while Zuckerberg was an undergraduate at Harvard.
He is shown as ambitious, driven and intent on success for Facebook and is keen to get rid of his image as an isolated geek in his dorm room.
Zuckerberg said that it was interesting the stuff that they focused on getting right – like every single shirt and fleece they had in that movie is actually a shirt or fleece that he owned.
But the plot is based on the fact that a woman who never existed in real life, dumped him.
Now while he was dumped a lot in real life, the idea of the movie is that the whole reason for making Facebook is because he wanted to get girls, or wanted to get into clubs, he moaned.
The real story was that Zuckerberg has been with his current girlfriend, Priscilla Chan, since before the advent of Facebook.
Zuckerberg's comments have been greeted with surprise, partly because the thought of him having a real girlfriend had not occurred to most, but also because Facebook has been careful not to attack the film.
This is because the successful film is free publicity and doing no harm to the company's image.
However, Zuckerberg's claims that the woman described in the film was entirely fictitious may not be true. The Facebook Effect, an earlier book, claimed Zuckerberg had dated a Berkeley undergraduate during a break in his relationship with Chan.
Zuckerberg has always worried that people will look at the film and see his character when he was 19 and say 'Oh, well, he was like that... He must still be like that, right?'"
He's has walled off China on his global world victory map
and decided that if he wants to conquer the Middle Kingdom,
he'd better do more than order Chinese take-out. So as befits the
son-of-a-dentist Harvard wunderkind, the Facebook founder
is taking Chinese lessons every day for an hour, going beyond "ni hao"
to some of the more intricate details of the 25,000-character
reading and writing system, and with his longtime Chinese-American
fiancee studying to be a medical doctor, Facebook looks set to one day
rule
the mainland.
What's 500 million users worldwide? Zuckerberg wants China's billions,
too. Problem is: China's a communist country and internet rules there
are not the same as in the West -- "off with your head" is but one way
Beijing's internet minders have of reminding netizens to toe the party
line -- and Facebook has been restricted inside the Middle Kingdom
since 2009 when ethnic ''unrest'' in the freedom-loving Xinjiang
region made the Ministry of Mind Control leery of any Zuckerberg
shenanigans.
Long story short: Facebook has its eyes on China and it plans to win.
"We kind of carved off China and said 'Okay this one is extremely
complex and has its own dynamics'," the Mark recently said in a
California speech which was leaked to the press, details of which
included his private phone number, his hotmail password and other
private stuff. "In China I think the values are so different from what
we have in the US so, before we do anything there, I'm personally
spending a lot of time studying it and figuring out what I think the
right thing to do is. It's kind of a personal challenge this year, I'm
taking an hour a day and I'm learning Chinese. I'm trying to
understand the language, the culture, the mind set -- it's just such
an important part of the world. How can you connect the whole world if
you leave out a billion-six people?"
China's official population tally lists just 1.3 billion -- not 'a
billion-six' -- of which some 400 million mindcontrolled netizens are
active online as you read this.
Zuckerberg, 26 going on 27, told the workshop participants that
Facebook respects local laws and cultural differences where ever it
goes, explaining how Nazi content is blocked in post-Nazi Germany
because it is illegal there, and how when a user created an "everybody
draw Mohammed day" group on a Pakistan-based Facebook website,
Facebook eventually blocked it -- since images of the prophet are
against the law there and nobody wants to intentionally upset the
apple cart.
When asked about the new Hollywood movie "The Social Network," which
some pundits say could take home an Oscar or two, Zuckerberg puckered
up and said that while
the film got a few random details right, such as wear and tear of some
of his clothes, the main key details were wrong.
For example, the Hollywood story claims he set up Facebook after he
was dumped by a Harvard woman, but no, that's not right, he said. He
still has the same pre-Facebook Harvard girlfriend, Priscilla Chan, a
charming physician-in-training from the Boston suburbs.