Long before Facebook settled its lawsuit with some of Mark Zuckerberg’s old Harvard buddies, West Wing creator and writer Aaron Sorkin had planned a movie about Facebook that would focus on the early moments when the social network was just a gleam in young Zuck’s eye.

Turns out this project is full steam ahead, and the Facebook crew is none too happy about it. In fact, Facebook sent letters asking former employees not to cooperate or comment on anybody that may be doing research for the film.
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After years leading the pack in Europe, Microsoft has lost its title as the number one web browser in Europe. The new leader is Mozilla’s Firefox 3.

Though the move is partly explained by a switch from many have made from Internet Explorer 7 to IE8, and when combining all of the versions of IE together, they still lead Mozilla by about 10%. Still, Firefox is climbing very steadily up the ladder and Microsoft’s browser hegemony may be in trouble.
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Denise Finkle of Oceanside, NY saw the dark side of social networking head-on. She was one of a growing number of young people subjected to cyber-bullying through Facebook. For her, it was a group set up by peers at her high school.

Now Finkle is suing four former students, their parents, and Facebook for bullying which included accusations of bestiality, intravenous drug use, and contraction of AIDS.
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I wrote the other day about accusations leveled at user-generated review site Yelp, claiming they were using shady tactics to get merchants to advertise with them by promising to remove bad reviews, among other things.

Yelp shot back with a response pointing out that many of their clients have not benefited from advertising with them, showing screenshots of a client that has not had bad reviews taken down by Yelp.
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The backlash against Facebook’s changes to their terms of service are complete now, with Mark Zuckerberg backtracking on their proposal to keep, use, and mine users’ information, even when they choose to deactivate their profile and leave Facebook.

Coming on the heels of an internal valuation much lower than the previously floated $15 billion, this move reveals that Facebook is having problems discovering ways to make money. If mining you data and retaining licensing rights to your info is the best way Facebook has found of making money, then it’s very troublesome not only for them, but other social networks.
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There aren’t a lot of Nokia users left in the United States, which is kind of a shame–partly their fault and partly the fault of philistines.

Nokia makes unparalleled hardware. I have an E71 and it’s sleek, has all the functionality of BlackBerry, and ever feature one could want on a QWERTY phone. It’s professional grade, and I love it.

But taking a look at iPhone’s app store, I realize my E71 is not nearly as cool as the iPhone. Sure, the battery lasts for two days, even if I’m running multiple programs and hooked up to 3.5G, I get email pushed instantly to my inbox without additional rates, and the GPS has saved my bacon numerous times. But I want to be able to shake it and find a restaurant!
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Some actual good news for the American economy as Intel has announced they will spend $7 billion building and revamping plants to build its new 32 nanometer chips here in the United States.

The plan will create an estimated 7,000 new high-wage jobs in places like my home state of Oregon, Arizona, and New Mexico.

Intel has managed to weather the financial crisis fairly well by holding $15 billion in liquid assets, so while most companies are scraping by, Intel is able to announce large scale investing. Interestingly, Intel President and CEO Paul Otellini made the announcement in Washington as the economic stimulus is being debated.
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No Super Bowl ad has been more affective on the web than Denny’s ad promising a free Grand Slam breakfast on Tuesday morning. Google Hot Trends has been littered with searches about the offer, and each link has led to either a Google AdWords advertisement or, better yet, Denny’s site.

The fact is, most of the ads during the Super Bowl were centered around websites. This was the case for more than for normal ads one sees on the air.
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One thing I will be checking for after Sunday’s Super Bowl is how well the companies that spent millions to advertise will deal with the inevitable online flood that will occur after viewers see their ads.

The one thing about Google Hot Trends that is a fact is that much of it is driven by television, including advertising. With the announcement that Anheuser-Busch has launched a blog, there is some evidence they are moving forward. But optimizing sites for organic search traffic that arises from television hasn’t really caught on as much as it should.
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Friendfeed is finally getting that gigantic jump in users that Twitter experienced in 2008. However, is Friendfeed’s success based on its own merits or are they piggybacking on Twitter’s rise?

While it appears to be true that over 50% of Friendfeed’s total content is arising from Twitter, can that explain its rise in unique visitors? Friendfeed has about 1 million uniques per month compared to 550,000 in September. It is a big possibility that a lot of these unique visitors are finding Friendfeed through search engines that are crawling Twitter’s content. In that case, it would not be particularly impressive.
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