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CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--Ben Mezrich's new book "The Accidental Billionaires," a dramatic and contested account of the early days of social network Facebook, is on the fast track to Hollywood.

But Thursday night's inaugural public event for the book, which first hit stores on Tuesday, was a humble affair well suited to this relatively quiet university town. Held in the Brattle Theatre, a basement-level space in a 120-year-old brick building just off Harvard Square, Mezrich was interviewed on a small stage by Scott Stossel, managing editor of The Atlantic Monthly, his onetime roommate, and a fellow Harvard … Read more

For all of its glory, Twitter is apparently not as sticky as many social media buffs would like it to be. A recent Harvard Business School study reported that 10 percent of the service's users account for more than 90 percent of tweets. (I wrote about Twitter's lack of loyalty back in April.)

However, I don't think it really matters. As with any service or piece of software, a rising tide lifts all boats, so a core user base can propel a service for quite a while. Somewhere down the line however, Twitter as a company will need to put programs and efforts into place to encourage people to actually use the service if it ever plans to monetize it.

The fact that 10 percent of users are driving 90 percent of the content is not dramatically different than what you see with sites like Wikipedia, or with personal blogs, which have an even lower rate of consistent publishing. According to a 2008 study by Technorati, 95 percent of the blogs they track hadn't been updated in at least four months.

Orphaned tweets, like orphaned blogs, are just as much part of the social fabric as anything else. The fact is that people abandon stuff all the time--TV shows, books, whatever. We shouldn't be remotely shocked that someone bails out of blogging or something else that could be considered work. … Read more

Correction at 6:35 a.m. PDT: This article was initially written on the assumption that the study was new. It was actually published in 2005.

For those waiting for a grand cataclysmic battle between Gog (Linux) and Magog (Windows), with one supreme victor, don't hold your breath.

I was reading through a 2005 study by Harvard Business School professors Pankaj Ghemawat and Ramon Casadesus-Masanell, and was surprised by how little has changed in the past four years, despite Linux and Windows duking it out in ever-increasing intensity.

Since that study was released, Linux has continued to swipe at … Read more

An all star research team is developing a putty-like material to help regenerate shattered bones, a technology that could allow soldiers to avoid amputation and quickly regain full use of badly broken legs.

'Fracture putty' is a biocompatible compound designed to be packed in and around non-union fractures. It provides a load-bearing, osteoconductive, bone-like structure to give regenerative growth a chance. Then, once the bone heals, the putty degrades into harmless, absorbable by-products.

"The fracture putty will serve as a bioactive scaffold and will be able to substitute for the damaged bone," said principal researcher Mauro Ferrari. "… Read more

Talk about spilling the beans: A marketing brochure for law firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart Oliver & Hedges, which represented would-be social network ConnectU in its much-publicized suit against Facebook, claimed that the final settlement netted the site's founders a handsome $65 million in Facebook stock and cash.

Oops.

A Law.com article dug up the brochure and its claim, and has posted a .pdf file on the Web. According to the same article, principals at the law firm now regret posting the results. Meanwhile, ConnectU remains in a fee dispute with Quinn Emanuel, a fact which came to light … Read more

As Facebook hits its fifth birthday on Wednesday, it's nearly impossible to find a recent news story that doesn't refer to its growth with terms like "lightning-fast," "exponential," "skyrocketing," or some other expression that would be quite at home in a space-age comic book from the 1950s.

That might be true now. And with an executive lineup sourced from Bay Area elite (including a handful of former Google leaders), high-profile conferences and parties, not to mention developer "hackathons" all over the world, it has all the makings of a landmark … Read more

Ben Mezrich, the author whose book Bringing Down The House inspired this summer's gambling flick 21, has confirmed to the Boston Herald that he's writing a book about Facebook's origins and that West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin is going to turn it into a movie.

As you may recall, part of a proposal for the book, tentatively titled Face Off, was leaked to gossip blog Gawker and launched a mini-firestorm because of some supposed inaccuracies--not to mention the fact that it doesn't look like the book will portray Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in the most positive … Read more

Larry Lessig, professor of law at Stanford Law School, is leaving the West Coast to head to the Stanford of the East, Harvard Law School, according to Harvard. Lessig used to teach at Harvard Law School, so it should prove to be a comfortable change, and perhaps in keeping with his shift from "West Coast code" to "East Coast code", to an emphasis on overcoming corruption in politics. (No, not that kind of corruption.)

Lessig was my professor at Stanford Law School, and became a mentor to me there, though I fought his ideas for the … Read more

Facebook has hired the former chief of staff to onetime U.S. Attorney Alberto Gonzales as its general counsel, according to the Los Angeles Times. Ted Ullyot, currently a Washington, D.C.-based partner for the law firm Kirkland & Ellis, will relocate to the Bay Area and join the Palo Alto social network next month.

He appears to have been hand-picked by Elliot Schrage, the former Google executive who joined Facebook as vice president of communications and public policy this spring, and Sheryl Sandberg, another Google alum who now serves as the company's chief operating officer.

Ullyot "… Read more