The Winklevoss twins will probably be scary, too. This is a 'Jurassic Park' promo shot of actor Joseph Mazzello, who was recently cast as Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz. NB: He's nearly two decades older now.
(Credit: Amblin Entertainment/filmdope.com)This isn't particularly Earth-shattering news, but it's sort of hilarious.
Dustin Moskovitz, one of Facebook's co-founders and its head of engineering until he left last year, will be played by the little boy from "Jurassic Park" in the tell-all flick "The Social Network."
According to details in the Internet Movie Database, the role of Moskovitz has been filled by Joseph Mazzello, the actor best known for playing Timmy, the skinny 8-year-old who fell out of trees, nearly got electrocuted, and narrowly escaped getting eaten by all kinds of meany dinosaurs in the 1993 blockbuster. In other words, he already has experience as a member of the supporting cast of over-the-top movies about high-tech innovations.
Mazzello is now 26, which should make you feel very old.
Moskovitz was instrumental in Facebook's origins, but in "The Social Network" (helmed by "Fight Club" director David Fincher with a screenplay by Aaron Sorkin) he has a relatively minor role. The film is not supported or authorized by Facebook or Mark Zuckerberg, its CEO and co-founder. And the book that the movie is based on--Ben Mezrich's "The Accidental Billionaires"--relies on sourcing, much of it anonymous, from other figures early in Facebook's history. We can confirm that Moskovitz, who has been loyal to the company even after leaving, was not one of them. Putting too much of him in there could lead to legal problems.
The young cast of the movie has proven to be an amusing blend, with "Adventureland" star Jesse Eisenberg starring as Mark Zuckerberg (likely a very good fit), pop star Justin Timberlake playing Silicon Valley entrepreneur Sean Parker (really?), and "Gossip Girl" actor Armie Hammer playing both Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the identical twins who claimed Zuckerberg's founding of Facebook amounted to a theft of their own idea.
YouTube might still reign supreme in online video, but the big surprise coming out of Nielsen's VideoCensus release on Thursday is that Facebook is now the world's third most popular place to view video online.
According to Nielsen's latest VideoCensus numbers, which look at the number of video views in October, YouTube serviced over 6.6 billion streams. In a distant second, Hulu offered up over 632 million video streams. But it was Facebook with over 217 million streams in October that easily beat out Bing, Yahoo, and several other online sites. In September, Facebook was ranked tenth in total streams.
In October, Facebook placed second in total number of unique viewers: over 31.5 million. YouTube had almost 106 million unique viewers during October. Hulu placed fifth with 13.4 million viewers.
According to Nielsen, the amount of time Web users spent viewing videos on social-networking sites increased 98 percent year over year. In October 2008, users watched 503.8 million minutes of video; they watched 999.4 million video minutes in October this year. That growth far outpaced growth in number of online video streams as a whole, which grew 26 percent year over year.
Facebook has moved its way up to third place.
(Credit: Nielsen)"During the past year, online video viewing has become central to the Web experience," Nielsen Vice President of Media Analytics Jon Gibs said in a statement. "In conjunction with this increase, we are seeing remarkable growth in video viewing on social networking sites and it is only natural that these two trends would converge in consumers' minds, making sites like Facebook and Myspace.com, increasingly important distribution points for both consumer and professionally generated video."
But it was Facebook, not MySpace, that led the way in video streams on social-networking sites, nearly tripling MySpace's 85.2 million streams during October.
According to Nielsen, the "total time spent viewing video on Facebook" grew by 1,840 percent year over year. The number of unique viewers grew 548 percent over the same period. Total streams increased by 987 percent year over year.
"Facebook's rapid growth in online video during the last year illustrates the site's evolution from simply a communications focused tool to a media portal," Gibs said. "Social networking sites are evolving from a venue for catching up with friends to a platform for personal expression, allowing consumers to share their experiences in the full variety of content formats available online."
Don Reisinger is a technology columnist who has written about everything from HDTVs to computers to Flowbee Haircut Systems. Don is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and posts at The Digital Home. He is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
Twitter co-founder Biz Stone announced on Thursday that the familiar, "What are you doing?" tag line that has sat atop the service's status update box since its launch has been replaced with "What's happening?"
"Twitter was originally conceived as a mobile status update service," Stone explained on the company's blog. Therefore, Stone continued, it made sense for Twitter to make it easy for users to receive "short, frequent answers to one question, 'What are you doing?'"
But as Twitter grew, that question's importance waned. As Stone pointed out, "people, organizations, and businesses quickly began...ignoring the original question, seemingly on a quest to both ask and answer a different, more immediate question, 'What's happening?'"
Realizing that, Stone said that Twitter has decided to ask users what's happening to reflect the real nature of tweets. It makes sense. While there might be those who still answer questions related to what they're doing, the vast majority of users are, as Stone pointed out, "witnessing accidents, organizing events, sharing links, breaking news, reporting stuff their dad says, and so much more."
By changing Twitter's question to "What's Happening?", Stone doesn't expect anyone to use the site differently. But it is a major step for the company.
For years, "What are you doing?" has been a staple on Twitter as it grew from a niche community to a major social network. At the same time, Twitter's users have largely ignored it. And so, if Twitter insists on asking a question for users to answer in their status update box, maybe it really is appropriate for it to ask "What's happening?"
What do you think? Are you happy with Twitter's modification? Let us know in the comments below.
Don Reisinger is a technology columnist who has written about everything from HDTVs to computers to Flowbee Haircut Systems. Don is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and posts at The Digital Home. He is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
Facebook groups are under attack. But the attackers say they come in peace and insist they want only to highlight a flaw in the way Facebook handles group administration.
An organization called Control Your Info has taken control of hundreds of Facebook groups. Those groups had administrators that eventually stepped down from their position, creating a power vacuum at the top. According to the organization, when the administrator steps down, anyone can take over a group, view the members' personal information, and change group information to say whatever they want. Control Your Info believes that the way Facebook handles group administration is a major flaw. And it wants to bring that to everyone's attention.
Control Your Info has hijacked Facebook groups.
(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)"Hello, we hereby announce that we have officially hijacked your Facebook group," a message written on Monday reads on one hijacked group. "This means we control a certain part of the information about you on Facebook. If we wanted, we could make you appear in a bad way which could damage your image severely."
Janis Roukkos, a representative from Control Your Info wrote that his organization wants to get social-networking users to "think about the safety in your social-media life to the same extent you do in your real life." Although the Control Your Info is in control of that specific group now, Roukkos wrote that Control Your Info will restore the group name (which it changed) and leave the group "by the end of next week." He also promised to not "mess anything up."
That single group isn't alone. A quick search for "Control Your Info" in Facebook yields hundreds of groups that have been hijacked by the organization. All the group names have been changed to "Control Your Info," the logos have been changed to the organization's image, and the messages are all the same. The only difference is which Control Your Info representative is writing about the organization's intentions to each group.
Control Your Info's blog sheds some more light on the organization's problem with Facebook. According to Control Your Info, "Facebook Groups suffer from a major flaw. If (an) administrator of a group leaves, anyone can register as a new admin. So, in order to take control of a Facebook group, all you really have to do is a quick search on Google.
"When you're admin of a group, you can basically do anything you want with it," the blog post continued. "You can change (its) name, and the groups members won't even get a notification of it. You can send (messages) to all members and edit info. This is just one example that really shows the vulnerabilities of social media."
Once again, Control Your Info attempted to justify its actions. The organization said the "project is strictly not for profit and done for a good cause."
Facebook did not immediately respond to request for comment.
In the meantime, what do you think about Control Your Info's practices? Is it really teaching folks about social-media security? Let us know in the comments below.
Don Reisinger is a technology columnist who has written about everything from HDTVs to computers to Flowbee Haircut Systems. Don is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and posts at The Digital Home. He is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
Although technology and the Internet have taken a beating in the past for potentially limiting people's social interaction, a new study from the Pew Research Center has found that the opposite might be true.
According to a Pew Internet Personal Networks and Community survey, which polled 2,512 adults, the dawn of new technology and the Internet has not caused people to withdraw from society. In fact, the study found that "the extent of social isolation has hardly changed since 1985, contrary to concerns that the prevalence of severe isolation has tripled since then." Pew said that 6 percent of the entire U.S. adult population currently has "no one with whom they can discuss important matters or who they consider to be 'especially significant' in their life."
That said, Pew did find that Americans' "discussion networks"--a measure of people's "most important social ties"--have shrunk "by about a third since 1985" from three people to two. However, Pew found no evidence to suggest that it had anything to do with mobile phones or the Internet. In fact, the organization's study found that mobile-phone use and active Web participation yields "larger and more diverse core discussion networks."
Social media is also helping people expand their social interaction. According to Pew, those who use the Internet frequently "are much more likely to confide in someone who is of another race." Users who share photos online are more likely to discuss political topics with someone of a different party, the organization found.
Do you know your neighbor?
Frequent Web users are more likely to communicate with neighbors in person than those who don't use the Web as often, Pew found. In fact, 61 percent of respondents said that they talk to a neighbor at least once per month. The study also found that bloggers are 72 percent "more likely to belong to a local voluntary association" than those who don't blog.
Perhaps most important, Pew found that just because someone is a heavy Web user, that doesn't mean they remove themselves from traditional social activities like visiting a restaurant or hanging out at a bar on a Friday night. According to the study, Web users are "45 percent more likely to visit a cafe, 52 percent more likely to visit a library, 34 percent more likely to visit a fast-food restaurant, 69 percent more likely to visit other restaurants, and 42 percent more likely to visit a public park." Later on, the study reported that social-networking users "are 40 percent more likely to visit a bar, but 36 percent less likely to visit a religious institution."
So, next time your grandmother tells you that the Web is ruining the world, you might want to tell her to check out Pew's study. For more on these figures and many more, click here.
A boat rows on the Charles River in Boston in the fall of 2006.
(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET)Now, these are some guys you don't see at the average Silicon Valley hackathon: The Harvard heavyweight crew team is filming scenes for "The Social Network," according to a Boston Globe gossip column on Tuesday. Film crews have been on the Charles River in Boston recently, the column reports.
That's because two of the main characters in the juicy, David Fincher-directed tell-all about the origins of Facebook are Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, would-be social-network entrepreneurs who claimed that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg stole the code and business plan for their project, ConnectU. The identical twin Winklevosses were also members of Harvard's crew team, they and ultimately wound up on the U.S. Olympic squad last summer in Beijing.
The Globe column also notes that one of the rowers had some red dots painted on his face so that ultimately, the face of an actor could be superimposed on it--which, though it sounds technologically complicated, is probably easier than trying to teach an actor how to row. Besides, "The Social Network" already has some smoke and mirrors to deal with: the Winklevoss twins are being played by a single actor, Armie Hammer.
(The Globe assumes that the face to be superimposed is that of pop star Justin Timberlake, who plays Napster co-founder Sean Parker in "The Social Network." But Parker, we're pretty sure, never rowed on Harvard's heavyweight crew team.)
Meanwhile, though the Charles River is apparently fair game, it looks like Harvard didn't let the film crew on campus: Johns Hopkins University in Maryland put out a release on Tuesday saying it will be standing in for Harvard, in some scenes shot in early November.
Sound the alarms! The U.K.'s Telegraph news outlet has a story that seems to prove the unthinkable: that onetime social-networking rivals Facebook and MySpace could actually be working on some kind of partnership.
Two years ago this would've been a huge deal. Now? I'm really not surprised.
"The move could potentially see MySpace music and video footage being shared on Facebook via its Connect platform, which allows people to log into third-party sites using their Facebook ID," the article by Emma Barnett explains.
It then quotes Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg as saying that "we would like to have (MySpace's) content, as we already do with many other sites, shared across our network because it is good for our users" and that "we are open to working with MySpace and are in talks with them at the moment."
MySpaces CEO Owen Van Natta, who used to have a similar role at Facebook to the one that Sandberg does now, is likewise quoted as saying "we are in talks with Facebook, and other sites, about how we could partner with them."
See, here's the deal. Sandberg and Van Natta are quoted in pretty ambiguous terms. But any third-party company on the Web is at liberty to implement Facebook's log-in standard with the Facebook Connect API: over 15,000 sites had, at last count. The catch with MySpace is that both sites are so large, they'd naturally be in some kind of talks about it simply to handle infrastructure issues (and likely more). The Huffington Post, for example, struck a deal with Facebook to power its "Social News" feature with Facebook Connect rather than just to chuck in some Facebook Connect code.
Partnering with Facebook is actually excellent positioning for MySpace, because the News Corp.-owned social site has been attempting to differentiate itself from pure social networking: a game that Facebook has clearly won. By hinting that it could strike a deal with Facebook, MySpace is putting out a major "we're different" message as it tries to establish itself as a pop culture hub. Facebook's the one providing the platform for the content; MySpace is the one providing the content itself.
For Facebook, meanwhile, you could take this as a "look, we've won" move. After all, it's a validation of the power of the social network's content platform that a company like MySpace--which used to dwarf Facebook in size--would want to use it for distribution.
SAN FRANCISCO--With both MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta and News Corp. chief digital officer Jonathan Miller taking the stage at the Web 2.0 Summit this week, there was naturally plenty of talk about the social site's attempt to reverse its ill fortune of late. Once the biggest name in social networking, it's long since lost that title to Facebook and is trying to reinvent itself as a destination for music and entertainment.
"I think that what you see in the space more than anything else is if you don't keep innovating and moving forward you get in trouble," Miller said in his talk on Thursday morning. "You can't stop, you have to keep going, and (MySpace) didn't keep going, it kind of stopped."
And in that time, he added, "we had two fantastic competitors emerge in Facebook and Twitter."
The previous day, Van Natta made his first big appearance on the conference circuit since he joined MySpace and was tasked with a major turnaround. Van Natta unveiled a new music video hub as well as an enhanced set of marketing tools for music artists--some of which were built in with technology from iLike, which MySpace acquired this summer.
And on Wednesday night, the "new" MySpace was out in full form: a line snaked down three city blocks when music fans caught wind of the fact that the company had booked rock band Weezer for one of its "secret shows" concerts.
"MySpace started with an essence around certain things, and one of them was music, and meeting new people," Miller, a former AOL exec who also joined News Corp. this spring, said on Thursday. "We're going back to basics in that sense, but you've got to make it relevant to today and going forward."
It's obviously too early to tell whether the "reinvention" will work. Some critics say that it's too big of a task, especially given the state of the advertising market. But Miller spent a big portion of his talk at the Web 2.0 Summit hyping up the Fox Audience Network, or FAN, the digital advertising division that News Corp. first announced last spring.
"We kind of broke it out of MySpace and gave it a life of its own," Miller said. "We're just at the beginning of a coming-out party for FAN."
FAN just inked a deal with agency giant Omnicom, and more are on the way, he added. Miller also said FAN is the fifth-largest ad network on the Web, after the usual suspects--Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and AOL--and that it's hoping to get into fourth place soon.
A new study released on Wednesday by the Pew Internet and American Life Project has found some rather interesting tidbits of information about social network users.
According to the study, 19 percent of Web surfers use "Twitter or another service to share updates about themselves, or to see updates about others." According to the organization, its earlier findings in April 2009 found that just 11 percent of Internet users were using a status-update service.
But the reason why there has been such an uptick in status updates has much to do with the users themselves, Pew found. According to the organization, the growth is being driven by "social network Web site users, those who connect to the Internet via mobile devices, and younger Internet users--those under age 44."
The study found that 33 percent of those who are updating their status range in age between 18 and 29. Those aged between 30 and 49 make up 22 percent of the group. Just 13 percent of those who update their status are 50 years of age or older.
Pew determined that the Twitter user's median age is 31. MySpace's median age is now 26, down from 27 in May 2008. LinkedIn has also gotten younger by a year, featuring a median age of 39. But Facebook is one of the few social networks to buck the youth trend, upping its median age to 33, from 26 in May 2008.
... Read moreDon Reisinger is a technology columnist who has written about everything from HDTVs to computers to Flowbee Haircut Systems. Don is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and posts at The Digital Home. He is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
SAN FRANCISCO--He's not kidding about making changes.
MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta took the stage at the Web 2.0 Summit event on Wednesday and paraded out a whole slew of announcements related to turning the flagging social network into a music and media powerhouse. He showed off a massive catalog of music videos--coming from all the partners in the MySpace Music joint venture--and an enhanced set of tools for bands using the site as a marketing and promotional hub. Plus, the MySpace Music service now syncs up with Apple's iTunes, not just Amazon MP3.
It was former Facebook exec Van Natta's first big public appearance since becoming CEO of the News Corp.-owned MySpace in April.
The "artist dashboard" for MySpace Music is a free product that offers a suite of analytics for bands and artists that operate MySpace profiles so that they can get details on who's listening and interacting with them within the MySpace community. It's also baked in features from iLike, the music service that MySpace acquired this summer. iLike operates social apps on a variety of platforms, including Facebook, and artists using MySpace can now access that data too.
"We're giving people things like geographic breakdowns, where exactly their friends are not just in the U.S. but in the world," Van Natta explained. "This is literally getting pushed live as I'm sitting here talking to you."
For the fans, there's the music video portal, which started rolling out on Wednesday, offering the entire catalog of music videos from all the labels that offer their music on the MySpace Music streaming service. It'll compete with Vevo, the Universal Music Group-founded music video hub that features YouTube-created technology and investment backing from Abu Dhabi oil money. But it sounds like Universal's music videos will be on MySpace, too.
CNET News reported earlier this month that MySpace was working with video hub Hulu--in which News Corp. is a stakeholder--to launch a new video service. It's unclear whether there is any connection to the new music video hub.
MySpace launched the MySpace Music operation last year and hired former MTV executive Courtney Holt to head it up. But things haven't been altogether sunny. Earlier this year, word got out that the major labels who've put a stake in MySpace Music were dissatisfied with its performance.
Plus, earlier on Wednesday, it came to light that rival Facebook was making its first big move in the music space. The massive social network announced a partnership with music service Lala as part of its revamped virtual gifts marketplace, allowing members to buy songs for one another.
Van Natta shrugged off concerns that MySpace, with a significant portion of its traffic eaten away by Facebook's rocketing growth, is having trouble pulling in advertising revenues.
"We're really good at monetization," he assured the audience. "There's a lot of different avenues that we can take."
This post was expanded at 4:54 p.m. PT.
