The Social

Not only is this Super Mario costume homemade and hilarious, the guy sure can boogie.

(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET)

Really, America? Can we talk?

You see, I received this press release from Experian Hitwise in my in-box about the most-searched-for Halloween costumes in the U.S., based on searches in the month ending October 24 that ended in "costume." And the ranking was led by "Michael Jackson costume" and "Balloon Boy costume." OK, so those are timely, albeit a little bit more than unimaginative.

But it doesn't stop there. Following that were "Tinkerbell," "Catwoman," and "Poison Ivy," indicating that most costume searches are either on behalf of women or men who really want to make a fool of themselves. Among the top costume searches beginning with the word "sexy" were "sexy sailor costume," "sexy nurse costume," "sexy witch costume," and "sexy Queen of Hearts costume." (What would Lewis Carroll think?) And high-ranking costume searches beginning with "adult" include "adult cat costume," "adult Snow White costume," and "adult Care Bear costume."

I don't care what you dress up as for Halloween. Have fun with it. But just think about it. Adult Care Bear costume. Really. It's a costume that's probably itchy and uncomfortable, unflattering, and will embarrass the heck out of your kids if you have any. Not to mention that there's no obvious relevance to current events or pop culture that would negate the creepiness factor, considering the last time I checked the Care Bears have been around since 1981. Whatever happened to cowboys and pirates and disgraced politicians? Hitwise stats have officially weirded me out.

More depressing figures: Compared with the same time period last year, Hitwise found a 97 percent jump in searches for "pet costumes" this year. Those poor dogs.

We've been hearing a few sneaky tips from folks within earshot of the Boston, Mass., set of "The Social Network," the Columbia Pictures movie about the contested origins of Facebook. This week, the film crew has been on the Charles River working on scenes in which Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the identical twins who had a lawsuit against Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, are depicted at a Harvard crew practice.

That Boston Globe report about the Harvard heavyweight crew team getting cast in the background? Not quite.

Ivy League athletic restrictions bar current athletes from being film extras, and filming has been an all-day operation while classes are still in session, so an open casting call was held at the new Community Rowing Inc. boathouse on the Charles River in Newton, Mass.--and former Harvard and Northeastern University rowers are among those in front of the cameras. The CRI boathouse, tipsters tell us, has also been the filming HQ for the crew scenes.

The rowers are serving as body doubles for the actors and extras, as well as the actual muscle to power the boats in team scenes. And a few of them indeed have their faces marked up for the CGI superimposing of actor Armie Hammer's visage--he's playing both of the Winklevoss twins.

One thing we've heard is that one of the characters in the scenes is Harry Parker, Harvard's longtime varsity heavyweight crew coach. He's not playing himself, nor does it appear that a well-known actor has been cast to play him (because this would be a great cameo role), but rather a lookalike actor has the role instead.

Most interestingly, a tipster also tells us that while filming of the crew scenes is expected to wrap up this week, that it'll be headed to the iconic Henley Royal Regatta in the U.K. this June. There is indeed a scene in the "Social Network" that takes place at Henley, and it sounds like they're hoping to film it on-site--though we haven't been able to confirm that the formal, buttoned-up annual regatta will allow a movie crew on the grounds.

Other confirmed filming locations for "The Social Network" are Los Angeles and Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, which will be standing in for Harvard's campus. Will the cast, which includes "Zombieland" star Jesse Eisenberg (as Mark Zuckerberg) and pop star Justin Timberlake, actually do any filming in Silicon Valley? No word on that yet.

"The Social Network," directed by David Fincher ("Fight Club"), is based on Ben Mezrich's recent book, "The Accidental Billionaires." Facebook has maintained a stance that it stretches the truth.

LOS ANGELES--There are a lot of reasons why the entertainment industry is still trying to figure out how to wrangle Twitter: real-time tabloid drama, on-set spoilers, and the fact that 140 characters offers a lot of ways to say a movie really sucks.

The 140Conf LA event, which took place on Tuesday and Wednesday at the Kodak Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard, had a great opportunity to be the definitive discussion hub for tackling those tricky issues and complications that arise when the much-talked-about "real-time Web" collides with the old-school entertainment industry. That didn't happen. Instead, the event was a general showcase of the possibilities of Twitter, much like at the previous 140Conf event in New York this summer.

Conference organizer Jeff Pulver said that despite the Hollywood setting, he didn't want to take a purely entertainment-focused angle. "This really is not a Twitter conference, it's a gathering of people who use it as a platform and speak it as a language," he explained at a post-conference cocktail event on Tuesday. Pulver said he intended 140Conf LA to be "a celebration" of the possibilities of Twitter and the people who are passionate about using it, a disparate crowd that includes marketers, public servants, and yes, entertainment industry professionals. Indeed, 140Conf featured panels about police chiefs who use Twitter, teachers implementing it in the classroom, and how it's affecting the photography profession.

True, there were a lot of entertainment types there, mostly those talking about how Twitter has positively affected their business. Industry bloggers talked about how the blast-it-out nature of Twitter makes it easier to harness and report fast-breaking news. "Access Hollywood" personality Billy Bush talked about what he's learned from Twitter, like "no TUIs. Twittering under the influence is not a good idea." And "Tonight Show" blogger Aaron Bleyaert talked about the program's popular "Celebrity Twitter Tracker" feature, in which it makes fun of banal celebrity tweets. "Making fun of how celebrities think that everything they do (matters)," Bleyaert said, "Twitter's been great for us."

More interestingly, Sarah Ross, head of digital at the Ashton Kutcher-founded Katalyst Media, said paparazzi interest in the Twitter-happy Kutcher has actually declined since he started documenting his life on the microblogging service. That's fascinating, and it would've been cool to see whether the case is the same or different for other celebrities who tweet. It would've been great to hear from an industry personality who doesn't tweet, or one who's quit the service, or some perspectives from the production or public relations side of things, or perhaps someone who manages celebrity Twitter accounts. There's a lot out there.

But, Jeff Pulver said, he didn't think a Twitter-and-Hollywood conference would have much draw.

"I don't think anyone in L.A. would give a damn if we had a conference about the entertainment industry and Twitter," Pulver said. "It's not as interesting to people here as it is elsewhere."

Another conference attendee at the same cocktail party voiced a similar opinion. "This is not a studio crowd," he said of the people who'd showed up for 140Conf. Studio executives are "not innovators, not movers. They're very reactive."

Fair enough. Folks like Pulver, who have been using Twitter since its early days, are probably pretty sick of hearing about the latest gossip-blog diatribes getting plastered all over their conversation tool of choice. But headlines in the likes of Variety, The Los Angeles Times, and the Hollywood Reporter beg to differ. "Bones" creator Hart Hanson inadvertently created a mini-firestorm when a tweeted joke about swine flu on-set was taken seriously. Some studios have reportedly started inserting "no tweeting" clauses into contracts. As the likes of Perez Hilton and TMZ continually remind us, it's also given train-wreck pop stars a whole new outlet to hate on one another.

The entertainment industry has historically been reliant on the deft spin of public relations to keep a gaggle of wild personalities under wraps. Social media, not surprisingly, is a real problem. That goes double for Twitter, which can be updated on-the-fly from any mobile phone on the set of the latest hyped-up teen vampire flick or on the sidelines of a velvet-rope tiff at the Roosevelt Hotel. 140conf, rather than focusing on the glittering possibilities, could have given these very real issues some more face time.

Take the no-tweeting rules that are getting imposed by studios, production companies, publicists, and even sports leagues. "The majority of celebrity tweets are inane and not of concern to studios, but they still need the stronger contractual protections to cover themselves against the minority," entertainment attorney Jonathan Fuhrman, who previously served as vice president of business and legal affairs at The Weinstein Company, explained to CNET News.

"Every talent agreement--with writers, directors, producers, cast, and crew--has a standard confidentiality provision," Fuhrman continued. "That's what really is at issue here. In a world where anyone can tweet, the new, buffed-up confidentiality language is an important protection for the studio to prevent any of the talent from releasing this. And this is before you take into account the whole other issue about publicists and marketing campaigns: we are talking huge, million-dollar organized campaigns that can be compromised by an ill-advised tweet."

But on the flip side, that potential benefit of Twitter was paraded onstage at 140Conf. "Heroes" creator Tim Kring, for example, gave a well-attended talk on Tuesday about how Twitter has allowed the NBC sci-fi show's team to interact with fans in an unprecedented way. "You can follow the escapades of the show by following the people involved in it," he said.

Still, Kring also hinted at the complications of using Twitter as a vehicle for connecting with TV audiences: "We're now making Episode 13 and we are airing Episode 8, so at the beginning of the season we're up to two or three months ahead of where the audience is," Kring said. "The making of the show is so far ahead of where the audience experience is that it's hard to have a real-time relationship." Unfortunately, he didn't elaborate on how the show keeps tabs on its Twittering team. Have they ever had any accidental leaks or near-missteps? Kring didn't talk about that.

"Twitter has become hugely important in marketing movies," Fuhrman said. "The perfect example is 'Paranormal Activity.' What Twitter did for that movie, every studio would love to bottle that formula, and believe me, they'll try." In other words, it's a delicate balance. Twitter, for all its 140-character simplicity, has the potential to make or break a big Hollywood success.

Even though he didn't think it merited its own two-day event on the Kodak Theatre stage, 140Conf creator Jeff Pulver did acknowledge that he thinks the Hollywood-Twitter relationship is only going to get more complicated, especially when it comes to the big movie studios.

"They're scared because they want to be the gatekeeper," Pulver said. "It's a big conflict and it's going to get worse."

This post was updated at 11:33 a.m. PT on October 30 to correct the spelling of Jonathan Fuhrman's name.

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.

In preparation for its upcoming spin-off from parent company Time Warner, AOL has named nine members to its board of directors--and from what it sounds like, more additions to the board could be coming.

The current lineup includes former Amazon Chief Information Officer Richard Dalzell, Plainfield Asset Management partner Karen Dykstra, financial services exec William Hambrecht, Paley Center for Media Director Patricia Mitchell, former FCC Chairman Michael Powell, former CBS Chief Financial Officer Fredric Reynolds, former Procter & Gamble exec James Stengel, and ex-William Morris Agency CEO James Wiatt.

"AOL is very fortunate to have an exceptional group of proven leaders to serve on our board of directors," CEO Tim Armstrong, who took over the reins of the company this spring, said in a release. "AOL is on a mission to help create the future of media and content and the AOL board will play a central part in helping us focus the strategy and also operate the company with the highest ethical standards."

The majority of the board members don't hail from Armstrong's own Silicon Valley turf: the CEO served as Google's director of sales up until his hire at AOL. But most of them are veterans of traditional media, which presumably will give the onetime dial-up king an advantage as it attempts to shape itself into a digital-content power player--at least on the surface.

(Disclosure: One of AOL's new board members has a past affiliation with CBS Corp., which publishes CNET News.)

Actor Armie Hammer (left, with actress Blake Lively) in a promo shot from TV series 'Gossip Girl.' Hammer will play twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss in 'The Social Network.'

(Credit: The CW)

Did director David Fincher end up finding a pair of 6-foot-5-inch identical twins to play ConnectU founders Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss in "The Social Network," his upcoming movie about the contested origins of Facebook? It appears the answer is no.

According to blog The Playlist, which picked up on filmmaker Richard Kelly's Twitter account, a single actor has been cast: 23-year-old Armie Hammer, best known for the role of moneyed sleazebag Gabriel on teen drama "Gossip Girl." A thread on screenwriter Aaron Sorkin's Facebook page reveals that additional young actors cast include Max Minghella, Rooney Mara, Dakota Johnson, Brenda Song, and Josh Pence--but no character names were provided.

"The Social Network," which kicked off filming in Boston this week, is an adaptation of Ben Mezrich's unauthorized Facebook tell-all, "The Accidental Billionaires." Founder Mark Zuckerberg will be played by actor Jesse Eisenberg, while pop star Justin Timberlake will play Valley it-boy Sean Parker.

The question remains as to whether Armie Hammer, who actually is 6-foot-5, will be playing both twins with the help of some "Parent Trap"-style camera work, or if they've combined Cameron and Tyler, who had a longstanding legal battle with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg after they accused him of stealing their code and business plan, into a single character.

In either case, he sounds like the perfect casting choice for the white-collar Harvard graduates, who hail from Greenwich, Conn., and competed in the 2008 Olympics in Beijing on the U.S. rowing team. According to the Internet Movie Database, Hammer "is the great-grandson of industrialist, art collector, and philanthropist Armand Hammer."

Dude won't even have to act!

One piece of 'Balloon Boy' fan art took the iconic poster that hangs on the wall of Agent Mulder's office in the sci-fi series 'The X-Files.'

(Credit: FullBleed.org)

Two years ago we asked the question: Could the mass hysteria of the 1938 "War of the Worlds" scandal, in which a Halloween radio drama orchestrated by actor Orson Welles was mistaken for a real announcement of Martians landing in New Jersey, still take place in the Information Age?

The answer: Yes, it could. And it happened this week.

Like millions of Americans, you were probably glued to your computer watching some news outlet's live video stream or hitting refresh on Twitter for updates on "Balloon Boy," the twisted saga of a 6-year-old Colorado boy who had allegedly floated away in a flying-saucer-shaped helium balloon that his parents had built. Was he alive? Had the helium suffocated him? Had he, heaven forbid, fallen out of the balloon?

And the media flipped out.

"This Is Wrong: A Six Year Old Child Could Die On Live Television," industry blog Mediaite warned. Keywords related to the missing kid started to dominate Twitter's trending topics. More details started to pour in: the boy was revealed to be Falcon Heene of Fort Collins, Colo., whose parents were avid storm-chasers and whose family had appeared on reality show "Wife Swap." Audiences grew captivated as the whole situation became weirder and weirder.

Thankfully, "Balloon Boy" was safe. But rather than being dramatically rescued from a flying saucer in an uplifting ending worthy of the "Miracle on the Hudson," it turned out that he'd been in a box in his parents' attic the entire time: and then the really weird details began to emerge. The family quickly hopped aboard the TV news circuit, and not only did little Falcon blithely say "we did it for the show" on "Larry King Live," he proceeded to puke on two network morning shows. Later in the day, the Business Insider floated a claim that a former video intern for the boy's father, Richard Heene, was attempting to sell evidence that the entire affair was fabricated for a TV show. (This has not been proven whatsoever.)

It's annoying. It's annoying that the whole thing could have been an attention-grabbing stunt. It's even more annoying that hours of workplace productivity were slurped down the drain by streaming-video footage of a wacky silver balloon that didn't actually have a traumatized 6-year-old on board like we all thought it did. Likewise, it was probably pretty darn frustrating back in 1938 when scores of Americans realized that they'd mistaken a "War of the Worlds"-themed radio drama for a real emergency broadcast--especially for the people in the New York and Philadelphia metro areas who reportedly fled their homes in panic. (Try to explain that one to the neighbors.)

But maybe this cloud (balloon?) has a silver (tinfoil?) lining. Much has been made recently of the death of "watercooler" media: the TV show everyone is watching, the news story everyone is following, the topic that the whole world seemingly can't stop talking about. The Internet's ability to slice and dice culture into niches and easy-to-follow subcultures was supposed to more or less destroy that. Yet we had another "War of the Worlds": something weird and bizarre that made us all completely freak out like spooked chickens.

For better or for worse, just about everyone on Thursday was talking about "Balloon Boy." They were worried about him. They were incessantly searching Google News for any kind of update. They were cracking snarky jokes and wondering if it was "too soon." They were biting their nails when a photograph started to circulate that seemed to show an object falling from the silver saucer balloon. They were relieved when "Balloon Boy" was found safe. And they were angrily cursing themselves and the national news media when it became clear that the whole thing could have been fabricated. This was the news story that disproved our cynicism over the viability of true, mass-media phenomena in the Digital Age. In fact, it was the tools of the Web--streaming video, Twitter, news aggregators--that made "Balloon Boy" into the sensation that he became.

And honestly? If we have to look like gullible idiots, we might as well all be in it together.

One blogger's take on how Twitter's error message could be turned into a microbrew.

(Credit: GorillaSushi.com)

Eric Schmidt, I blame you.

Right as you announce that you're holding your third-quarter earnings call from atop a treasure chest made of sustainably-harvested teak filled with $22 billion in gold doubloons (okay, so maybe I'm being a bit imaginative there), a smattering of prominent folks in the dot-com industry start coming out of the woodwork with ideas that would've sounded absolutely ludicrous a few months ago. Namely, they're getting into the booze business.

Twitter co-founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams are launching a wine label for charity, it was revealed on Thursday. Then, on Friday, AllThingsD's Kara Swisher posted the fruits of a discussion with former AOL exec and current Pilot Group venture capitalist Bob Pittman, whose latest venture is the $275-a-bottle Casa Dragones tequila. (We first reported on Pittman's tequila ambitions about a year and a half ago, but didn't have any further details.)

Have you seen the Twitter feed for Casa Dragones? It's awesome. "Sipping Casa Dragones with Alec Baldwin, Tory Burch, Andre Balazs, Bon Jovi and friends last night at East Hampton's Blue Parrot." Or, "Parthenon, new Acropolis museum, Cy Twombly's opening. Leaving Athens now after a night of sipping. Hot!"

One more entry in the space and this is officially an industry trend. Anybody else in the VC or entrepreneurship community want to fess up to launching a tangy new microbrew (Fail Whale Pale Ale?), a sleek new underground cocktail lounge (muddle those strawberries like you mean it!), or a high-end moonshine distillery nestled in the hills of Marin County? Or who're the real innovators readying their business plans for the chance that the Golden State opens the floodgates to marijuana?

Come on, you can tell me. I won't bite...but I might ask you to buy me a drink.

All joking aside, there have been some rather positive signs for the health of the industry, at least on the surface. There was Eric Schmidt's declaration this week of sunnier skies ahead (at least for Google). Facebook is rushing toward profitability faster than it expected. And next week, the annual Web 2.0 Summit rolls into San Francisco with its reliably impressive lineup of speakers: MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta, AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, Intel CEO Paul Otellini, Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz, News Corp. digital chief Jon Miller, Twitter co-founder Evan Williams. Some of their companies might not be in particularly terrific health right now, but I'm pretty sure they won't be talking about how much everything sucks.

Then you look at the party lineup. Microsoft has put together a Windows 7 launch party with a few edgy music acts on the bill. There's a start-up focused "After Dark" soiree at San Francisco's St. Regis Hotel (from the invitation: "Explore the streets of the ever-changing Web 2.0 landscape. Whether you cruise the strip or creep down the alleys of the Web metropolis, meet us after dark for a night to remember." Ooh, scandal!) And MySpace, hastily trying to counter sputtering traffic with an ongoing executive shakeup that may or may not turn out well, is throwing one of its "Secret Shows" concerts and some folks are hearing they've booked alt-rock gods (and "Rock Band" staples) Weezer.

The open bars are crawling back onto my Google Calendar. The Dow has inched back into the five figures. And the Valley elite's wacky, expensive side projects are starting to make their way into the headlines.

It's great to see the tech industry's entrepreneurial spirit carrying over into well, spirits. But are we really seeing an end to our long, cold "nuclear winter," as Valley mainstay Marc Andreessen so eloquently put it back in April 2008 --or have we just been deceived by the calm, numbing, bloodstream-warming sensation of expensive sipping tequila?

Whatever. See you at happy hour.

The crew of "The Social Network," the David Fincher-directed retelling of Facebook's earliest days, is headed to film in the Boston area soon with a widely reported start date of October 19.

Rumors on Web forums indicate that the Harvard Square neighborhood of Cambridge, Mass.--the eponymous university's epicenter--will be the backdrop for some scenes involving actor Jesse Eisenberg, who plays Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Eisenberg himself has been quoted as saying that the movie will actually be filming on Harvard's campus, something that the university would not confirm.

Facebook was founded in a dorm at Harvard when Zuckerberg was a sophomore there; he later dropped out to run the site full-time. "The Social Network" script was based on writer Ben Mezrich's "The Accidental Billionaires," an unauthorized tale of Facebook's origins that doesn't portray Zuckerberg in the most positive manner.

Boston.com reported Thursday that a Somerville pub called the Thirsty Scholar has confirmed that it'll be used as a filming location, but couldn't confirm what everybody wants to know--whether pop star Justin Timberlake, who plays early Facebook exec Sean Parker, will be on-set.

Here's the catch. I've read the Aaron Sorkin-penned script for "The Social Network"--granted, it's a draft with a May 2009 date on it, so who knows what has changed--and Sean Parker doesn't even appear in any Boston scenes. Sorry, Boston.