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Tag: Chris Hughes

  • Aaron Sorkin plans Facebook, the movie

    More than 100 million people use Facebook, but until recently, Aaron Sorkin was not one of them.

    Now Sorkin has a good reason to sign up. Sorkin plans to write the movie version of the popular networking site.

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    Sorkin will team with producer Scott Rudin for the film, which will tell the story of Facebook’s origins, when it was co-founded by Harvard roommates Mark Zuckerberg, Chris Hughes and Dustin Moskovitz.

    Facebook was availabe first only to Harvard students, then expanded to accommodate all Ivy League students. Now, anyone can join the site.

    Sorkin is best known for writing the films Charlie Wilson’s War and A Few Good Men, as well as the TV show The West Wing.

    Before he begins the screenplay, Sorkin is sharpening his internet skills.

    On a new Facebook group page, titled “Aaron Sorkin & The Facebook Movie,” Sorkin admits, “I figured a good first step in my preparation would be finding out what Facebook is, so I’ve started this page. (Actually it was started by my researcher, Ian Reichbach, because my grandmother has more Internet savvy than I do and she’s been dead for 33 years.)”

    Sorkin has not yet revealed whether the movie will address the controversy concerning the founding of Facebook.

    In 2004, identical twins Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, founders of the social networking site ConnectU, sued Facebook. They claimed that Zuckerberg, their Harvard classmate, stole the idea for Facebook after they had hired him to write code.

    The lawsuit was settled in early 2008. It was decided that Facebook would acquire ConnectU, and the founders of ConnectU would receive an undisclosed sum of money and stock in Facebook.

    After the ruling, the Winklevoss brothers protested that Microsoft’s October 2007 investment in Facebook proved the company’s value to be $15 billion, not $3-$4 billion, as had been claimed in the lawsuit.

    U.S. District Court Judge James Ware ruled that the Winklevoss brothers weren’t allowed to file an appeal until the original settlement goes through.

    In the meantime, the Winklevoss twins competed in the Bejing Olympics for the U.S., receiving sixth place in the men’s pairs rowing competition.

    Sorkin has asked Facebook users to contribute their stories to aid him in writing the film. He promises, “I’ll try to get better at this as I get more practice.”

  • Facebook co-founder helps Obama build support on the web

    Thanks to a Facebook founding friend, Barack Obama now has well over one million Facebook supporters.

    That’s a lot of people to keep track of, but it’s also a lot of people to give money, to get out the vote and to help the campaign in many other ways.

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    As described in Monday’s New York Times, Chris Hughes, one of the founders of Facebook, has done much to make Obama the fund-raising and campaign-organizing power that he is on Facebook and other Internet sites.

    Hughes, 24, joined the Obama organization in February 2007. He kept a connection with Facebook as a consultant, and he reportedly has stock options worth millions.

    Under the direction of Joe Rospars, a veteran of the Internet-savvy 2004 Howard Dean presidential campaign, the Obama organization was eager at the time to make more use of the Internet.

    Hughes had just the kind of experience Rospars needed, as he had been in on the wildly successful Facebook from the time it started at Harvard in February 2004.

    Hughes roomed with Howard Zuckerberg, who created the site to link Harvard students with each other on the Internet. Hughes became a part of the company, serving as spokesman. Another Harvard student, Dustin Moskovitz, also joined the effort.

    The site gradually expanded to other colleges and then high schools. It’s open to anyone 13 or over now and has 80 million users worldwide.

    After moving to Chicago to help the Obama campaign, Hughes focused on making the website My.BarackObama.com a true networking site.

    “Hughes brought a growth strategy borrowed from Facebook’s founding principles,” wrote Brian Stelter in the Times. “Keep it real, and keep it local.”

    Consequently, the site, which now has 900,000 members, works to connect people at the neighborhood level, making it easy for them organize and work together.

    “The point is not to have a million people,” Rospars told the Times. “The point is to be able to chop up that million-person list into manageable chunks and organize them.”

    Last month, the Obama campaign also added a page called Fight the Smears to MyBarackObama.com. It’s designed to combat what the campaign sees as mistruths about Obama, such as the allegation that Obama is not a natural-born citizen of the U.S. (The website shows his birth certificate.)

    Hughes used his blog on My.BarackObama.com last month to celebrate the fact that Obama had over one million supporters on Facebook.

    “There couldn’t be a better testament to the energy and enthusiasm of young people today,” he wrote.

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