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18 Feb 2011 12:27

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Tech, U.S.: Obama meets with everyone TechCrunch cares about all at once

  • Finally. Most of the people we write about were in a single room last night, having alcohol together. Obama. Mark Zuckerberg. The Twitter guy. Steve Jobs. And if you’re stretching it, that @$$hole Larry Ellison. If a nuclear bomb hit this restaurant last night, we would have nothing to write about and would probably have to shut down the blog. We’re glad it wasn’t. source

26 Jan 2011 19:10

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Tech: Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook hacked: Well, that’s reassuring

  • Let the hacking begin: If facebook needs money, instead of going to the banks, why doesn’t Facebook let its users invest in Facebook in a social way?
  • “Mark Zuckerberg” • Or, that is, some dude who hacked the Facebook founder’s Facebook profile. You know what’s really bad press, Mark? Not an award-winning movie about your life. Something like this. source

19 Dec 2010 21:40

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Culture: SNL’s clever rip on Time’s “Person of the Year” pick really insightful

  • We missed SNL last night, but we have to say that this clip really says a lot about the Time Person of the Year situation. While making Julian Assange look as creepy as possible, SNL gets a lot of jabs in at the oddity of Time picking a boring guy who runs a company that gives away your private data vs. an endlessly fascinating dude who tries to reveal corruption. Well-played, SNL.

15 Dec 2010 10:09

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Culture: Time’s Person of the Year not Julian Assange, but some Mark guy

  • OK, so many were gunning for Julian Assange to go into this spot, but at the same time, Mark Zuckerberg is the guy who would probably deserve the honor most if Assange wasn’t in the running. Why? This seems like a pretty good argument: “In less than seven years, Zuckerberg wired together a twelfth of humanity into a single network, thereby creating a social entity almost twice as large as the U.S.” Assange hasn’t done that yet. Plus, wasn’t Assange on the cover of Time like a week or two ago? Seems like he’s already got some high media saturation. source

09 Dec 2010 10:10

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Biz: Mark Zuckerberg, people we don’t care about sign “Giving Pledge”

  • 50 number of rich people who have offered most of their wealth to charity with Bill Gates and Warren Buffett
  • 16 number of new names on the list, including Steve Case, Carl Icahn and … Mark Zuckerberg source
  • » The only name people care about: Is it us, or does the Mark Zuckerberg one seem designed to make people look for ulterior motives? Because it seems that’s what people are already doing. You know, nobody ever questioned BILL GATES for this, and he had a lot more public relations work to do after that antitrust stuff than Zuckerberg ever did.

29 Nov 2010 20:40

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Politics: George W. Bush invades Facebook; world stops dead in tracks

The two things that define the naughts more than anything else, together at last. Bush openly admitted he was there because he was “trying to sell books.” source

04 Oct 2010 11:08

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Tech: “Social Network” criticism: Here comes the Facebook movie backlash

  • As one of the few journalists who’s interviewed Zuckerberg numerous times and is familiar with the history of Facebook’s early founding and continued growth, seeing the movie is a jarring, disorienting experience… The real Zuckerberg… has a much more varied personality.
  • Huffington Post reporter Jose Antonio Vargas • Regarding “The Social Network.” Well, no crap, buddy. Have you not been listening to Aaron Sorkin? He’s basically been saying that he made most of it up for weeks. And it’s fairly possible that you might have some bias anyway, due to the fact that you have exclusive access to Facebook. But we digress. He’s not the only reporter to say something to this effect: “The Facebook Effect” scribe David Kirkpatrick had this to say about the whole thing: “Even before Hollywood got involved… Facebook was the subject of quite a bit of lore — not all of it true,” he said. Which is pretty much how we feel about the matter. Sorkin wrote the Facebook tall tale, and it doesn’t matter whether or not it’s real. That tall tale, by the way, scored $23 million at the box office, and it’s also awards bait, so it may be with us for a while. source
 

02 Oct 2010 15:00

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Culture: “The Social Network” on track to top box office this weekend

  • $8 million made by the Facebook movie in its first day alone source
  • » So how real is it, anyway? Not particularly. Writer Aaron Sorkin took artistic license with the idea of the film. While many of the plot points are true (Sean Parker did leave the company after a cocaine arrest, for example), the tone of many of the characters, as well as the school itself, didn’t match those of the Harvard students who saw the film. And cyberlaw expert Lawrence Lessig, while praising the film itself, took issue with the lessons that Sorkin took from the storyline, both with its characters (“I know Parker. This is not him.”) and with its feel of what makes the Web tick (“Sorkin boasts about his ignorance of the Internet. That ignorance shows.”). The movie is very good and one of the year’s best, but don’t let the wool get pulled over your eyes. It’s fiction based on fact.

29 Sep 2010 21:06

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Culture: Reviews: “The Social Network” receives epic amount of praise

  • » What Roger Ebert says: If you only trust Roger Ebert like us, you can feel free to know that this is in fact the movie of the century: “David Fincher’s film has the rare quality of being not only as smart as its brilliant hero, but in the same way. It is cocksure, impatient, cold, exciting and instinctively perceptive.” So yeah, we’ll be at the theater on Friday wearing a “Free Zuckerberg” shirt.

26 Sep 2010 22:45

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Politics: Max Headroom: Mark Zuckerberg softens up in the PR machine

  • So, what’s new?This morning, Republican Rep. Mike Pence found himself in the somewhat undesirable spot of explaining how the Republican’s “Pledge to America” was different from the plans they’ve sold in the past. Blame Jon Stewart.
  • Not-so-double-standard Our boy Fareed Zakaria had a pretty good point regarding some of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s criticism of the U.S., specifically with the death penalty – simply put, Iran is a really big pot calling a relatively small kettle black.
  • Not such a bad guy!As Oprah proved on her show, that Mark Zuckerberg guy isn’t such a jerk. See? He’s going to Japan with his beautiful girlfriend! He lets people skateboard on the job! How could this guy be the subject of an Aaron Sorkin hit piece?