It's hard to go anywhere and not see, hear and read about Mark Zuckerberg right now. Last week and the week before, the Facebook founder and CEO was getting attention for giving away $100 million. This week he's talking about two long-awaited Facebook features — a way to easily get your data out of Facebook and a better way to parse friends into subgroups. On Tuesday night, satirist Andy Borowitz wondered on the radio — only half in jest — if he should win a Nobel Prize in economics.
Sandwiched between all that, of course, is the reason for all this publicity: Hollywood has made an uncomfortably excellent movie about the company, and Facebook's image makers want to ensure that partially fictional account doesn't become the real way the world sees Facebook and its precocious leader.
They're doing their job well. But having finally seen the movie myself — no free screening for me — I can tell you that they should stop worrying. I don't know if Zuckerberg stole the idea behind Facebook from the Winklevosses. I don't know if he cheated Eduardo Saverin.
What I do know is that it doesn't matter. They didn't build the company, Zuckerberg did, and in Silicon Valley, at least, that's all that matters.
Remember three years ago when Yahoo tried to buy Facebook for $1 billion and Zuckerberg said "No"? Remember four years ago when he launched "newsfeed" and again said, "No" when outraged users and a few employees told him to shut it down?
Gutsy decisions like that are why Facebook and Zuckerberg are where they are today, not because of who had what idea first.
Most have forgotten, for example, that the Google guys were accused of having stolen the idea for Adwords — the targeted advertising model behind much of the company's success. Yahoo ended up owning well north of 5 percent of Google because of that and other legal settlements.
Has it changed Larry Page's and Sergey Brin's place as technology visionaries? Not a bit. The list of ideas Steve Jobs and Bill Gates have allegedly appropriated have filled chapters in books.
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