Ellen McGirt takes a look at 'The Social Network'

Fast Company writer, who has covered Facebook over the years, disagrees with the premise of new movie about Facebook's founding

By DANE GOLDEN

"I definitely did not friend the movie," Ellen McGirt says of "The Social Network," the new film about the founding of Facebook and now-CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

McGirt, a senior writer for Fast Company Magazine who has written several articles about Facebook over the past few years, appeared on the podcast "HEY! with Dane Golden" Tuesday night.

She said that while as a writer she appreciates the fact that any story is by its nature incomplete, "The Social Network" was more incomplete than it needed to be.

"I thought it gave not only gave a short shrift to Mark, but a short shrift to the other people who were part of the founding in the early days," she said.

Furthermore, she said, the film left out some pieces that could have made for a more intriguing film.

McGirt's first Fast Company article about Zuckerberg, titled "Hacker. Dropout. CEO" came out on May 1, 2007, and is quoted as a source in the bibliography of Ben Mezrich's "Accidental Billionaires," the book upon which "The Social Network" is based [See pages 1, 1B, 2 and 3 of that article]. It was a time of great turmoil for the company.

"Mark had turned down the Yahoo money and was under siege continuously for a bunch of things," including the lawsuit from brothers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss who claimed that Zuckerberg had stolen their idea at Harvard, a main focus of the film.

"It had been a never-ending series of full-on assaults," McGirt said. "All of which makes a much more interesting picture of what it takes to fund a startup, and one of the few really successfully-executed, good ideas in the post-bubble era."

While the article didn't include much information on Facebook's founding, the focus of the film, McGirt did say that in 2007 "nobody was really forthcoming about" information relating to the lawsuits, and many at Facebook at that time didn't quite know the details.

"I wasn't getting a lot of first-hand stuff about the actual founding, about what happened with the twins and all the other stuff," she said.

McGirt said that from a journalistic perspective, Facebook had many dimensions that could have been better told than the film's choice of narrative.

"You hope an idea comes along in your lifetime that's as interesting as social networking and the social graph is," she said.

Facebook succeeded where others failed in large part due to the vision and execution of Zuckerberg and the other early creators.

"For someone who gets credited for being geeky, awkward and strange," McGirt said, "he and his friends had an unusual capacity to understand what people actually wanted in an interaction and in information."

"What they postulate is that he was needy and nerdy and lonely, and I think that's the least interesting possibility of all possibilities of why he would be so skilled at understanding human beings. And I think that's unfortunate."

Ellen McGirt has written a new article offering her thoughts on the film, The Facebook Drama "The Social Network" Won't Show You.