&c1=usa&c2=(none)&c3=The+Guardian&c4=Facebook+(Media),Film,Digital+media,Media,Culture+section,Technology,Facebook&c5=&c6=Owen+Gibson,+media+correspondent&c7=2008_08_29){kind=small}
- guardian.co.uk, Friday August 29 2008 00.01 BST
- The Guardian, Friday August 29 2008
Forget the fussball table, the Segway or the private plane. Your very own biopic could be the ultimate in oneupmanship among Silicon Valley's movers and shakers after the West Wing creator, Aaron Sorkin, revealed he was working on a film about Facebook's youthful founder.
The plan, which led to online suggestions that it could be subtitled Revenge of the Nerds, was unveiled by Sorkin in a posting to the social networking site appealing to users for stories and ideas. "I understand there are a few other people using Facebook pages under my name - which I find more flattering than creepy - but this is me," he wrote.
Mark Zuckerberg, a 24-year-old who dropped out of Harvard to concentrate on the site, has repeatedly turned down offers to sell the company for billions of dollars, although he did sell a small stake to Microsoft last October in a deal that valued it at $15bn (£8.2bn).
The mooted film will see Zuckerberg, who has a low profile apart from occasional appearances at trade conferences, leapfrog Silicon Valley legends such as Microsoft's Bill Gates, the Apple founder, Steve Jobs, and Google founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, for big-screen kudos.
Facebook was founded by Zuckerberg with friends Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. As with other online success stories, its origins are clouded in some acrimony. Another group of Harvard students who invented the less successful ConnectU have accused Zuckerberg of stealing their idea.
User figures grew across the world once the website was opened up to all comers, and now total more than 100 million.
It was credited with bringing social networking to an older audience who had not previously signed up to the likes of MySpace and Bebo, which are targeted at younger users. But privacy concerns and slowing growth have recently led some analysts to claim that its honeymoon phase could be over.
Sorkin will hope he fares better with the high-stakes world of Silicon Valley than with his wry look at life inside Hollywood's television networks. Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip was nowhere near as popular as his sprawling political series The West Wing and was cancelled by NBC after one season.
