Tag: facebook

  • Stories and glories

    It’s been a really busy two weeks, at work and at home.

    Off stage, out of sight, we were dealing with a family medical issue that had us feeling worried and vulnerable all of a sudden. Then we got some good news that made things not-so-scary, but we’re still reeling from having even dealt with the problem in the first place. It’s something I really hope to write about soon, but I promised I’d hold off until we had some kind of resolution and we’re just getting there.

    Even with some of the sick time I had to take off, things actually seemed to speed up at work. As the holidays approach, our deadlines are getting tighter and I seem to be just writing and writing and writing.

    The biggest surprise and bright spot recently was that CNN.com approved of a crazy, weird column idea I had months ago about Facebook theology. I pitched it tentatively, sure it would be a strange and unwelcome fit, but the editor I work with over there took a chance on it and ended up liking the result. The piece ran on the site today and this time at least I was prepared for abusive comments and ridicule. (Sample comment: “No disrespect to the author, but this is the dumbest idea for a news article I have ever read.” Right. No disrespect.) It actually hasn’t been as bad as I was expecting and the article has been shared more times on Facebook already than the previous two columns I wrote over the summer. And how adorable is that illustration up there? I really like it.

    The CNN thing made up for having to try to explain to people why I’m not on NPR every week anymore (short answer: I don’t actually know and am afraid to ask). After a rough couple of weeks, it was a nice boost I really needed.

    On the Statesman front, I had a story on the front page today about Gowalla’s big parks deal with Disney, did a story recently about Texas State professor Cindy Royal’s online war of words with Wired over a recent boobalicious magazine cover, a review of the Xbox 360 Kinect that ran in Tech Monday (longer, more exhaustive blog version here) and a Tech Monday column about next week’s Austin intellectual property summit.

    As of this writing, I have another A1 story scheduled for Saturday (fingers crossed), tech gift guides running Sunday in the Statesman and later on Television Without Pity, a profile of Epic Mickey game designer Warren Spector and a Season for Caring story about an amazing Austin family I am lucky to have met. Shit got really busy lately, I’m telling you.

    And on top of all that I’m working on an iPad-related writing project with an Austin company that I’ll tell you more about soon. Busy times, but it’s not all work. I’m watching tons of TV after Lilly and Carolina go to bed at night, trying to finish Franzen’s book Freedom (50 more pages!), listening to great podcasts on my way to and from work and trying to enjoy life right now. I looked back on the summer and realized I was really having a hard time adjusting to our new reality (having a toddler and an infant in the house) and was really crabby a lot of the time.

    Given the recent things that have happened, I’m letting myself enjoy the situation a little more and trying not to stress out so much. I know that if I don’t relax and enjoy it, I’m going to regret missing out on some really wonderful times with my girls.

  • That time I defended a billionaire from Facebook

    Aaron Sorkin. Photo by Ralph Barrera, American-Statesman
    I posted a few days ago on Twitter about this big pipeline of stories I’ve been working on that are suddenly going to appear one right after the other for the next few days. The flood started today with a movie review I wrote for the Statesman of The Social Network (B+).

    I also did separate interviews with screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, Jesse Eisenberg, who plays Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in the movie, and actor Armie Hammer.

    A condensed version of the interviews ran as one piece in today’s paper, along with the review.

    I loved the movie, but had a problem with how Zuckerberg was portrayed. Making him meaner and colder than he is in real life makes for a much more entertaining movie and certainly a more dramatic one, but I was still bothered a little, enough to point it out in the review and to bring it up in different ways to Sorkin and Eisenberg, who both had very good reasons for approaching the story the way they did. But, having met Zuckerberg briefly and having seen him speak live several times, I’m pretty confident that a large swatch of his personality and his goals simply don’t come across in the movie. Not to take anything away from Eisenberg. I think he does a great job playing a character. It’s just that the character is not exactly Zuckerberg, at least not the Zuckerberg of the last few years. I think the movie also betrays Sorkin’s inability to see much that’s positive in what Facebook has become.

    That’s his prerogative. Facebook is gigantic and growing and scary.

    This was the first movie review I’ve written in a long time and I really enjoyed getting back to it, if only briefly. I worked very hard on making it well-written and I hope it comes from a slightly different point of view than most of the ones I’ve seen.

    The other thing that ran in the paper today was a short story that’s been prompting some discussion on Twitter and might only be of interest if you’re in Texas and into politics. It’s about Twitter and the gubernatorial election.

    It’s a walk-up to a much longer, more detailed piece about how Texas Governor Rick Perry and his November challenger, former Houston mayor Bill White, are using social media in their campaigns. That story, which I’ve been working on for weeks, is scheduled to run in Saturday’s paper (whups, it moved to Monday), hopefully on the front page (fingers crossed). I’ll link to it when it hits the Web.

    Other updates: Lilly has started dance classes at her daycare. Carolina is driving us nuts because she wants to crawl everywhere, grab everything and put all foreign objects in her mouth. Not much else to report. Keeping busy, trying to get enough sleep at night, still missing summer, looking forward to the holidays.

  • Trailers Without Pity: The Social Network

    Our new Trailers Without Pity video is about The Social Network, an October movie from director David Fincher about the creation and subsequent world-changing growth of Facebook

    It’s an interesting thing to make a video mocking a movie like this because it’s based on real people and events. I met Mark Zuckerberg a few years ago at South by Southwest Interactive and sat front row when he (perhaps unwittingly) threw a reporter to the wolves in front of an audience of several hundred people.

    Mark’s a very smart guy and seems to truly believe what he says about privacy going away and Facebook’s potential to be a huge avenue for change in the world. He’s got a very young man’s confidence and all the resources in the world at his disposal right now. Which is also what makes him a little scary and very hard to relate to. When people like Diane Sawyer interview him, they will ask a perfectly reasonable question, and he’ll give a perfectly reasonable-sounding answer to a question that is different than the one which was asked. It’s a neat trick, but not one that endears you to people, really.

    I can’t wait to see how the movie portrays him. I just saw Zombieland a few nights ago and really liked Jesse Eisenberg in it and think he’ll do a great job.

    As for the video, it’s nice that all the time Pablo and I wasted on Facebook has finally paid off in some small way; this was a very easy script to write.

  • Quit Facebook Day

    I wrote a story in today’s newspaper about Quit Facebook Day, which as of this writing is an online movement with 28,266 people pledged to leave the social network.

    This sounds impressive until you find out there’s close to 500 million people using Facebook and the vast majority of them apparently don’t care enough about recent privacy concerns to warrant cutting off their ties to Facebook friends and family.

    There’s a blog post that goes with the story in which I give three options for dealing with your privacy on Facebook.

    The story itself started as a very brief story (what we call a “brite”) and then got a little bit longer and then bounced from one section of the paper to another, so I can see a little bit of the seams of where it turned from one thing into another, but overall I think it works well with the blog entry to give the lay of the land.

  • Shhhh… Facebook is listeni– oh, HI, FACEBOOK!

    'Hey, I look at porn at work, too!'

    Today on NPR’s All Tech Considered, we did a segment about Facebook and privacy, an issue we keep coming back to every few months because every few months Facebook is like, “Hey, we changed everything again. Deal with it.”

    The blog post on NPR contains a lot more links to news stories and information if it’s a topic that gets your undergarment of choice in a wadded state. (The audio is embedded on the blog post, too.)

    I’m not exactly sure what audio you’ll be hearing, though. We recorded the segment early in the afternoon and later we found out that something we said in the piece was wrong and I had to run back to the studio and re-record. I thought we were only subbing in one line but instead we did an entire re-over, so the piece I ended up hearing on the radio was more accurate, but was not as info-packed as the version we did earlier in the day. Such is life. Nothing’s ever perfect, especially when you’re on deadline.

    And yes, I realize the irony of talking about Facebook privacy when I just added Facebook “Like” buttons to my entire personal Web site.

    I know.

    OK.