In theory, Google TV makes an enormous amount of sense.

The technology, which Google is making available to third-party hardware vendors, integrates traditional cable, satellite and broadcast TV with Web content.

It also lets you access the Web from your TV and takes advantage of Google’s search capacity to locate movies, TV shows and video content.

The first iterations of Google TV include the Sony Internet TV ($600 to $1,400 depending on screen size) and a couple of external set-top boxes including the Review from Logitech.

I tested the Logitech Review, now on sale for $299. The device was easy to install because I have a compatible Dish Network receiver with a built in Digital Video Recorder (DVR) that connects directly to the Logitech Review. If you have a cable box or other type of receiver, you’ll need to use an “IR Blaster” to allow the Logitech unit to send signals to your TV receiver for changing channels and selecting over-the-air programs.

Once the TV, receiver and Review are wired together, the next task is to configure the unit to work with your TV. For some reason, you have to tell it the model number of the TV set you’re using and also align your screen with the Review. You also have to connect the Review to a wireless or wired home network, which may include typing in your wireless security code.

Google TV’s user interrface is straightforward, though it was a bit confusing at first to distinguish between TV listings, programs saved to my DVR and web programming.

Out of the box, the built-in applications include the Google Chrome browser, Netflix and Amazon streaming movies and TV shows, Pandora streaming audio, and Twitter. Additional apps will be available in the future.

One of the hardware’s best features is the nearly full-size wireless keyboard, which includes a TV on/off button, volume adjustment and buttons to select programs to watch and record. The keyboard has a built-in trackpad that you can use to navigate around the screen.

Part of this column was written from my TV set using Google Docs via the web. It was fun sitting on my couch and watching this column unfold on my 55-inch TV. I don’t plan to do this often, but I can see myself using the device to read and write e-mail using Gmail or another e-mail service.

Just to the right of the keyboard’s Ctrl key is a prominent search key that lets you search for content on your DVR, TV and Web. If the content is on your DVR, it will say “DVR recordings” to the left of the listing. It will also tell you when it’s on TV and show you any web episodes.

The biggest problem is that some of the major networks are blocking their content from Google TV, so when I clicked on the full web episode of “Dancing with the Stars” on ABC.com, I got a message saying that “the operating system or web browser you’re using is not currently supported.”

I got similar messages when I tried to access content from CBS and Hulu. Even though there are online articles saying NBC isn’t available, I was able to watch content from the Peacock Network.

I was pleased that the device provided access to streaming movies and TV shows from Netflix but, unfortunately, Netflix programs didn’t show up in search listings and — unlike the newest version of Netflix for Roku — there is no way to search within the Netflix application.

It took getting used to, but overall my experience with Google TV was pretty good.

We did run into a snafu while my wife was trying to watch a program recorded on our DVR. All of a sudden, the DVR went crazy, switching channels and randomly displaying menu items as if an invisible hand were messing with our remote control. And that’s kind of what was happening.

Somehow Google TV started sending random signals to the DVR which only stopped after I unplugged the device.

Advanced technology is great, but there are times when all she wants to do is sit and watch TV. How quaint.

Laptop PCs are back in the news and, as usual, Steve Jobs gets the credit. Last week’s announcement of two new MacBook Air ultralight notebooks got a lot of attention, partially because of their size and weight but mainly because they have no hard drive; instead they use flash memory as a “solid state drive” (SSD) for storage.

As he announced the laptops, Jobs proclaimed its design as “the future of the MacBook” and went so far as to say “All notebooks will be like this someday.”

He’s probably right. Like other technologies from the 1980s, the hard drive is starting to outlive its usefulness, at least when it comes to internal storage for portable devices. For laptops, flash memory makes sense — at least for a portion of the market.

It didn’t take Jobs to convince me about the benefits of flash storage. I fell in love with an SSD-equipped laptop more than two years ago when I got my hands on a Lenovo X300. It was very expensive at the time — nearly $3,000 out the door — but it sold me on the advantages of a machine that started faster, ran quieter, used less energy and — most important — wasn’t subject to hard drive crashes. For a butterfingers guy like me, having a laptop without a drive means that when I drop it or if it falls off a table (yes, it’s happened more than once) I don’t have to panic about whether my data will still be there because, unlike a hard drive, SSDs have no moving parts and no heads to crash against a delicate spinning drive surface.

Aside from price, the big compromise on SSD machines is that you have to live with less storage. The MacBook Air ranges from 64 gigabytes for the $999 11-inch model up to 256 GB as an option on the 13-inch model for anyone willing to spend $1,599. That’s a lot less storage than a laptop hard drive, which typically range from 160 GB to more than 500 GB.

Apple doesn’t even offer hard drives on its new MacBook Air but it does offer both types of storage on its MacBook Pro and, as you’d expect, the SSD option substantially adds to the price as it substantially subtracts from the storage. The base MacBook Pro with a 320 GB hard drive costs $1,499 but if you want a 128 GB SSD instead, you not only give up space but pay an extra $300.

Cost issues aside, having to cut back on storage is a trade-off I’m willing to make when I’m on the road.

The Lenovo X300 that I’m carrying around right now has only 64 GB of storage, tiny compared to the nearly two terabytes of storage on my home PC. And, unlike my home machine, it has a 13-inch screen instead of two 21-inch monitors. It also has a slower processor and lacks quite a few other bells and whistles but carrying around a sub-3 pound notebook is a lot easier on my back and shoulders, especially all day at a trade show.

When I leave the house, size and weight matter more than the ability to access every photograph, video and MP3 file in my collection. And, because all my important data is stored on my desktop PC, I wouldn’t panic (as much) if I lost or broke my laptop, which is a lot more likely than losing a machine that never leaves the house.

As it turns out, 64 GB is more than enough room for the operating system and quite a few essential applications like Microsoft Office, a couple of browsers, a video editing program and all the data files I need on the road including weeks’ worth of my one-minute daily recorded radio segments, hundreds of Microsoft Word files, quite a few PowerPoint presentations, some short videos and even a couple of full length (2 GB each) movies.

And if you do need more space, you can always plug in an external USB hard drive, including one of the ultra-portable drives that don’t even require external power like Seagate’s 1.5 terabyte drive, which weighs just over half a pound.

And if that’s not enough, there is that giant “hard drive” in the sky. Thanks to the growing use of “cloud storage,” we don’t need as much local storage as we once did. I used to have an enormous Outlook data file but now my contact list, calendar and four years’ worth of e-mail messages and attachments are stored online, courtesy of Google’s Gmail. I still keep a local copy of my photographs on my hard drive but now it’s possible to store those online as well. And thanks to streaming video services like Amazon and Netflix, the only reason to store movies and TV shows is to watch them on airplanes, but even that’s changing thanks to GoGo In-flight Wi-Fi.

Of course, there are all those music files on my hard drive but I’m guessing Apple has an answer for that too. Rumor has it that the reason they purchased and shuttered Lala.comwas so they could offer a cloud-based version of iTunes.

A lot has been written lately about and cyberbullying and bullying in general. And, like every writer who covers this subject, my colleagues at ConnectSafely.org and I have given our share of advice about how to avoid cyberbullying and what to do if you experience it.

But recent suicides, including those of Tyler Clementi and other young people, gay and straight, have brought the issue to the forefront.

While suicide is a rare consequence of bullying, it is a horrific reminder that people react in different ways. The overwhelming majority of victims, of course, don’t take their own lives but that doesn’t mean that they might not be affected in profound ways. By citing experts in youth risk, I could go on for pages on the subject of bullying and its impact with plenty of advice on why it’s important to teach our kids not to bully and how to deal with the bullies that are out there but instead of doing that, I’d like people to watch this short video by our Role Model in Chief.

As the President said, it can get better. I grew up during a time when it was “acceptable” to make blatantly racist, sexist or homophobic comments but, today, derogatory comments made in public are usually met with disdain. That’s not to say we’ve overcome racism and sexism, but we have made progress in making such remarks socially unacceptable. We’ve also cut way down on smoking, driving without seatbelts and many other things that were common place during my youth. If you don’t believe me, watch back episodes of Mad Men to see what was “normal” in the early sixties.

It’s my hope that we can do the same with bullying not just against LGBT youth but everyone. It’s not going to easy but it can be done and messages like the one delivered by President Obama are a step in the right direction.

Like the President, I don’t know what it’s like to bullied because of my sexual orientation but, like him, I do know what bullying feels like because, like almost everyone, there are things that make me different from other people and some people have trouble handling that.

The President’s Message

Regardless of what you think about President Obama’s performance in office or his social and economic policies, the message he just delivered to LGBT youth needs to be heard by all of us, regardless of our age, gender or sexual orientation. “It Gets Better” applies not just to LGTB youth but to every victim of bullying.

A couple of weeks ago Facebook announced a new feature called Groups, which allows people to create semiprivate conversations with, as Facebook advertises it, “small groups of friends.” Facebook promoted this as a privacy feature but, depending on how it’s used, Groups can also jeopardize privacy.

Trouble is, what starts out as a small group can quickly mushroom into a large one, and it’s quite possible that the group could contain members who are not your friends or even friends of the person who created the group.

I like the idea of Groups and can see how it can enhance privacy by giving people the ability to communicate with a select group of friends instead of their entire friends list. But until Facebook fixes a couple of privacy loopholes, I recommend people approach Groups with a bit of caution. A group is fine as long as you are aware of who is in it, but if things get out of hand, you could wind up sharing information with a much larger group than you had thought.

Any Facebook member can create a new group simply by going to facebook.com/groups. As part of the group creation process, you’re asked to specify the initial members, which can include any of your friends. You can always go back and add members but so can any of the other members.

Last week Facebook announced the new Groups feature which is designed to limit communications to a sub-set of your Facebook friends.

In an interview, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told me “there are a lot of things you want to share with all your friends at once but there are also things that you only want to share with your family or some co-workers.” He said that “If you don’t have a way to do that, you just won’t share them at all. But now that people have tools to do that very easily, we expect that a lot of people will use Facebook as their tool to communicate and stay in touch with these groups of people that are really important to them.”

But when it comes to privacy, Groups is a double-edge sword. It can also jepordize your privacy.

In theory, Groups provides users additional privacy because anything you post in a grup is seen only by its members which can be a much smaller group than your entire list of Facebook friends. It could be your running group, the people at work or perhaps your immediate family.

But in practice, Groups can quickly get out of hand because any member of a group can add members on their own friend list even if they’re not friends with anyone in the group, including the Group’s administraror. So, if you create a group, let’s say of your baseball team, there is nothing to stop the left fielder from inviting his cousin who isn’t actually on the team. And once his cousin is in, that person can add friends of his own so that 9 person baseball team could grow big enough to fill a ballpark.

I know about this first hand because the day after Groups was launched, I was invited into what started out as a small group but soon people in the group started adding their friends and within hours it grew to several hundred member, including a lot of people I don’t know.

There are ways to manage Groups. Any member of the group can always see who else is in the group and remove yourself if you don’t want to be there. Also, the administrator can remove people from the group but only after the fact. The administrator does not get to approve or reject new members.

Also, people who are added to groups by others don’t get a chance to either accept or reject the invitation. They’re added immediately and their name shows up on the roster unless and until they remove themselves. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was reportedly added to (and later quit) a group pretending to represent NAMBLA – the North American Man/Boy Love Association).

Another issue with groups is that, by default, the membership list is public information thought there is a way to create a “secret group.”

There are three types of groups: Public, Open and Secret.

• Public groups where both the membership list and the contents of the group is accessible to anyone.
• Closed groups –the default setting — where the contents are private but the membership list is public so it’s possible to search for Closed groups and know who is in them.
• Secret groups where the member list, the contents and the existence of a group is to designate it as “Secret.”

Another annoyance with groups is that, by default, all messages posted to the group are sent to the email address associated with your Facebook account. That can be a good feature if the traffic level is moderate but it can get overwhelming.

Know the Groups you’re in

When someone adds you to a group you will get an email that includes a link to the group’s Facebook page.  Click on that link to make sure it’s a group you want to be in. If not, click “Leave Group” in upper right corner. You can also see what groups you’re in in the left-most column on your home page:

You can see the Groups you're in from your Facebook Home Page

You should periodically click on the “See All” link near the top left of any Group you’re in.  If you don’t want to be sharing informatoin with people on that list or if you’re not comfortable being associated with that group, you should consider leaving the group

CBS News and CNET Technology Analyst on Microsoft’s new Windows Phone 7

Larry spoke with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg shortly after Facebook made an announcement about Downloading, an App Dashboard and Groups.  This short (1 minute) video contains a 21 second excerpt. The audio is from Larry’s daily CBS News/CNET Tech Talk segment for Thursday, October 7th, 2010:

10:37: Mark Zuckerberg is in the back of the room now.

10:40: Mark Zuckerberg is just starting. Promises that it’s not about what people have speculated about

Company coming out of 60-day lock down mode says Mark Z

10:41

Talking about changes to photos, making them hi-rez, new uploader, etc
10:41: Making improvements to chat network (thankfully)

10:43: This summer we focused a lot on making content high quality (Mark Z). Cut down on spam, improved games policy. Made it so users now all have “real names.” If name doesn’t look real, they make them prove they’re real

10:43

Says that FB Places is already the biggest location app “that’s out there.”
10:43

Has seen a big surge in gaming growth on FB
10:44

“Lock down was a pretty busy time for us. Lots more releases coming.”

10:45

“We’re trying to build a social platform that’s very diff from building a social app. When building an app it’s for 1 use case (games, status updates, etc). Hard to get dynamics of that right but its a lot more challenging to build a platform

10:46

Key to making a platform is giving people a very easy way to control the info they disclose.
10:47

Key is making sure people have good controls that are simple yet powerful. “This is the big problem we work at at FB”

Today we have 3 things to talk about that are new.
10:47

Big challenge is to make it easy and safe for people to take their info to another service.

10:49

He’s talking about giving people a copy of all their information. Download all your info from FB to your PC
10:49

New product called “Download Your Information.” We zip up all your posts, photos, etc and you can download the file to a computer.

10:51

2nd thing is a dashboard for all your apps to see the last time the app accessed your data. You can change permission, uninstall app from dashboard.,
10:51

Mark is turning podium over to David Recordon to talk about download your info
10:51

Have a copy of all your information, all of your data. Rolling out feature today
10:52

Combining all info into a single zip file. “You should really understand that this is all of your personal info. You should take security seriously. Will ask for your password before you can download
10:53

Carl (not sure of last name) talking about new dashboard
10:54

Combined 2 screens into single screen accessible from main privacy controls
10:55

The Apps, Games and Websites Dashboard shows permissions granted to each app, lets you manage the permissions and in some cases manage on a granular basis. Last thing is that it gives you detailed log of what “API calls” that app is making over time. Not just the permissions but what it’s actually doing.
10:56

Greater viability will make developers more careful about what info they access
10:57

Mark is back at the podium (actually walking around in front of room).
10:57

I’ve met and interviewed Mark before and now (as then) he’s far more personable than te movie portrays him. Smiles, laughs and connects with people. The movie persona is not Mark Z.
10:58

Mark Z talking about how you have different social circles that you want to interact with in different ways.
10:59

Sometimes “just your friends” isn’t private enough. Sometimes you want to post to a sub-group of your friends, not just for privacy but because you may not want to bug all your friends with everything you post. Sometimes its just for a sub-group of friends
11:01

How do you map out “all the real world groups that you have in the graph?” says Mark Z
11:01

Goals of what Mapping Out subgroups

Map all real world groups
Everyone participates
Useful in lots of ways
11:02

Building a way so you don’t have to pick out groups of people each time such as when you want to invite people to events.
11:03

Mark is talking about other ways to do this group function. Another way is to have sub-groups of friends “lists.” (Actually they have long had a list function but only 5% of people ever use it)
11:03

“Nobody wants to make lists.”
11:06

Has a system in company that indexes each relationship and makes it so that with all of your interactions we can filter stuff based on who you are likely to be close with. Use this in a bunch of places such as chat interface. Doesn’t have all your friends but the ones FB’s software thinks you’re closest with.
11:07

Trouble with the software approach is that it’s easy to get it wrong. You might be going back and forth with a carpenter who is working on your house but he or she might not be a close friend
11:07

Almost worse to get it right — a girl you’re flirting with and an ex-girlfriend had better not show up on the same list
11:09

Still hasn’t said exactly what they are launching. Just talking about problems with creating groups of sub-friends on the service using code. “Can’t guess what people’s clusters are with a lot of accuracy.”
11:10

Real solution is simpler. Let people tag themselves.
11:10

It’s a social problem and that’s why we solved it.
11:10

Useful in lots of context. That’s what this group thing is about. “A social solution” that takes advantage of real world connections. Already the case with photos where friends can tag your photos.
11:12

What will work and be a building block is to build “the best group communications tools.”
11:12

Like photos, groups have the property that not everyone has to set them up themselves.
11:12

It’s a product and a fundamental building block called Groups.
11:13

Groups:

Shared Space
Group Chat
Email lists
11:13

Mark inviting Justin Shafer to talk about groups. Joined FB from HotPotato that they acquired
11:15

Each group reps a space shared among a small group of friends.
11:15

Groups works like a mailing list
11:15

You could have a group of friends you hike with and send them a message about an upcoming hike.
11:15

Works like photo tag. Create a group, add friends and other group members can add members. Social norms govern it. Don’t add non-family members to family group. Also group chat. Like 1 on 1 but with entire group
11:16

Groups work just like mailing lists. You can send and receive mail within your group. Also m.facebook.com mobile interface for groups.
11:17

Adding a document you can edit just like Google Docs
11:18

1. Create a group
2. Add your friends
3. Start sharing
11:19

Chris Cox now talking about how “social design is a new way of approaching old problems.” Feels like a brand new field
11:20

Chris Cox said that early web designers were print designers. Now approaching problems in a completely different way. Social design.
11:22

If you think about answering semantically rich questions, we can design complex software for that and another way is to build a social interaction to unlock human behavior that says ‘I want to answer stuff.”
11:22
11:23

Cox says that FB stays up to date because people are always updating their relationships. “The interaction of one person with the product affect and organize the interactions of people around them.”
11:23
Our solution to organizing groups is not just a filter on your news feed but a way of designing a space (like your dinner table or local coffee shop)
11:24

News feed is a good space for telling what happened but not a way to share what’s happening like at the dinner table. Groups has its own logo and meant to resemble a human space so people can feel comfortable interacting with it” Chris Cox
11:25

Q&A Time. I will have to take a quick break to do a live radio piece on this. you can listen at www.kcbs.com or tune into KCBS AM or FM in San Fran.
11:35

I’m back. Q&A still going on
11:35

Zuck: 3 privacy settings for groups. Open,Closed and Secret
11:41

Secret group is one where content and membership is secret. Closed is open only to invited people.
11:43

When you download your FB info they send an email asking you to confirm password and make sure it’s a computer you’ve used in past, an area you are known to be from as additional input for identity verification.
11:45

Zuck: If you want to make sure everyone is safe and you can never hurt them then you start building walls but those are the same walls that block innovation. But if you take down all the walls it can present danger. We debated controls a lot and whether it was really safe and worth doing. (Paraphrased). He worries that some people will try to exploit it. We thing “People should be allowed to download their info.” We give them as much protection as we can.
11:46

Questioner asks if you will be able to easily invite a group to an event., Answer is Yes.
11:46

Won’t remove old features like “Lists.” Mark says that people put a lot of work into creating them. Even though it’s 5% there is “no need to delete 25 million people’s work” They will continue to allow old groups and old lists.
11:47

We want to build a simple product.
11:48

Cox: Newsfeed is a summary of everything is going on. That will continue to be shared with lots and lots of people. We want that to continue. But when people go to what’s on your mind box and consider the amount of people they’re interrupting.
11:53

Q&A about to wrap up. Taking last question. When you download do you get info about all your friends or just you. Mark Z says it’s about your info. We will let you include everything, even the actual video you uploaded. All YOUR info, message threads, status updates. Not your friends info because that’s not your info.
11:55

Thanks everyone for joining. This was my first live blog. If you’d like to stay in touch, drop me a note at larry@larrymagid.com, visit my site at www.larrysworld.com and follow me on Twitter at @larrymagid.

Thanks
11:55

And of course here on HuffPost at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/larry-magid

by Larry Magid
This article first appeared in the San Jose Mercury News

I’ve never thought of myself as a “traditionalist.” But after I saw Google’s blog post last week about a recent change to its Gmail service, I found out that I’m kind of an old fogy.

Google announced it is now allowing Gmail users to turn off “Conversation View.” Unlike so-called traditional e-mail programs and Web services — including Microsoft Outlook, Yahoo Mail and Hotmail — Gmail has always grouped together messages into what they call “a single conversation or thread.” So let’s say you sent Joe an e-mail three weeks ago and he responded to you, you responded back to him and then, weeks later, he responded back to you. When you clicked on Joe’s new message in your inbox, you would see the entire conversation in chronological order, with Joe’s newest message at the bottom.

With conversation mode turned off, you see the person’s response immediately, just as you do in most other mail services. And, like most other services, if the person is responding to you, you usually will also see your original message below the response.

I’ve never been a fan of conversation view because, for me, the most important message is the recent one and that’s what I want. I’ve raised this issue with officials at Google over the years and they always looked at me like I’m a bit nuts and unappreciative that they “improved” the e-mail experience by forcing me to use conversation view.

I understand why Googlers and many of its users

prefer conversation view. As with most features, it’s not a black-and-white issue. There are some advantages of being able to quickly review an e-mail exchange, especially when the response to your e-mail comes days or weeks after the conversation was initiated. But it’s also true that there is an advantage to having the most recent message on top, especially if it’s likely to contain important and timely information. I can think of several times I anxiously awaited a message and then had to wade through screens and screens of older messages to find what I’m looking for.

In a blog post, Google admitted it “really hoped everyone would learn to love conversation view, but we came to realize that it’s just not right for some people.” But they couldn’t resist referring to people like me as “e-mail traditionalists like many former Outlook users (who) think conversation view just complicates something that has worked for years.”

Well, I guess I know where I stand. According to Google, I must be an old geezer who likes things the way they were back in the old days. Maybe the next thing Google will do to accommodate us old-timers is to release an Android phone with a rotary dial and a dial tone or force us to use a virtual carriage return between lines when we type in Google Docs. They could offer us a black-and-white-only version of YouTube or maybe even one with captions instead of sound so we can experience video the way it was before talkies were introduced back in 1927.

As long as we’re on the subject of e-mail and “traditionalists,” it’s fair to say that maybe even Google is a bit old-fashioned simply because it’s in the e-mail business.

Speaking at the Nielsen Consumer 360 Conference in June, Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said only 11 percent of teenagers use e-mail on a daily basis. Pointing out that teens lead the way in consumer technology, she predicted that “e-mail is probably going away.”

She may be right. I’ve spoken to many young people who regard e-mail as just another 20th-century technology that their parents used back in the day. Just as e-mail — for us — was an amazing replacement for postal mail because it took minutes and sometimes seconds instead of days to arrive, text messaging, instant messaging and chat are replacing e-mail because they arrive in real-time. And not only are texts instantaneous but they also arrive on your mobile phone instead of that old fashioned device called a personal computer.

Based on my observations, it seems as if teens who send text messages expect a response before they would even have time to put their phone back in their pocket. According to a report last month from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 87 percent of teen cell phone users text, and they send and receive an average of 50 messages a day — five times as many as the average adult who sends texts. And, as Sandberg pointed out, adults do seem to be following in our children’s digital footsteps. In the past year the percentage of adults who use texting has grown from 65 percent to 72 percent.

About the only thing faster than texting would be predictive messaging, in which you would get a response to a message even before you sent it. But I better be careful what I wish for. For all I know, Google and Facebook might be already working on that.

Jessie Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network (Credit: Columbia Pictures)

I didn’t discuss The Social Network movie with Mark Zuckerberg when I interviewed him in May but I have talked with others who expected it to be a hatchet job. But that’s not what I took away from the movie. The film certainly implied that Zuckerberg may have stolen the idea from the Winklevoss brothers and that he did nothing to prevent the company from deceiving co-founder Eduardo Saverin into signing away his share of the company but, on balance, Zuckerberg seemed more driven than evil.

It portrayed a young man who was not only tenacious but focused on what matters when it comes to building a lasting web property. At various points in the film, Saverin pressured Zuckerberg to let him sell advertising but Zuckerberg understood that you first have to build a site that people love before you can start to monetize it. And that’s exactly what he did. Despite its critics and its various privacy snafus, millions of people love Facebook and it is fast becoming a very profitable business.

Mostly the movie portrayed a young man with a vision. From the beginning, Zuckerberg understood the power of connections and the power of friendship. In the movie he had some challenges when it came to his own real-world friends, but he certainly knew the power of helping others stay connected to their friends. In the movie, after being suspended from Harvard for hacking into campus servers to gather pictures for his first website – one that let students compare the relative attractiveness of female Harvard students, he commented that the power of that site was not that it depicted pretty girls (the Internet has plenty of those pictures) but pretty girls that Harvard students actually know. And later in the film, when talking about the early success of Facebook, he commented that it was all about users being interconnected.

The movie also clarified Facebook’s growth strategy which was based on exclusivity. It started at Harvard and then migrated to Yale, Columbia and Stanford before being rolled out to other colleges, then corporations and finally the general public. My own kids were at Whitman College and UCLA during Facebook’s expansion period and I remember how excited they were when Facebook finally came to their campuses. When it expanded to companies, I was excited when I got to sign up by virtue of having a corporate email address and when it finally opened up to everyone, it was a club that people actually were happy to join, especially compared to its main competitor – MySpace – which looked like it was located in the Web’s low-rent district.

After watching the film, I don’t think less of Mark Zuckerberg. If anything, it gave me a better appreciation for his genius – not just as a nerdy coder but as one of the first people to truly understand the power of social media.

Disclosure: Larry Magid is co-director of ConnectSafely.org, a non-profit Internet safety organization which receives some of its funding from Facebook.