In a slight switcheroo from viral video, here is a cool infographic from the One Block Off the Grid solar energy blog.

As 1BOG notes:

“Facebook recently passed 500 million users. If the growth rate of the world’s largest and fastest growing social network could be applied to solar, it would only take 4.7 years to power the entire world with solar energy.”

And that’s without adding in all the energy expended poking, friending and throwing sheep!

Check out the graphic (click in it to make it larger)–1BOG explains that the green is the growth curve of Facebook since 2004 if it were applied to global solar energy. The x-axis is months and the y-axis represents additional terawatts solar energy generating capacity that would be added over the next decade.

So you don’t miss a video, here is the one that Facebook showed at the launch of its Places geo-location feature yesterday (and which seems to have been shot partly in Dolores Park in San Francisco, right near All Things Digital Worldwide HQ):

BoomTown loves political dynasties from any party with about as much enthusiasm as I have for tossing sheep on Facebook.

Which is to say, none at all.

Nonetheless, it was an odd blast from the past to see this offspring spring into the public eye–as in Ben Quayle, former VP Dan Quayle’s son, who is running for Congress in Arizona.

Here is a somewhat awkward campaign video by Quayle the younger, in which the candidate declares he is going to beat up Washington, D.C. and then walks right off at the end like he is heading there immediately, just as he is approving the ad:

How much is BoomTown and everyone else in Silicon Valley trying to nab a copy of Ben Mezrich’s likely-to-be-entirely-made-up-but-who-cares tale of dirty doings at Facebook?

Muchety-much! So much so that I called all my book industry contacts–hey, I am a published author, ya know!–even though I have not actually completed reading a book since the Internet started and gave me permanent attention deficit disorder.

But, so far I have come up peanuts in grabbing an early copy of Mezrich’s tome, “The Accidental Billionaires,” which is set to come out July 14.

Facebook is not pleased, of course, and will likely be challenging Mezrich’s work as specious dreck. But the drama around the book should be interesting, to say the least.

More so, since this week also came news that actors Michael Cera and Shia LaBeouf are being considered to play founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and that David Fincher, the director of the lugubrious Brad Pitt snoozer, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” is “attached” to the movie version.

Even better: “West Wing” creator Aaron Sorkin will pen it and actor Kevin Spacey will produce the Columbia Pictures film, which will be called “The Social Network.”

Well, Hollywood sure came up with an original title!

It certainly does not signal the juiciness of the proposal for the book–which did manage to leak out last year–with a lot of tale tales in it that seem to have pretty much tracked on its oddly purple subtitle of “The Founding of Facebook: A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal.”

The cover–which you can see on the book’s Facebook page (the delicious gall of Mezrich!)–features a spilled martini glass and a red bra flung nearby.

Martinis? Red bras? Sex? Facebook? Really?

Obviously, Mezrich has not actually met Zuckerberg, who is a very nice geekish young man, but who has approximately the sex appeal of a rack of Facebook servers.

Powerful yes! Spockish? Yes! Sexy? Um, no, no, no.

I will not even begin to parse the red bra thing, although I am attributing the martinis to stylish former COO (and now MySpace CEO) Owen Van Natta.

But, apparently, the sex part seems to have to do with Zuckerberg starting the company with others while an undergrad at Harvard University, as a scheme to meet some ladies.

I would say there are easier ways to attract the womenfolk–not that I could give tips or anything–but whatever!

Thus, since I cannot get my mitts on the book (yet!), here’s my list of 10 completely made-up, utterly fabricated, just-call-me-Jayson-Blair things that should be in the book.

10.) Facebook was actually going to be called OnlyPrettyLadyFacebook, but cooler heads prevailed.

9.) The Wall? A clever plot by Zuckerberg to build his online service on a fascist construct, touting his hegemony over all he surveyed.

Wait, that actually happened, and now some Russians are even investors.

Long live the Zuckrepublic of Palo Alto!

8.) Reason for stealing, oops, borrowing, oops again, completely separately developing an exact replica of ConnectU social network at Harvard:

The Olympically muscle-headed Winklevoss twins used to beat up the brainy Zuckerberg on his way back to the dorm, prompting a “Revenge of the Nerds” plot line.

7.) Facebook’s Beacon advertising? All Randi Zuckerberg’s idea, so she could find out what she was getting for her birthday from her billionaire-on-paper brother.

6.) Zuckerberg’s famous flip-flops were made in China under dubious working conditions. Wait, that’s true too.

5.) The 20-something Zuckerberg is actually 93 years old, a real-life version of Benjamin Button, which would explain the social awkwardness and staring-into-space-sometimes thing.

4.) The no-breast-feeding-pictures controversy pretty much proves no one is interested in bras or, more precisely, what goes in them at Facebook.

3.) COO Sheryl Sandberg is a cyborg sent to Facebook from Google for purposes of infiltration. She and her crafty sidekick, Elliott Schrage, will become self-aware in 2012 and hunt down Zuckerberg in a thrilling chase that will also become a movie.

2.) The sex, drugs and rock-and-roll stuff actually all took place at MySpace, which really pisses off certifiably dashing co-Founders Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson because, once again, Zuckerberg stole their mojo!

1.) This work of fiction, oops, “fact”-ion, oops again, nonfiction, is probably not going to sell many copies because it will mysteriously be uploaded in its entirety by a widget that will distribute it free to Facebook’s 200 million plus users while simultaneously SuperDuperPoking Mezrich, by throwing real sheep at him.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you, Ben.

(By the way, here is an extra for you: The $15 billion valuation for Facebook, along with all the other Web 2.0 ones? Totally true. Just ask any VC.)

And, in case anyone was wondering what the real Facebook looks like, here is a recent video tour I did of its new HQ in Palo Alto, Calif.:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090624/boomtowns-top-10-list-of-fact-challenged-revelations-that-should-be-in-the-facebook-tell-all-book/feed/ 6 http://allthingsd.com/20081001/slide-sidles-up-to-old-media-in-search-of-new-revenue-apparently-max-cannot-live-by-superpoking-alone/ http://allthingsd.com/20081001/slide-sidles-up-to-old-media-in-search-of-new-revenue-apparently-max-cannot-live-by-superpoking-alone/#comments Wed, 01 Oct 2008 07:04:43 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=4662

You almost have to admire the shape-shifting–if not a wee bit slippery–stylings of Slide CEO Max Levchin.

The serial entrepreneur– whose current start-up has made him the massively-funded widget-king of Web 2.0–has signed distribution deals with Time Warner’s Warner Bros. unit, CBS and Comcast’s E! Entertainment channel to allow users of its new FunSpace Channels video service to look at clips from shows.

Slide’s other media partners in the new deal include Current Media, Hulu, Universal Music Group, as well as 236.com, Break Media, CollegeHumor, FUEL TV, Howcast Media, Video Detective and YouTube.

The FunSpace video service will recommend content based on how much users forward clips to others.

To make money, Slide will get a cut of ads sold by its media partners, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.

Oh my, how incredibly traditional of Levchin (pictured below on a wacky magazine cover).

But it should probably come as no surprise that Levchin is singing a bit of a different tune these days, as the daunting task of actually building a sustainable business model and attracting long-term advertisers has dawned on him–and probably many other Web 2.0 wunderkinds.

“Television is a world advertisers love,” said Levchin in The Journal article–a quote in which you can almost hear the quarter drop and the connection made that trying to earn real money from sheep-throwing and SuperPoking is perhaps not the most stable of business plans.

Of course, it was only a year ago that the business model for the high-profile social-networking applications maker–loudly touted by him and others at the company–was centered around “user-initiated” ads and in consumers becoming “brand ambassadors” for products.

These kinds of unproven ad schemes seemed fanciful to me when I first heard about them, although they doubtless sounded great to the many investors who ponied up tens of millions of dollars in funding to give Slide an eye-popping and still-undeserved $550 million valuation.

At the time, I wrote:

Ah, brand ambassadors! Like perhaps being dispatched to a posting in the tenth ring of hell.

It seems, though, that the old canard about getting audiences to carry water for brands and loving it has found new life, as social networks and the widgets that live off them search for business models.

Now I am not against widgets, those small third-party applications that people can put on their Web pages on social networks like Facebook and MySpace, in general.

While there are now many too many, and most are simply features and not companies, some are actually helpful and substantive and introduce a plethora of innovation and features into a service like MySpace that the service itself would or could never have offered.

And I also think that these widget-makers need to find a way to make money, especially the very popular ones like Slide, if they are to stay around.”

That’s more true than ever before as the economy tightens and kooky experimentation is no longer tolerated.

In fact, Levchin noted in the article that Slide had dumped one of its typically fun but profitless widgets–a digital fortune cookie service.

Said Levchin to The Journal: “We asked ourselves, can they generate cash and are they going to be engaging to users a year from now?”

Um … no and no, which should have been obvious from the get-go about a lot of social-networking apps, which I had labeled juvenile and ultimately ephemeral.

While such goofy stuff has given Slide a lot of traffic–it attracts more than 160 million viewers a month–that has not necessarily translated into big revenues since much of the traffic is pretty low-rent and because the ads are limited by the big social-networking sites where Slide apps are popular.

One of the most striking things in the article was the contention that Slide expected $30 to $50 million in 2009 revenue, which is probably on the low side. To be fair, Levchin always told me he was not as focused on revenue generation as on growth.

But with this move, Levchin is now clearly focusing on revenue, and it’s long past time to do so.

Of course, with nuclear winter in advertising of all kinds approaching fast, let’s hope Slide still has a sheepskin or two around to keep warm until the thaw.

As an added plus, here is one of three interviews I did with Levchin last year, giving him somewhat of a hard time about revenue issues (and he gave back as good as he got):

[ See post to watch video ]

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