It appears that the founders of Google are, like the guys that created Facebook, are going to get a feature film.
From Dateline:
EXCLUSIVE: The founders of Facebook aren’t the only game-changing geeks poised to have their story told on a movie screen. Michael London’s Groundswell Productions has teamed with producer John Morris to acquire movie rights to the Ken Auletta book Googled: The End of the World As We Know it. They will use the book as the blueprint for a feature film that tells the story of Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page and the fast rise of the juggernaut web business that made them billionaires.
The book was published last fall by Penguin. Auletta, the media columnist for The New Yorker, chronicled a business that grew into a search engine-driven octopus whose $20 billion in ad revenue last year was more than the major broadcast networks combined. CEO Eric Schmidt predicted to Auletta that Google will become the world’s first $100 billion media company.
Some of you might expect me to snarl and say that these guys do not deserve the fortune that they have; because they are liberals — or at least from a State that is quite known for it’s liberalism.
Well, I hate to be the one to break it to you; but I do not fault these young men one lousy iota. Why? Well, it is like this here:
First off, I am not a progressive, who believes that anyone that makes or has more money than me, is someone to be loathed. Those guys have that sort of money, because they worked their rear-ends off for it. They just did not stand around and all just luckily all of that success came to them; for nothing. No, they worked for it. They spent hours coding and recoding that software to make it work better. That my friends, is just honest to goodness work. Work, that I could never do in million years, if I wanted to. Why? Because I am not a coder; I am a writer —- or at least I try to be one anyhow. There are some however, that think that I couldn’t write my damned way out of a paper bag; and you know, sometimes I think they just might be right. 😉
There is another angle to this as well; whether we want to admit it or not — Twitter, Facebook and Yes, even Google revolutionized the way we use the internet. Before these services were created; an era known affectionately among us old duffers as the “Web 1.0” era — the Internet was a patchwork of websites, that were, quite honestly, awful. You see, this was also before the days, when HTML was actually quite intelligent. The internet, for better or for worse — has grown and got much smarter by enormous leaps and bounds, since back in the mid-1990’s when I began to use it. Honestly, to me, it seems like one day, I was using Microsoft Frontpage 2000 to create my website; and now I am using WordPress to do what I do now. The awesome part is; WordPress does everything, and I do mean, everything for you. WordPress is a writer’s dream and it too, has changed the way writing and yes, the internet is done.
Speaking of WordPress; if anyone deserves a Movie made about him — It is Matt Mullenweg. Now as for Matt; whether you love him or hate him, you cannot argue this fact; Matt changed the game with WordPress. Matt basically took a piece of software, that someone else had stopped development on, did what is known as “Forking” in programming talk, and made it his own and made enormously better product out of it. Matt for all of his quirks; and that god-awful, “R.E.M. Shiny Happy People” looking template he is using on his blog — is actually an awesome person. 😀
In closing: (Said in my best drunken Ted Baxter voice) We as Conservatives should not be the one’s deriding these young people, we should be the one’s extolling their fortunes and encouraging others to follow in their footsteps.
Others: Crikey, Speakeasy, New York Magazine, VentureBeat, Fortune, Gizmodo, Underwire, The Wrap, ScreenCrave.com, L.A. Times Tech Blog, Just Jared, VentureBeat, Fortune, Gizmodo, L.A. Times Tech Blog and Gizmodo Australia.