In a preview video of this Sunday’s 60 Minutes, Lesley Stahl asks Facebook wunderkind Mark Zuckerberg for his thoughts on The Social Network. Zuckerberg, who once told the media that he wouldn’t even bother watching Aaron Sorkin‘s depiction of Facebook’s inception, ended up taking all of his employees to see it with him. “I actually thought it was pretty fun,” he told Stahl. Yet he added, “There were hugely basic things that they got wrong too.” Girls, he claimed, were not his motivation for starting Facebook, citing that he already had a girlfriend at that point.

Former President George W. Bush‘s Decision Points publicity blitz continued yesterday, when he sat down with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg for a live chat at the website’s Palo Alto headquarters. During the interview, Dubya again demonstrated why voters once indicated they’d love to grab a beer with him—mostly by poking fun at Zuckerberg through the duration of their talk.

The sluggish U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has finally responded to Facebook’s 2005 application to trademark the word ‘face’ with a notice of allowance, which is a bureaucratic way of saying “Go for it.” The company “now has six months to show that is uses the trademark,” ABC News reports, after which the Trademark Office will decide whether to grant final approval. Oh, and there’s a fee, of course—Mark Zuckerberg will have to part with $100 to complete the claim.

My return to New York has reminded me of the existence of “Cool.”  It was conspicuously absent from my summer stomping ground, Menlo Park, and I certainly don’t have much of it naturally, so I forgot about it until a few weeks ago. You can imagine my not-in-Kansas-anymore reaction to passing clubs on a Saturday [...]

In a few minutes, Facebook founder — and recent reluctant dramatized movie subject — Mark Zuckerberg will address the crowd at Ycombinator’s Startup School at Stanford University, following up a stellar slate including Groupon founder Andrew Mason, Quora founder Adam D’Angelo, Sun Microsystems founder Andy Bechtolsheim, Linkedin founder Reid Hoffman and angel investor big daddy [...]

Ever since The Social Network was announced and certainly since it’s become the most important web-based movie since The Net, people have wondered what the actual “accidental billionaires” have thought of it. We know that Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz have both tried to shrug it off as typical Hollywood fiction. But what does Edward Saverin, the co-founder played in the film by Andrew Garfield, think of a movie that makes him out to be just a super nice guy who got (spoilers) royally screwed over. Shockingly, he liked it.

Will Geraldo Rivera be the antagonist of The Social Network 2?

Rivera told the story of his face-to-face meeting with Mark Zuckerberg, and revealed how the 26-year-old billionaire “absolutely freaked out” for some reason.

Aaron Sorkin, creator of the West Wing and writer of the much-anticipated Mark Zuckerberg biopic The Social Network thinks Facebook is bad. Sorkin appeared on The View this morning and told the ladies there that the social networking site is “divisive.”

Facebook may have been down yesterday, but its cofounder Mark Zuckerberg is up. The 26-year-old social-media whiz kid has been listed in the Forbes 400 as the 35th richest person in America, shooting past older media barons like Newscorp’s Rupert Murdoch, who is ranked 38th, and Apple’s Steve Jobs, who is ranked 42nd. Software kingpin Bill Gates of Microsoft still reigns on top of the Forbes list of rich people.

Vanity Fair has released its 16th annual ranking of the 100 most influential people of the Information Age. Spoiler alert: They are all white men. Other than that the top five is full of the usual suspects, though further on the list gets more interesting.

In the past few weeks, the Pakistan government has been doing everything in their power to keep anti-Islam content from getting seen on the internet. Their latest step, announced earlier today and reported by the Associated Press, will be to begin monitoring seven major websites including Google, Yahoo and Amazon as well as all out banning 17 smaller sites.

I read Mark Zuckerberg’s op-ed in today’s Washington Post with an open mind op-ed, interested to see how he would confront and react to the Facebook privacy criticism. As I read it, I became confused — because it didn’t read like an op-ed, it read like an op-ad.

Facebook has been facing some major backlash over their latest modifications to privacy concerns– from the ubiquity of their “Like” button to the fact that now your Facebook information will be shared with most major websites to tailor their advertising to you– but this may be the first major organized movement to abandon the platform. “Quit Facebook Day” is scheduled for May 31st, and the leaders, Matthew Milan and Joseph Dee, have a serious bone to pick with the social networking site.

One gets the sense the clock is ticking on Facebook’s fast and loose ways of forcing people to share information about themselves they might not otherwise wish to make public. Which may explain the immediately negative reaction to an old IM chat that was apparently leaked to Business Insider earlier today.

Recent changes announced by CEO Mark Zuckerberg at last week’s Facebook F8 developer conference have some even more concerned than usual Internet privacy experts. And while It’s not surprising then that many people are creating angry groups and sending angry letters, what is surprising though is one group of four are all US Senators.

Business Insider’s Nick Carlson has just published a number of long posts, which are the result of a “long investigation into the origins of Facebook” and don’t appear to reflect too well on founder Mark Zuckerberg: the word ‘hacked’ comes up more than once.

So remember the big hubbub over Facebook’s ever-changing Terms of Service (TOS) last year? Remember how Zuckerberg & co tried to say that they didn’t “own” your data…they just licensed it? Facebook would like you to know that at the end of the day, they’ve still got your data by the proverbial balls.

Speaking at the Crunchie awards in San Francisco this weekend 25-year-old Mark Zuckerberg told the crowd that privacy should no longer be considered a “social norm.” A scary declaration which might also explain why the recent change in privacy settings was implemented with such a heavy, oblivious hand. Apparently online everyone is expected to behave like a 25-year-old.

When looking ahead at the next year, pundits turn into prognosticators. Bloggers covering all sorts of topics and industries are now giving their predictions for what’s to come in 2010. Conventional wisdom says to go the conservative route with these choices in order to avoid looking foolish when none of your projections pan out. At the same time, there’s a key difference between picking things that are realistically possible and those that are already on the road to happening. I’ve assembled my favorite predictions covering a variety of fields and what’s supposedly in store for the near future:

The year 2009 had many media bright spots, break-out stars, dominating networks and game-changing technologies. The Mediaite 50 collects the finest, most exemplary innovators and influencers of the year, defining a media moment in time and setting the agenda as we move forward. See the full list after the jump:

Despite the fact it looks like Facebook has shored up many of its new privacy setting issues which drew red flags when they were unveiled last week, the public fallout continues. Seems that those easily overlooked 350,000 people who actually took the time to figure out the privacy settings and apply them are none to happy with the arbitrary nature with which their control over their personal information was suddenly removed. Also, a lot of them work in media.

At this point, who hasn’t written a song for the holiday season with some sort of Jew-related punchline? The latest in the canon comes courtesy of Max Weinberg from the Tonight Show, singing a response to Orrin Hatch‘s “Eight Days of Hannukah” — a song by a Mormon for the Jews. Weinberg and the Tonight [...]

As the decade’s close drew nearer it seemed prudent to actually call it something, and the Oh-Ohs, Double-Os and Two-Thousands frankly sound dumb. “The Aughts” is nice, clean, short, simple and definitive, and also sounds vaguely British which means it’s classy. That is why, here at Mediaite, our end-of-decade retrospective series is called…The Aughts. This new decade has snuck up on us, but we’re not letting the old one go just yet.

On the off chance you may have missed the news in the last few days, Facebook has rolled out new, controversial privacy settings that appear to be aimed at getting users to make as much information about themselves available to as many people possible. Why is Facebook so keen on getting you to share all your favorite TV shows, and drunken party pics? It’s not for your benefit, that’s for sure.

In the press release for Ken Auletta‘s latest book, Googled: The End of the World as We Know It, Penguin Press promotes the work (a magisterial history-of-Google-Inc./rumination-on-the-future-of-media) in standard publishing-house fashion. Alas, Auletta (or the author of the press release) seems unable to spell the names of some of the tech world’s biggest stars. Has the famed media critic perhaps not heard of a little research tool called Google?