Mr. Sorkin's Facebook photo

Aaron Sorkin, who co-created The West Wing and films like Charlie Wilson's War, has agreed to produce a screenplay about the birth of Facebook.

To facilitate the project — and hopefully draw feedback from the site's vocal userbase — Sorkin's researcher Ian Reichbach started a Facebook group called Aaron Sorkin & the Facebook Movie.

In the group's description, Sorkin writes:

I've just agreed to write a movie for Sony and producer Scott Rudin about how Facebook was invented. I figured a good first step in my preparation would be finding out what Facebook is, so I've started this page.

The film will examine Facebook's humble beginnings in 2004, when founder Mark Zuckerberg's conceived it in his Harvard dorm room. Membership to the network was restricted to Ivy League students. It later expanded to all universities in the US and Canada; followed by high school admissions, eventually opening to all users.

Sorkin is currently soliciting Facebook members for legends about the site. The discussion board also hosts topics related to how Facebook has changed social relations. One topic reads, "Dating: From 'Did she call?' to 'Did she change her [Facebook] status?'"

Last year Microsoft bought a 1.6 percent stake in Facebook for $240 million, instantly vaulting the company's value to about $15 billion. This occurred shortly after Facebook availed portions of its back-end code to third-party developers, dramatically altering the user experience and sparking a broad array of copycats, including other social networks, like MySpace and LinkedIn; chat services like AIM; and even Apple, whose App Store, a shop for downloading third-party apps for iPhone, served 60 million downloads in its first month.

And unlike rivals MySpace and Bebo, which have sold their independence to News Corp. and AOL, respectively, Facebook remains a founder-run enterprise. The site isn't quite profitable, but it's begun experimenting with various forms of advertising, including ad feedback, video advertising and the controversial Beacon model, which automatically updates users on what friends — and professional colleagues — are doing on partner sites like Blockbuster or Yelp.

This year also marked a significant acquisition for the underdog social network: that of ConnectU, a college-oriented social network whose code Zuckerberg, a former employee, allegedly stole and used to build Facebook's foundation.