FAIL: Job Security
Again. This seems to be a recurring theme in our weekly updates. Perhaps, given the economy and the fickle nature of the Internet, it shouldn’t come as a surprise to see 47% of MySpace’s employees sacked this week. It’s even less of a surprise since, at least to me, MySpace’s decline has been fairly evident for some time. 500 employees lost their jobs, but MySpace CEO Mike Jones was quick to assure the media the firings “were purely driven by issues related to our legacy business, and in no way reflect the performance of the new product”. Those who made the cut? Mostly developers. According to survivors, virtually every other role was axed.

WIN: AMBER Alerts
This week Facebook partnered with the AMBER Alert program to allow users to sign up for AMBER Alert bulletins to be delivered directly to their news feeds. The AMBER Alert program has recovered some 525 children safely, but approximately 800,000 children go missing every year. With Facebook reporting a member base of over 500 million, it can’t hurt to have that kind of exposure.

WIN: Sex on Mars
The Journal of Cosmology‘s recent publication about a privately-funded manned mission to Mars included a chapter on sex and reproduction on the Red Planet. Sex in space is a subject that’s been given little scientific treatment hitherto, but Dr. Rhawn Joseph, author of the “Sex on Mars” chapter of the report, insists there would be many conditions, particularly social pressure, that push Mars colonists into having sex with the intention of conceiving. He also proposes infants born on Mars would be different than babies born on Earth due to environmental variables, and that it would only take a few generations for an entirely new species to develop. Which brings to mind a publicly-funded endeavour, Pioneer One, an ongoing low-budget television show about a youth born on Mars who comes to Earth under mysterious circumstances. Despite occasional moments of dubious accents and a fair bit of camera instability, the show is worth a watch, which can be done free via its web site.

FAIL: Wetting Yourself
No, this isn’t a fetish item. More a reference to intense fear, something WikiLeaks’ revelations caused a Florida trailer park resident who was so traumatized by what he read on the infamous site that he’s suing Julian Assange for a host of alleged offenses, from terrorism to treason to just plain “he scared the $%@# out of me”. I do feel badly for the Floridian in question, but I can’t help but think the depression, anxiety and hypertension he’s accusing WikiLeaks of inspiring in him might have also been created by, you know, an Ed Wood movie. Kudos to him, however, for having the balls to make very public accusations against an organization that, if it flexed the collective muscles of its staunch and equally infamous supporters, might make Rambo piss himself, too.

WIN: STS-133
NASA released a “no really, this time we mean it” statement announcing the new launch date for Discovery’s final mission, STS-133. Of course, nobody can fault NASA for pushing the launch back, and back, and back, due to pesky problems that made it not quite worth the risk. That’s why today’s announcement is a win. For those of us enthusiastic about the space program every launch day is like Christmas, and this time we get another shot at festive joy on February 24th. Bonus: the mission will carry the first ever human-like robot into space, R2 aka Robonaut, who’ll tweet from the International Space Station to @AstroRobonaut. Unfortunately STS-133 is one of the last 2 shuttle missions to be flown before the fleet is retired completely, so it will be tinged with sorrow that even a totally awesome microblogging robot cannot erase.

WIN: Zombie fans
Last week I featured digital zombies, but this week I have to give a shout out to fellow zombie fans as we quiver and light up cigarettes in the afterglow of Resident Evil 3D – but more to the point, The Walking Dead panel at the New York Comic Con. The panel was so jam packed it took a good 45+ minutes to seat the attendees, and the reception everyone involved with the television show received proved just how much people adore a good zombie yarn.

WIN: UFOs
A massive UFO sighting (explained by the government as…all together now…weather balloons) over Manhattan sparked both buzz and terror midweek. What makes it a win is the fact that it was purportedly predicted by a former NORAD officer that fleets of UFOs would hover over major cities on October 13th. So it’s got that insanity factor that we all love. Cue the hideous music from Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

FAIL: MySpace
Specifically, the new MySpace logo. What was undoubtedly intended to be a clever, if not borderline geeky visual just looks like someone forgot to finish the editing process. The end result is something completely unintuitive and nowhere near enough to pull MySpace out of its tailspin.

FAIL: The Social Network
Those in the know are tearing apart this movie for its reportedly immature and incomplete portrayal of the crew behind social networking giant Facebook. Despite the fact that it’s been hyped to death and has spent a significant amount of time trending hither and yon, it fails at the task of interesting me even in the smallest measure, no matter how long it stays in the box office.

WIN: Twins
Or to be exact, astronaut twins. Scott Kelly, currently commanding the International Space Station, will soon be joined by his twin brother Mark Kelly, who’s set to command the final space shuttle mission, in the ISS. Bonus geek points for the precious cargo Mark will be delivering: an instrument called the “Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer”. Not even Reed Richards could invent something that sounds so cool.

The movie is due to be released in October, and in July, we saw the full trailer of The Social Network. Here it is, in case you didn’t get to see it.

I have to admit – in spite of the overly dramatic treatment, the trailer makes the movie seem interesting.

This is not the main reason for this post, though. The release of the full trailer spawned other “trailers” of movies about social networks. Some people have a lot of time on their hands, and the temptation of poking more fun at Facebook (in spite of or because of its popularity, you tell me) is just too big to resist.

“The Twit Network” is my favorite – as the title says, it is Rated Awesome!

It latches on to the drama of the original but makes it so hilarious that you can’t help but want the movie to be real. That should make for a good background movie on a night of geeky revelry.

Here’s another “trailer,” this time of MySpace. I don’t really use my MySpace account, but this video about the “other” social network will introduce you to Tom, the guy who built his own empire. It’s not as well-crafted as the other two videos, but you can’t leave MySpace out of the picture.

And that, folks, is what happens when you make movies of people like Mark Zuckerberg. So tell me, are you going to watch The Social Network?