Facebook Group

His fingers tapping like a tiny army over laptop keys, Waleed Korayem, a university student who quotes Einstein and Voltaire, skims the Internet in a noisy cafe and opens his Facebook group, the one that drives Islamists into fits of rage: Yeah, We Are Seculars and We Are Proud. It's hot and he is sweating, clicking through cyberspace venom and passionate screeds of Muslims debating Islam and democracy in the Middle East.

Is Aaron Sorkin getting his geek on? The famous technophobe and Hollywood scribe is trading the "West Wing" and "Studio 60" corridors for the graffiti-scrawled, software-developer-mobbed corridors of social networking upstart Facebook Inc. The Palo Alto company says it has not signed on to a Sorkin film about its inception, but Sorkin has started a Facebook group (well, he says, his assistant did that) to gather color for a Facebook film he is writing for Sony and producer Scott Rudin.

EARLIER THIS MONTH, the popular student networking site Facebook.com hit its first major rough patch: It became too transparent. It turns out that even members of the generation most comfortable with tell-all networking websites -- where people post details of one-night stands and political affiliations, among other things -- have their limits and want a little mystery shrouding their constructed online identities.