The friendships, disputes and sudden fantastic wealth of a Harvard student who invented Facebook have been retold on a million webpages but now it appears the creator of The West Wing will write the big-budget Hollywood version of the story.

A film about the social networking phenomenon has been commissioned by Sony Pictures and Aaron Sorkin, the master of a thousand intrigues in the popular American political series, is expected to write the screenplay.

Sony Pictures told Times Online today that the project has been given the go-ahead, but no further details were yet available.

Facebook, which has more than 100 million users, has refused to co-operate with scores of filmmakers in the past but now a big screen version of its story has been sanctioned.

A page on the Facebook website itself has been created, apparently by Sorkin, as he begins research for the film, which is expected to chart to disputed origins of the site.

His post reads: “Welcome. I'm Aaron Sorkin. I understand there are a few other people using Facebook pages under my name - which I find more flattering than creepy -but this is me. I don't know how I can prove that but feel free to test me.

“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. (Actually it was started by my researcher, Ian Reichbach, because my grandmother has more internet savvy than I do and she's been dead for 33 years.)”

The film will tell the story of Mark Zuckerberg a Harvard student who watched his private pet project grow into a global powerhouse that is thought to have made him a billionaire.

It is not yet clear whether the film will be heavily fictionalised, but in reality the site was set up as a service for fellow Harvard students in 2004 before expanding to other colleges and then schools across America.

Any internet user can now join the social network which attracted 132.1 million unique visitors in June 2008 according to ComScore, an internet marketing research company.

In four years Mr Zuckerberg has morphed from a dishevelled student with a business card that read "I'm CEO. . . bitch" into a powerful new media magnate.

Details of the film plot are unknown but there have been several legal disputes and accusations by fellow students that Mr Zuckerberg stole their idea.

ConnectU, a networking site that employed him in November 2003, even launched a failed lawsuit claiming that he had illegally stolen both the concept and source code from them.

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