On this day in engineering history, four Harvard University
students founded Facebook, a social networking website that now boasts over
350-million active users. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's president and CEO (image left),
was then a computer science student whose claim to fame was the development of
an application called Synapse that analyzed a listener's musical tastes and
designed a suitable playlist.
The future billionaire was joined in his dorm
room quest for the next "killer app" by two Economics majors, Eduardo Saverin
and Dustin Moskovitz; and Chris Hughes, a History and Literature student.
Privacy Concerns
Before he became the world's youngest self-made billionaire,
Mark Zuckerberg was nearly expelled from Harvard. Zuckerberg, who had been
coding since the sixth grade, created a site called Facemash that netted 450
visitors and 22,000 photo-views in its first four hours. According to the Harvard Crimson, Facemash displayed
student images side-by-side and prompted users to choose the more physically attractive
person. The photos were obtained without student consent, however, and
Harvard hauled the hacker before its Administrative Board for "breaching
security, violating copyrights and violating individuals' privacy".
Ultimately, Harvard dropped the charges against Zuckerberg,
who then turned his talents to academic ends. During the fall of 2003, he
created a study tool for his art history class by uploading 500 Augustan images
and enabling comments. Students shared their notes and an on-line community was
born. The following semester, Zuckerberg began coding a website that – unlike Facemash
– would host student information, but only with the consent of his classmates. Thefacebook,
originally located at thefacebook.com, was modeled after the printed "facebook"
of students and faculty at Philips Exeter Academy,
the New Hampshire
boarding school that Mark Zuckerberg had attended.
A New Empire?
Within a month, more than half of Harvard's undergraduates had
joined thefacebook.com. In March 2004, membership was extended to students at Columbia, Stanford, and
Yale. Next, the site welcomed students from the rest of the Ivy League, colleges
in the Boston area, and from most universities
in the United States and Canada. As the
fast-growing social networking site spread across the continent, Zuckerberg marveled
at how far he had come since designing an application based on the board game Risk. "It was centered around the ancient Roman Empire," Zuckerberg told the Harvard Crimson about his gaming creation. "You played against Julius Caesar. He was good,
and I was never able to win."
During the summer of 2004, the newly-incorporated Facebook
Inc. moved to California's Silicon
Valley. Under the direction of its first president, Sean Parker,
the company launched a high school version before extending eligibility to
employees of high-tech companies such as Apple and Microsoft. After paying $200,000
(USD) to acquire a new domain name, facebook.com, the company made another bold
move. On September 26, 2006, Facebook welcomed everyone 13 years and older
with a valid e-mail address. Today, the average user spends more than 55
minutes per day on Facebook and has 130 friends on the site.
Resources
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Zuckerberg
http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2004/6/10/mark-e-zuckerberg-06-the-whiz/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eduardo_Saverin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dustin_Moskovitz
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Hughes_%28Facebook%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook
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