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Monday, August 1, 2011

Origin Of Facebook -- Facebook History

The story behind Facebook is fascinating. It involves college students, booze, hacking, investigation, and farm animals.
Facebook started as an idea and grew into a company that employs more than 1,000 people and is home to more than 400 million active users.
Facebook all starts with Mark Zuckerberg. As Facebook’s CEO and co-founder, Mark was named one of the World’s Most Influential People by Time magazine in 2008 when he was just 24. He founded Facebook along with a few of his former classmates – Dustin Moskovitz, Eduardo Saverin, and Chris Hughes – while attending Harvard.
The idea for Facebook came from Mark’s days at Phillips Exeter Academy, which annually published a student directory with headshot photos of all students and faculty known as the “facebook”.
Before there was a Facebook, there was Facemash. Zuckerberg invented Facemash on October 28, 2003 while attending Harvard his sophomore year. Apparently, Mark got dumped by a girl he was seeing, got drunk, and started blogging to get his mind off of things. He stated that he had his dormitory ‘facebook’ up and some of the pictures were so ugly that they could be compared to farm animals. Enter Facemash. Mark posted: “Yea, it’s on. I’m not exactly sure how the farm animals are going to fit into this whole thing (you can’t really ever be sure with farm animals…), but I like the idea of comparing two people together.”
Using photos gathered from the ‘facebooks’ of nine houses, Zuckerberg made a site that would randomly display two photos side-by-side, allowing others to vote on who the “hotter” person was.
How exactly did he get the photos? He hacked into Harvard’s computer network and copied them, of course. This whole incident got the attention of Harvard’s school newspaper, The Harvard Crimson. At the time Facemash went live, Harvard did not have its own student directory or anything similar. Mark’s site became instantly popular because of this, garnering 450 visitors and 22,000 photo views within only a few hours.
Mark blogged: “Perhaps Harvard will squelch it for legal reasons without realizing its value as a venture that could possibly be expanded to other schools (maybe even ones with good-looking people…), but one thing is certain, and it’s that I’m a jerk for making this site. Oh well. Someone had to do it eventually…”
A few days later, Harvard administration shut down the site and charged Zuckerberg with breach of security and invasion of privacy and copyrights. He faced expulsion but in the end the charges weredropped.
In January 2004 (the following semester), Mark began coding a new website called Thefacebook. He was inspired by the newspaper article covering the whole Facemash incident, in which the paper stated that there could be many benefits to a centralized website.
Thefacebook launched on February 4th. “Everyone’s been talking a lot about a universal facebook within Harvard,” Zuckerberg toldThe Harvard Crimson. “I think it’s kind of silly that it would take the University a couple of years to get around to it. I can do it better than they can, and I can do it in a week.”In just 24 hours time, Thefacebook had nearly 1,500 registrants.
In March, Zuckerberg (and team) expanded to the other Ivy League schools and soon after the rest of the country and eventually the whole world.
A week after he launched the site in 2004, Mark was accused by three Harvard seniors of having stolen the idea from them.
New information uncovered by Silicon Alley Insider suggests that, on at least one occasion in 2004, Markused private login data taken from Facebook's servers to break into Facebook members' private email accounts and read their emails--at best, a gross misuse of private information. Mark hacked into the competing company's systems and changed some user information with the aim of making the site less useful.
The primary dispute around Facebook's origins centered around whether Mark had entered into an "agreement" with the Harvard seniors, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and a classmate named Divya Narendra, to develop a similar web site for them -- and then, instead, stalled their project while taking their idea and building his own.
But then, a twist.
After Facebook announced the settlement, but before the settlement was finalized, lawyers for the Winklevosses suggested that the hard drive from Mark Zuckerberg's computer at Harvard might contain evidence of Mark's fraud. Specifically, they suggested that the hard drive included some damning instant messages and emails.
The judge in the case refused to look at the hard drive and instead deferred to another judge who went on to approve the settlement. But, naturally, the possibility that the hard drive contained additional evidence set inquiring minds wondering what those emails and IMs revealed. Specifically, it set inquiring minds wondering again whether Mark had, in fact, stolen the Winklevoss's idea, screwed them over, and then ridden off into the sunset with Facebook.

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