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Select personalised ads. Apply market research to generate audience insights. Measure content performance. Develop and improve products. List of Partners vendors. Share Flipboard Email. Mary Bellis. Inventions Expert. Updated February 06, Featured Video. View Article Sources. Cite this Article Format. Bellis, Mary. The Most Important Inventions of the 21st Century. Then called "thefacebook. Now, six years later, the site has become one of the biggest web sites in the world, visited by million people a month.
The controversy surrounding Facebook began quickly. A week after he launched the site in , Mark was accused by three Harvard seniors of having stolen the idea from them. This allegation soon bloomed into a full-fledged lawsuit, as a competing company founded by the Harvard seniors sued Mark and Facebook for theft and fraud, starting a legal odyssey that continues to this day.
New information uncovered by Silicon Alley Insider suggests that some of the complaints against Mark Zuckerberg are valid. It also suggests that, on at least one occasion in , Mark used 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. Lastly, it suggests that 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.
In , Massachusetts Judge Douglas P. Woodlock called their allegations "tissue thin. Shortly thereafter, the parties agreed to settle. 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. Unfortunately, since the contents of Mark's hard drive had not been made public, no one had the answers. Over the past two years, we have interviewed more than a dozen sources familiar with aspects of this story — including people involved in the founding year of the company.
We have also reviewed what we believe to be some relevant IMs and emails from the period. Much of this information has never before been made public. None of it has been confirmed or authenticated by Mark or the company. Based on the information we obtained, we have what we believe is a more complete picture of how Facebook was founded. This account follows. In the fall of , Harvard seniors Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra were on the lookout for a web developer who could bring to life an idea the three say Divya first had in a social network for Harvard students and alumni.
The site was to be called HarvardConnections. The three had been paying Victor Gao, another Harvard student, to do coding for the site, but at the beginning of the fall term Victor begged off the project. Facemash had already made Mark a bit of a celebrity on campus, for two reasons. The first is that Mark got in trouble for creating it. The way the site worked was that it pulled photos of Harvard students off of Harvard's Web sites. It rearranged these photos so that when people visited Facemash.
The site also maintained a list of Harvard students, ranked by attractiveness. On Harvard's politically correct campus, this upset people, and Mark was soon hauled in front of Harvard's disciplinary board for students.
According to a November 19, Harvard Crimson article , he was charged with breaching security, violating copyrights, and violating individual privacy. Happily for Mark, the article reports that he wasn't expelled. The second reason everyone at Harvard knew about Facemash and Mark Zuckerberg was that Facemash had been an instant hit.
The same Harvard Crimson story reports that after two weeks, "the site had been visited by people, who voted at least 22, times. It was for this ability to build a wildly popular site that Victor Gao first recommended Mark to Cameron, Tyler, and Divya.
Sold on Mark, the Harvard Connection trio reached out to him. Mark agreed to meet. They first met in an early evening in late November in the dining hall of Harvard College's Kirkland House. Cameron, Tyler, and Divya brought up their idea for Harvard Connection, and described their plans to A build the site for Harvard students only, by requiring new users to register with Harvard.
Mark reportedly showed enthusiastic interest in the project. Later that night, Mark wrote an email to the Winklevoss brothers and Divya: "I read over all the stuff you sent and it seems like it shouldn't take too long to implement, so we can talk about that after I get all the basic functionality up tomorrow night. By the end of , Facebook had 1 million users. In , Zuckerberg's enterprise received a huge boost from the venture capital firm Accel Partners. Zuckerberg's company then granted access to other colleges, high school and international schools, pushing the site's membership to more than 5.
The site began attracting the interest of other companies that wanted to advertise with the popular social hub. Not wanting to sell out, Zuckerberg turned down offers from companies such as Yahoo! Instead, he focused on expanding the site, opening up his project to outside developers and adding more features.
Zuckerberg seemed to be going nowhere but up. However, in , the business mogul faced his first big hurdle: the creators of Harvard Connection claimed that Zuckerberg stole their idea, and insisted the software developer needed to pay for their business losses.
Zuckerberg maintained that the ideas were based on two very different types of social networks. After lawyers searched Zuckerberg's records, incriminating instant messages revealed that Zuckerberg may have intentionally stolen the intellectual property of Harvard Connection and offered Facebook users' private information to his friends.
Zuckerberg later apologized for the incriminating messages, saying he regretted them. The critically acclaimed film received eight Academy Award nominations. Mezrich was heavily criticized for his re-telling of Zuckerberg's story, which used invented scenes, re-imagined dialogue and fictional characters. Zuckerberg objected strongly to the film's narrative, and later told a reporter at The New Yorker that many of the details in the film were inaccurate.
For example, Zuckerberg had been dating his longtime girlfriend since He also said he was never interested in joining any of the final clubs. Yet Zuckerberg and Facebook continued to succeed, in spite of the criticism. Time magazine named him Person of the Year in , and Vanity Fair placed him at the top of their New Establishment list.
After the initial success of the IPO, the Facebook stock price dropped somewhat in the early days of trading, though Zuckerberg is expected to weather any ups and downs in his company's market performance.
In , Facebook made the Fortune list for the first time—making Zuckerberg, at the age of 28, the youngest CEO on the list. Zuckerberg was criticized for the proliferation of fake news posts on his site leading up to the U. In early , he announced a personal challenge to develop improved methods for defending Facebook users from abuse and interference by nation-states. Previous personal challenges began in New Year's and have included only eating meat he killed himself and learning to speak Mandarin.
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