The man who invented facebook

Zuckerberg developed an interest in computers at an early age; when he was about 12, he used Atari BASIC to create a messaging program he named "Zucknet.

The family also used Zucknet to communicate within the house. Together with his friends, he also created computer games just for fun. To keep up with Zuckerberg's burgeoning interest in computers, his parents hired private computer tutor David Newman to come to the house once a week and work with Zuckerberg.

Newman later told reporters that it was hard to stay ahead of the prodigy, who began taking graduate courses at nearby Mercy College around this same time.

Zuckerberg later studied at Phillips Exeter Academy , an exclusive preparatory school in New Hampshire. There he showed talent in fencing, becoming the captain of the school's team. He also excelled in literature, earning a diploma in classics.

Yet Zuckerberg remained fascinated by computers and continued to work on developing new programs. While still in high school, he created an early version of the music software Pandora, which he called Synapse. Several companies—including AOL and Microsoft—expressed an interest in buying the software, and hiring the teenager before graduation. He declined the offers. After graduating from Exeter in , Zuckerberg enrolled at Harvard University.

After his sophomore year, Zuckerberg dropped out of college to devote himself to his new company, Facebook, full time. By his sophomore year at the Ivy League institution, he had developed a reputation as the go-to software developer on campus.

It was at that time that he built a program called CourseMatch, which helped students choose their classes based on the course selections of other users. He also invented Facemash, which compared the pictures of two students on campus and allowed users to vote on which one was more attractive.

The program became wildly popular, but was later shut down by the school administration after it was deemed inappropriate. Based on the buzz of his previous projects, three of his fellow students—Divya Narendra, and twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss—sought him out to work on an idea for a social networking site they called Harvard Connection.

This site was designed to use information from Harvard's student networks in order to create a dating site for the Harvard elite. Zuckerberg agreed to help with the project, but soon dropped out to work on his own social networking site, The Facebook. Zuckerberg and his friends Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes and Eduardo Saverin created The Facebook, a site that allowed users to create their own profiles, upload photos, and communicate with other users.

The group ran the site out of a dorm room at Harvard University until June That year Zuckerberg dropped out of college and moved the company to Palo Alto, California.

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. Gordon, Philip. Global Events: Tipping Points. Guynn, Jessica.

Carson, Biz. Actively scan device characteristics for identification. Use precise geolocation data. Select personalised content. Create a personalised content profile. Measure ad performance. Select basic ads. Create a personalised ads profile. 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, But the real "first investor" claim to fame should actually belong to a Harvard classmate of Mark Zuckerberg's named Eduardo Saverin.

To picture Eduardo, what you need to know is that he was the kid at Harvard who would wear a suit to class. He liked to give people the impression that he was rich — and maybe somehow connected to the Brazilian mafia. At one point, in an IM exchange, Mark told a friend that Eduardo — "head of the investment society" — was rich because "apparently insider trading isn't illegal in Brazil.

Eduardo Saverin wasn't directly involved with Facebook for long: During the summer of , when Mark moved to Palo Alto to work on Facebook full time, Eduardo took a high-paying internship at Lehman Brothers in New York.

While Mark was still at Harvard, however, Eduardo appears to have bankrolled Facebook's earliest capital expenses, thus becoming its initial investor. In January, however, Mark told a friend that "Eduardo is paying for my servers. In December, , a week after Mark's first meeting with the HarvardConnection team, when he was telling the Winklevosses that he was too busy with schoolwork to work on or even think about HarvardConnection.

Check this site out: www. Someone is already trying to make a dating site. But they made a mistake haha. They asked me to make it for them. So I'm like delaying it so it won't be ready until after the facebook thing comes out. This IM suggests that, within a week of meeting with the Winklevosses for the first time, Mark had already decided to start his own, similar project--"the facebook thing.

A few weeks after the initial meeting with the HarvardConnection team, after Mark sent the IM to Eduardo Saverin talking about developing "the facebook thing" and delaying his development of HarvardConnection, Mark met with the HarvardConnection folks, Cameron, Tyler, and Divya, for a second time. This time, instead of meeting in the dining hall of Mark's residential hall, Kirkland House, the four met in Mark's dorm room.

Divya is said to have arrived late. In Kirkland House, the dorm rooms aren't laid out in cinder-block-cube style: Mark's room had a narrow hallway connecting it to his neighbor's.

As Cameron and Tyler sat down on a couch in Mark's room, Cameron spotted something in the hallway. On top of a bookshelf there was a white board.

It was the kind Web developers and product managers everywhere use to map out their ideas. On it, Cameron read two words, "Harvard Connection. Immediately, Mark asked Cameron to stay out of the hallway. Eventually Divya arrived and the four of them talked about plans for Harvard Connection. One feature Mark brought up was designed to keep more popular and sought-after Harvard Connection users from being stalked and harassed by crowds of people. In this second meeting, Mark still appeared to be actively engaged in developing Harvard Connection.

But he never showed the HarvardConnection folks any site prototypes or code. And they didn't insist on seeing them. During the weeks in which Mark was juggling the two projects in tandem, he also had a series of IM exchanges with a friend named Adam D'Angelo above. Adam and Mark went to boarding school together at Phillips Exeter Academy. There, the pair became friends and coding partners. Together they built a program called Synapse, a music player that supposedly learned the listener's taste and then adapted to it.

But the pair stayed in close touch, especially through AOL instant messenger. Through the Harvard Connection-Facebook saga and its aftermath, Mark kept Adam apprised of his plans and thoughts.

One purported IM exchange seems particularly relevant on the question of how Mark distinguished between the two projects--the "facebook thing" and "the dating site"--as well as how he was considering handling the latter:. Zuck: Because they're probably going to be released around the same time. Zuck: Unless I fuck the dating site people over and quit on them right before I told them I'd have it done.

Zuck: Like I don't think people would sign up for the facebook thing if they knew it was for dating. Zuck: and I think people are skeptical about joining dating things too. Zuck: But the guy doing the dating thing is going to promote it pretty well.

Zuck: I think the Facebook thing by itself would draw many people, unless it were released at the same time as the dating thing. Zuck: In which case both things would cancel each other out and nothing would win.

Any ideas? Like is there a good way to consolidate the two. D'Angelo: We could make it into a whole network like a friendster. Stanford has something like that internally Zuck: Well I was thinking of doing that for the facebook. The only thing that's different about theirs is that you like request dates with people or connections with the facebook you don't do that via the system.

Zuck: I also hate the fact that I'm doing it for other people haha. Like I hate working under other people. I feel like the right thing to do is finish the facebook and wait until the last day before I'm supposed to have their thing ready and then be like "look yours isn't as good as this so if you want to join mine you can…otherwise I can help you with yours later.

Zuck: The thing is they have a programmer who could finish their thing and they have money to pour into advertising and stuff. Oh wait I have money too. My friend who wants to sponsor this is head of the investment society.

Apparently insider trading isn't illegal in Brazil so he's rich lol. We believe he also had many IM exchanges about it with relatives and a close female Harvard friend. In January , Mark met with the Winklevoss brothers and Divya Narendra for what would be the last time.

The meeting was on January 14, , and it was held at the same place Mark met with the HarvardConnection team for the first time — in the dining hall of Mark's residence, Kirkland House. By this point, Mark's site, thefacebook.