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Revision as of 09:18, 7 March 2006 by Leki (talk | contribs) (more from old version)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)Mark Zuckerberg (born May 14, 1984) is a computer programmer who is known for creating the Facebook, an online social networking directory used by over 2.5 million students at over 800 academic institutions in the United States.
Early life
Zuckerberg was raised in Dobbs Ferry, New York and began computer programming in sixth grade. Zuckerberg attended Ardsley High School but by his junior year he had transferred to Phillips Exeter Academy. For his senior project at Exeter, he and a friend, Adam D’Angelo, coded a plugin for the Winamp music player that tracked a user's listening paterns and created a playlist that tried to predict what a user wanted to listen to next. The plugin, Synapse, was featured on Slashdot and the pair were approached by America Online, Winamp, Microsoft and other interested companies. According to Zuckerberg, one company interested in buying Synapse apparently gave the pair "an offer that was like two million," but the pair were not interested in selling at the time.
College years
Zuckerberg attended Harvard University and was enrolled in the class of '06. At Harvard, Zuckerberg continued creating projects. An early project, Coursematch, allowed students to view lists of other students enrolled in the same classes. A later project, Facemash.com, was a Harvard-specific image rating site similar to Am I Hot or Not. A beta version of the site was online for four hours before Zuckerberg's internet access was revoked by administration officials. The computer services department brought Zuckerberg before the Harvard University Administrative Board where he was charged with breaching security, violating copyrights and violating individual privacy. The plaintiffs alleged that Zuckerberg had hacked into House websites to harvest images of students without their permission. The action taken by the board, if any, was not made public.
Facebook is a social networking service for high school, college, and university communities, that allows users to create personal profiles, typically containing photos and lists of interests, exchange private or public messages, and join groups of friends. Zuckerberg started thefacebook.com as a social networking site for Harvard students in February 2004. The website spread across the Harvard campus and within a few weeks, over half the undergraduate population had registered. By the end of February, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes had joined Zuckerberg to spread the website. Within two months, Facebook expanded to allow students from the rest of the Ivy League and other prominent universities to register. It became something of a network phenomenon, spreading rapidly to other schools, despite some competition from similar, local websites. By December 2004, the number of registered users exceeded one million.
As the website’s popularity rose and advertising revenue grew, Zuckerberg and Moskovitz left Harvard to run Facebook fulltime. The pair recruited staff, including Sean Parker and Matt Cohler.
In late 2004, the owners of the website ConnectU (Divya Narendra, Cameron Winklevoss, and Tyler Winklevoss), another social networking website targeted towards college students, filed a lawsuit against Facebook, alleging that Zuckerberg had stolen source code intended for their website while in their employ .
Facebook is available to users from 2,000+ universities and 25,000+ American high schools. Facebook has offices in Palo Alto, California and in Boston, Massachusetts.
See also
References
- Mark E. Zuckerberg ’06: The whiz behind thefacebook.com - by Michael M. Grynbaum, The Harvard Crimson, June 10, 2004
External links
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