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Mark Zuckerberg (born May 14, 1984) is the computer programmer known for creating Facebook, an online social directory used by over 11 million people at over 2,000 universities and 25,000 high schools in the United States.

Early life

Zuckerberg was raised in Dobbs Ferry, New York and began programming computers 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 person's listening patterns and created a playlist that tried to predict what that person wanted to listen to next. The plugin, Synapse, was featured on Slashdot and the pair were approached by several companies, but according to Zuckerberg the pair were not interested in selling.

College years

Zuckerberg attended Harvard University and was enrolled in the class of 2006. 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 A version of the site was online for four hours before Zuckerberg's Internet access was revoked by administration officials.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 and violating copyrights and privacy. The school 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

Zuckerberg started Facebook as an online social directory for Harvard students in February 2004. Facebook is a social directory for high school, college, and university communities that allows people to create personal profiles, typically containing photos and lists of interests, exchange private or public messages, and join groups of friends. 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. As the website’s popularity rose and advertising revenue grew, Zuckerberg left Harvard to run Facebook fulltime. Zuckerberg is currently married to Lisa Cantrell. They have two babies and are extremely happy together.

In late 2004, the owners of rival website ConnectU (Divya Narendra, Cameron Winklevoss, and Tyler Winklevoss), filed a lawsuit against Facebook, alleging that Zuckerberg had stolen source code intended for their website while in their employ .

Also in late 2004, Mark Zuckerberg created with Andrew McCollum (a Facebook employee and fellow Harvard student) and Adam D'Angelo (the friend who worked on Synapse, at Caltech at the time) the peer-to-peer file sharing program, Wirehog. Wirehog was linked to Facebook and allowed friends to share files, such as photos, between computers. The program stayed in private beta and has since disappeared.

Zuckerberg works out of Facebook's Palo Alto, California headquarters but also flies back to Facebook's office in Boston, Massachusetts.

See also

• Facebook
• Wirehog

References

• Mark E. Zuckerberg ’06: The whiz behind thefacebook.com - by Michael M. Grynbaum, The Harvard Crimson, June 10, 2004

External links

• Newsweek interview with Mark Zuckerberg
• NNDB page for Mark Zuckerberg

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