The founder of Facebook is a young American man who goes by the name Mark Zuckerberg. Well, that is his name. Whilst it is Zuckerberg who is generally considered the websites founder, he actually co-founded the site with his university classmates Dustin Moskovitz, Eduardo Saverin, and Chris Hughes. They were not just any old bunch of classmates of course, they were Harvard students. Zuckerberg was born in White Plains, New York, on May 14th 1985 - making him just 25 at the time of me writing this page. His current net worth is estimated at $2bn and Time Magazine named him one of The World's Most Influential People of 2008, ranking at 52nd out of 101 in the 'Scientists & Thinkers' category.
Mark Zuckerberg Biography
Zuckerberg was born in White Plains, New York, and raised in the village of Dobbs Ferry, also New York. He is said to have begun programming whilst still in middle school and enjoyed developing communication tools and games from an early age. He went on to study briefly at Ardsley High School, a public secondary school, before moving on to the independent Phillips Exeter Academy. It was whilst at Phillips Academy that Zuckerberg built several advanced programs. The first was a program to help the workers at his fathers employer to communicate, then came a version of the game Risk, and then a music player called Synapse which learnt the users listening habits using artificial intelligence. Synapse was so advanced that both Microsoft and AOL attempted to purchase the software and recruit Zuckerberg, offers which he subsequently rejected in favour of attending Harvard University.
It was from his dorm room at Harvard, on 4th February 2004, that Zuckerberg launched the first version of Facebook. It initially started as a Harvard only thing, but was so popular amongst the universities students that he soon made moves to spread Facebook to other schools, it was at this point that Zuckerberg brought roommate Dustin Moskovitz on board, and the two spread the site to five other universities including Stanford, Cornell and Yale. It was no time at all before the site was extended to almost every educational institute in the United States. Remember that Zuckerberg was just 19 in February 2004! Zuckerberg soon forgot about Harvard and moved to Palo Alto in California, with Moskovitz and some other friends, renting a small house which served as their home and office. Zuckerberg has never returned to Harvard, instead seeing his company to grow to what it is now - huge!
It was in September 2006 that Zuckerberg and pals rolled out the News Feed on the site, instantly creating controversy and attracting criticism for its stalkerish characteristics. Stalkerbook is still a tag which sticks now of course. It was in 2007 that the website would truly begin to create noise globally, when it launched a Facebook platform, effectively making the site open source (although with certain restrictions and pre-approval measures). Developers worldwide began building applications and it was just a matter of weeks before their were applications with over a million users, there are now some 800,000 developers worldwide building applications for Facebook. I know one of them actually, doesn't seem so special to be associated with him now!
Facebook Inc. sold a 1.6% stake in the business to Microsoft Corporation for some $240m in 2007, suggesting an overall site value of some $15bn, although the sites growth in the years since make it likely that the company is worth much more than that figure now, in December 2009 Facebook claimed that it had 350m users. A movie based on the lives of Zuckerberg and his associates, called 'The Social Network' is set for release at some stage in 2010.
Mark Zuckerberg Controversy
Zuckerberg has not reached the top without controversy, the most significant being doubts over the originality of the idea. Former Harvard classmates Cameron Winklevoss and Tyler Winklevoss claim that Zuckerberg stole their idea for a social networking site whilst he was employed by them to assist with the sites development, the site in question being connectu.com. They filed a lawsuit as early as 2004 but the case was dismissed in March 2007, although it was quickly refiled in Boston, eventually Facebook settled the case for $65m.
