The Facebook Origin Story
I’m not the only one linking to this article right now, but in the wake of Mark Zuckerberg’s recent attempts to rewrite the Facebook origin story, it seems a good time to remind ourselves exactly how the company came to be.
Katharine Kaplan, writing for The Harvard Crimson in 2003:
Mark E. Zuckerberg ’06 said he was accused of breaching security, violating copyrights and violating individual privacy by creating the website, www.facemash.com, about two weeks ago. The charges were based on a complaint from the computer services department over his unauthorized use of on-line facebook* photographs, he said.
“I understood that some parts were still a little sketchy.“ “Issues about violating people’s privacy don’t seem to be surmountable,” he wrote at that point.
Students were ranked within the general Harvard community and individual Houses according to attractiveness. Zuckerberg hacked into House websites to gather the photos, and then wrote the codes to compute rankings after every vote. The programming and algorithms that made the site function were Zuckerberg’s primary interest in creating it, he said.
He’s clearly still interested in algorithms. Facebook is clearly still sketchy. He clearly doesn’t understand the concept of privacy. Is it a coincidence that Zuckerberg was born in 1984? Probably not.