How Facebook Was Founded: The Untold Story

March 10, 2010 6:46 AM

How Facebook Was Founded
posted by jefficator (60 comments total)

untold? I though it was common knowledge that Zuckerberg's a scumbag.
posted by leotrotsky at 6:52 AM on March 10, 2010 [2 favorites]

I thought it involved a virgin and a mirror made of tears and a shaman's knife made fromthe last Mastodon tusk.
posted by The Whelk at 7:04 AM on March 10, 2010 [9 favorites]

I just navigated from Facebook to Metafilter and this was the first thing I saw on the top of the front page. Heh.
posted by orange swan at 7:06 AM on March 10, 2010

It makes me wonder how they got these IM conversations.
posted by codacorolla at 7:09 AM on March 10, 2010

Please, let's not debate the disgruntled litigants and anonymous sources who seek to rewrite Facebook’s early history or embarrass Mark Zuckerberg with dated allegations.
posted by soy bean at 7:11 AM on March 10, 2010 [1 favorite]

Zuckerberg still developed and architected the first build - everyone has ideas, but execution is everything. I suppose he used someone else's money (money meant for his actual clients) to develop the prototype, and actively ran interference against his "clients" and... yeah, he's a creep. But Facebook itself is all his.
posted by KokuRyu at 7:12 AM on March 10, 2010 [5 favorites]

There's not enough poor people getting screwed here. I'm still waiting for the story where Zuckerberg and these preppy rowers were in turn outsourcing to a South Boston kid. But now you have a asshole from Philips Exeter who thinks he's entitled to whatever he can take and some Greenwich kids who had more money than sense and thought they could pay someone to do all the work for them. I'm not really connecting with any of the characters here.

I mean Christ, the protagonist here is someone who can say with a straight face that they're an Olympic rower who grew up in Connecticut and now attends Oxford's MBA program. Did he step out of fucking "Match Point" or something?
posted by geoff. at 7:13 AM on March 10, 2010 [14 favorites]

I don't really get the criticism of Zuckerberg for this. I mean, I think he's a douchebag, no doubt.

But how exactly do those other guys feel like he owes them anything? They had an idea for a site but

1) They didn't know how to program it
2) They didn't seem to have any interest in actually paying Zuckerberg for his code, they didn't have any formal agreements, etc.

I mean really their original idea wasn't even remotely unique. Tons of people were creating social networking sites, and had been for years. Friendster started in 2002.

So they talked to Zuckerberg for a couple days, then he stopped talking to them. And then a couple of months later he launched his own similar site. So what? Why does he owe them anything? They didn't give him anything?

It makes me wonder how they got these IM conversations.

The Winklevoss's sued facebook at some point, and they got a large settlement. They want to take credit for the site, so I imagine they're giving this stuff out to anyone who will listen.
posted by delmoi at 7:18 AM on March 10, 2010 [4 favorites]

I've been watching this Business Insider campaign for a week now: no traction.

I have no idea why they're going long on this story, but I can surmise a couple of thoughts on the apathy surrounding it:

Even though nobody, aside from Facebook's press team, is going to come out in defense of Zuckerberg, a kid who trumped everyone in the internets business, absolutely no one is going to come out in defense of three idea guys who's accumulated expertise resulted in no execution. It goes contrary to the ethos of the community.

Is Zuckerberg a douche for reading people's email? Yeah, he is, but all he did was get granular on the types of activities the US engages in as a whole, activities that make douchebags out of all of us.
posted by jsavimbi at 7:21 AM on March 10, 2010

I thought it involved a virgin and a mirror made of tears and a shaman's knife made fromthe last Mastodon tusk.

I think that's what Twitter uses these days to appease the Fail Whale.
posted by permafrost at 7:21 AM on March 10, 2010 [6 favorites]

Sounds like a nastier version of Bill Gates.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 7:24 AM on March 10, 2010 [2 favorites]

delmoi FTW. Nobody owes you anything for an idea.
posted by rusty at 7:25 AM on March 10, 2010

Oh, hahah. Zuckerberg was actually working on facebook before the "HarvardConnect" thing

Check this site out: www.harvardconnection.com and then go to harvardconnection.com/datehome.php. 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.

That's pretty funny.
posted by delmoi at 7:30 AM on March 10, 2010

I should say though, stringing these guys along like this was a duchy thing to do. But they also seem pretty lame themselves. It isn't like HarvardConnect was going to become what facebook became. Maybe it would have been slightly more popular on campus or something, but really.

The whole reason for formal agreements for things like this is not only to prevent getting ripped off, but also to prevent people from coming after you and claiming because they had a conversation with you, you owe them everything.

Sounds like a nastier version of Bill Gates.

Actually, he sounds pretty similar to Steve Jobs.
posted by delmoi at 7:35 AM on March 10, 2010

yeah, he's a creep. But Facebook itself is all his.

REDUNDANCYBOT HAS DETECTED SOMETHING
posted by DU at 7:39 AM on March 10, 2010 [2 favorites]

The stories about Zuckerberg hacking into rivals email systems is more interesting, though.
posted by delmoi at 7:40 AM on March 10, 2010 [1 favorite]

Pretty much every successful company I know about has some awkwardness in the foundation story. There's always a Pete Best that was there at the start but everyone would rather not talk about, a few George Martins who did real work but don't get much credit, and legions of people who have delusions they were the Fifth Beatle that made the magic work.

That's why it's so important that startups get the legal stuff right, from the very start. Way too much heartache in the handshakes and "understandings" that are common. OTOH lawyers are expensive and distracting and you're much better off spending the time actually building a product. The only solution to this Catch 22 is to work ethically with people you truly trust. Even then it often ends up going badly.

The quoted emails from Zuckerberg sound awfully unethical. Not just an awkward beginning, but a deliberate attempt to shut out some folks who thought they were working together with him. It's all ancient history now, a matter for lawyers, but if you ever plan to start something that might get big you can learn from it.
posted by Nelson at 7:46 AM on March 10, 2010 [7 favorites]

Please, let's not debate the disgruntled litigants and anonymous sources who seek to rewrite Facebook’s early history or embarrass Mark Zuckerberg with dated allegations.-- soy bean

Yeah because everyone knows that allegations become null and void once they become dated (even if they are supported by more recently discovered IM logs). It's the playground rule!



I don't really get the criticism of Zuckerberg for this. I mean, I think he's a douchebag, no doubt.

But how exactly do those other guys feel like he owes them anything? They had an idea for a site but

1) They didn't know how to program it
2) They didn't seem to have any interest in actually paying Zuckerberg for his code, they didn't have any formal agreements, etc.
--delmo

The article mentions paying the previous programmer, which implies they were paying him. I'm really puzzled by this logic. By definition if you are hired to do programming, then the person hiring you isn't doing the programming themselves. Do you therefore own all the programming you are doing? Do the people who work for Microsoft own Microsoft Word? Really questionable ethics being promoted here.
posted by eye of newt at 7:48 AM on March 10, 2010 [1 favorite]

I'm sure the Winklevoss twins honestly think they have an important story here. They had an idea for a social site, and that dastardly Zuckerberg snatched their success like the thieving brat he is! That's how every single person who's never tried to make a web site thinks the Internet works. They're not idiots, but they're very, very misguided.

The thing with design is, the original idea doesn't matter much. There're lots of great ideas for web sites that've been tried and which completely bombed. Facebook wasn't a brilliant idea in and of itself. What mattered was the way it got executed, which was all Zuckerberg's doing. It was his design choices that made the site so addicting, and that've made it the second most-visited site on the planet.

I do web design. I launched a social network last year (well, kind of a social network) that got a thousand sign-ups in a day. So I have a reputation among my group of friends as That Guy Who Makes Popular Things. But when I sit down to work on things with friends, it becomes pretty obvious that most of them see the Internet not as a large group of people, each of whom is trying to go on with his or her life, but rather as a pile of money that you can just take whenever you want.

It's kind of pathetic. "We'll make a news site. People will pay you money if you tell them the news, right?" But I'm certain that if, say, I come up with some brilliant idea for selling the news and it makes money, I'll be accused of plagiarism by the "make a news site" friend. Because it's news! That was his idea!

As far as implementation and marketing is concerned, Mark Zuckerberg's a genius. He's been a role model of mine for years, ever since I worked with a team working on a similar project. Say what you will about his being a dweeb and an ass and a Steve Jobs wannabe, he's shown a remarkable determination for having his way with Facebook, and he's turned it into one of the largest enterprises online.

Is it surprising that he sounded like a jerk 19-year-old when he was 19? Only if you're the sort of person that thinks you can't be a brilliant entrepreneur and also be human. People are people. It's not a crime.
posted by Rory Marinich at 7:52 AM on March 10, 2010 [8 favorites]

From the article: Bottom line, we haven't seen anything that makes us think that, whatever Mark did to the Harvard Connection folks, it was worth more than the $65 million they received in the lawsuit settlement. In fact, this seems like a huge sum of money considering that the entire dispute took place over two months in 2004 and that, in the six years since, Mark has built Facebook into a massive global enterprise.

I will gladly allow any of you to rip off any of my ideas for a $65,000,000 payoff in 5 years. Most of them are at least as good as a college dating site.
posted by The Deej at 7:55 AM on March 10, 2010 [5 favorites]

The quoted emails from Zuckerberg sound awfully unethical. Not just an awkward beginning, but a deliberate attempt to shut out some folks who thought they were working together with him. It's all ancient history now, a matter for lawyers, but if you ever plan to start something that might get big you can learn from it.

Ugh, you make it sound like ethics and morality are merely a matter of pragmatics. "Make sure you don't screw people over because things might get complicated!" And "ancient history now" sounds like the reason we keep letting the GOP off the hook. (At least you had the grace to indicate it was a matter for lawyers, unlike the Democrats.)
posted by DU at 8:03 AM on March 10, 2010

I believe it was Machiavelli who said that every empire begins with fratricide.

Emphasis here on the frat, I suppose.
posted by oneironaut at 8:14 AM on March 10, 2010 [8 favorites]

I think it is really important, when digesting this story, to put it in context. It is not like these kids were working in a lab and realized they stumbled upon the discovery of the microchip. What they were doing was not novel or innovative. Look at it this way, the dating site Harvard Connection. What is the market cap for something like that? Single, alumnis of Harvard who are willing to pay for a dating site and only want to date other Harvardians. Small beans. Zuckerberg's site was also small beans.

But that's fine, sometimes things take off and there's no real reason for it. Some things are really obvious, like Watt's steam engine, but the vast majority of things taking off occur for no real reason at all. Zuckerberg was simply at the right place at the right time.

And if the stars didn't align to make Facebook take off where others have failed, we'd probably only know Zuckerberg as the programmer at Morgan Stanley who doesn't seem to understand why anyone at the office likes him.
posted by geoff. at 8:15 AM on March 10, 2010 [2 favorites]

anyone at the office likes him. should be, "no one at the office ..."
posted by geoff. at 8:18 AM on March 10, 2010

I agree that an idea in itself has little value, but surely the exact context in which an idea is first executed can have a lot of bearing on its future success. And it does seem here that Zuckerberg was manipulating that moment in a way that, if the HarvardConnect people had been more scrupulous about signed agreements, would have been a straight-up act of sue-able ripoff. Sure, they should have been more scrupulous, but the moral point stands.
posted by game warden to the events rhino at 8:19 AM on March 10, 2010

Zuckerberg was simply at the right place at the right time.

And he was fortunate that people were beginning to realize how much MySpace sucked.
posted by The Deej at 8:21 AM on March 10, 2010 [1 favorite]

To me, the main thing isn't that he stole an idea, it's that he was involved in both projects and sandbagged one to promote his own. And the weird thing is that it doesn't even seem like he needed to sandbag harvardconnect - it's just a petty and scummy thing for a person to do.
posted by codacorolla at 8:25 AM on March 10, 2010

Is it wrong that I want all of the characters involved to suffer?
posted by 1adam12 at 8:28 AM on March 10, 2010 [3 favorites]

delmoi: "The stories about Zuckerberg hacking into rivals email systems is more interesting, though."

I agree, but the article about how he hacked ConnectU is incredibly vague. The one about using facebook logins to access members' e-mail accounts is pretty damning, I'd think.
posted by graventy at 8:38 AM on March 10, 2010 [1 favorite]

By definition if you are hired to do programming, then the person hiring you isn't doing the programming themselves. Do you therefore own all the programming you are doing? Do the people who work for Microsoft own Microsoft Word? Really questionable ethics being promoted here.

Actually, no. Unless you have signed a contract stating that you are doing "work for hire" then a programmer retains all rights to the code she creates. So if Zuckerberg was not under a work for hire agreement, he legally has as much right to use the code as the people who paid him to write it.

That said, I'm sure Zuckerberg is crying himself to sleep at night in his huge sacks of cash.
posted by ryoshu at 8:44 AM on March 10, 2010 [1 favorite]

I read on a lunatic local blog just yesterday that the aforementioned lunatic blog is responsible for the code that built FB.
posted by sciurus at 8:48 AM on March 10, 2010

HIDE

two facebook posts in two days... hmmmm
posted by HuronBob at 8:53 AM on March 10, 2010

The most interesting aspect of this story is the apparent fact that Zuckerberg will gleefully violate anyone's privacy if it benefits him and Facebook.
posted by william_boot at 9:33 AM on March 10, 2010 [8 favorites]

Ivy League douches suing other Ivy League douches for douchey tactics. News at 11.

The fact that this is all now a David Fincher movie starring Justin Timberlake and Jesse Eisenberg is just too vomitously perfect.
posted by blucevalo at 9:56 AM on March 10, 2010

Just to clarify, because I didn't read the links. Did Zuckerberg steal the idea for the internets off Al Gore by stealing information from Vince Foster's email?
posted by MuffinMan at 10:06 AM on March 10, 2010 [1 favorite]

The article's weird. What's with "We believe the following IMs were sent" and "one purported IM conversation"? You have the IMs or you don't. Look, it's a game, Zuckerberg one. The other guys can cry all they want with their lawyers. It's how it happens.
posted by xmutex at 10:46 AM on March 10, 2010

Zuckerberg won of course.
posted by xmutex at 10:46 AM on March 10, 2010

Winklevoss Twin powers activate!

Form of, a sack of entitlement!
Form of, a douchebag!
posted by benzenedream at 11:21 AM on March 10, 2010 [2 favorites]

When I was in middle school, I went to privileged smart-kid camp (my parents and I didn't know! Really! We just thought it was good-opportunity-for-smart-kid camp! I'm really not a tool...or rich) at Amherst. Zuckerberg's younger sister was in my dorm group and we were friendly. She was kind of a weirdo, but I guess everyone's kind of a weirdo when they're 13. She was into Wicca stuff and would always talk about how she put spells on people.

Anyway, since these were the days before Facebook, we lost touch after camp. Years later, when I was doing my prospective student overnight thing at the college I eventually attended, I was going on a dormitory tour (coincidentally in the same house of the same dorm I would eventually be placed into). My group was waiting to get on the elevator when the doors opened and who but the same Zuckerberg sister was standing there with a pile of dirty laundry to go down to the basement. We had one of those "are you___? we went to ___ together, right? weird!" awkward exchanges while the doors slowly shut and we went our separate ways.

When I got to school, I learned that the Zuckerberg sister had been in my house the year before, and was one of the few second-years who left for another dorm. (It's a very close-knit housing system.) When I told everyone the camp/elevator story, people all said, "yeah, she's the sister of the Facebook guy...her family is loaded." I saw her a few times in passing on campus, but never had a chance to talk to her again so I don't know if she's still a weirdo.

I think she's married now and is in grad school at Harvard.
posted by phunniemee at 11:28 AM on March 10, 2010 [2 favorites]

Oh, and aside from going through the metal detector in the J. Edgar Hoover building at the same time as Tim Matheson, that been my only brush with fame.
posted by phunniemee at 11:41 AM on March 10, 2010

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." Or do you think that's too dick?

1) What "the right thing" means to him is, like, the opposite of what it means to me.
2) It was too dick.
posted by kirkaracha at 11:44 AM on March 10, 2010 [2 favorites]

Zuckerberg may have not been the nicest 19 year old hotshot computer nerd on the planet, but the people he screwed over did eventually get $65 million out of him. They should be happy, and they should move on.
posted by spilon at 12:04 PM on March 10, 2010 [2 favorites]

The article mentions paying the previous programmer, which implies they were paying him. I'm really puzzled by this logic. By definition if you are hired to do programming, then the person hiring you isn't doing the programming themselves. Do you therefore own all the programming you are doing?

Well, they certainly don't own the programming they're not paying me for. That's why people have intellectual property agreements and hiring contracts. If you've got an informal "understanding" with someone, then you can't run around and claim you own anything they create ever for the rest of eternity.

As far as I'm concerned, you "own" the code you write unless you explicitly sign something saying who owns the code, or you're a non-contract employee writing code at an office, on employer's machines.

(Also, the fact that they were paying the other programmer doesn't mean they were paying Zuckerberg)

Do the people who work for Microsoft own Microsoft Word?

You don't think they have ironclad IP agreements, and clearly specified employment contracts at Microsoft?

Zuckerberg may have not been the nicest 19 year old hotshot computer nerd on the planet, but the people he screwed over did eventually get $65 million out of him.

They didn't get a cash payout, they got stock. Which means now they're invested in Facebook's future, and how it values stocks, whether it dilutes them, etc.
posted by delmoi at 12:39 PM on March 10, 2010

Just sounds like everyday business to me.

Which doesn't mean it's not douchey.
posted by showmethecalvino at 2:41 PM on March 10, 2010

Sounds like a nastier version of Bill Gates.

Then you must have missed Pirates of Silicon Valley (up in parts on YT). Bill Gates is totally more of a jerk than Zuckerberg.
posted by filthy light thief at 3:34 PM on March 10, 2010 [1 favorite]

I just like saying 'winklevoss'.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 5:43 PM on March 10, 2010

The one about using facebook logins to access members' e-mail accounts is pretty damning, I'd think.

Mark used his site, TheFacebook.com, to look up members of the site who identified themselves as members of the Crimson. Then he examined a log of failed logins to see if any of the Crimson members had ever entered an incorrect password into TheFacebook.com. If the cases in which they had entered failed logins, Mark tried to use them to access the Crimson members' Harvard email accounts. He successfully accessed two of them.

It is clear that the events described above would be a direct violation of Facebook's current policy, which has now been in place for several years. The policy was not in place at the time of the events described above. *

I didn't get this: who care's about Facebook's policy? What about Harvard's policy & the federal statutes on wire fraud? This is a *jailable* offense.
posted by morganw at 5:57 PM on March 10, 2010 [2 favorites]

This is precisely why I know anything at all about websites, design, programming, etc. - when I have an idea, I like to try and execute it myself. If it requires someone else to accomplish, I have to consider "is it SO good an idea that it's worth finding someone else to bring along, even if it means giving up a portion of the (assumedly large) profits?".

So far, I can only think of one idea that even fits that description and I'm working on it now. I've hired a programmer whom I've worked with at 2 different jobs in the past, I record all of our IM, phone, and personal conversations (with his knowledge, of course). Our first conversation about it began with me saying "I'm recording this call and I'd like you state your name for the record", which he agreed to; neither of us are out to fuck the other one over, but at least we're both covered now. For what it's worth - I'm providing all marketing materials, design, iconography, layout mechanisms, spec sheets, and a bunch of other things; pretty much everything but the underlying code. I'm not just saying "here's an idea! get it done!".

I'm in agreement with most people here - the idea these guys came to "Zuck" with wasn't altogether that original (certainly not $65 mil original) and ideas are very much free. I can spout off ideas all day long, but if I don't work towards executing said ideas they may as well be the drunken ramblings of a lunatic. If it was such a good idea, these guys would've tried harder to protect it. My bet is they thought "this might be kind of fun, and give us some campus cred and maybe a couple of bucks in our pockets". Zuckerberg's idea was much grander a vision, and worth protecting even at the cost of fucking over a client.

For them to come back all these years and billions of ad dollars later to claim "he stole our idea!" is far more dishonest and douchy than anything Zuck was doing.
posted by revmitcz at 6:31 PM on March 10, 2010

I didn't get this: who care's about Facebook's policy? What about Harvard's policy & the federal statutes on wire fraud? This is a *jailable* offense.

In theory. But the FBI wouldn't get involved unless there was a huge financial cost to the hacking. The worst trouble you'd get into would be to school discipline, maybe expelled. Seems really unlikely they'd come back and do anything now.

The other hacking instance seems like it might have been part of why the Winklevoss's settlement was so huge.

I think part of the reason why people aren't more sympathetic to Winklevoss's is that they just seem like such douchebags. Who wants to side with some rich entitled future MBA toolbags who were too lazy and incompetent to write their own software in the first place, and just tried to get someone else to do it for them. People who were born rich and wanted to buy success instead of actually creating it themselves.

At one point, Mark appears to have exploited a flaw in ConnectU's account verification process to create a fake Cameron Winklevoss account with a fake Harvard.edu email address.

In this new, fake profile, he listed Cameron's height as 7'4", his hair color as "Ayran Blond," and his eye color as "Sky Blue." He listed Cameron's "language" as "WASP-y."

Heh.
posted by delmoi at 6:56 PM on March 10, 2010

Behind every great fortune lies a crime.
posted by warbaby at 7:28 PM on March 10, 2010

I'm sure it's a great link, but I'm lazy and just going to wait for the movie starring Justin Timberlake.
posted by b2walton at 8:08 PM on March 10, 2010

The Social Network
posted by b2walton at 8:12 PM on March 10, 2010

...who were too lazy and incompetent to write their own software in the first place, and just tried to get someone else to do it for them

Everybody who has ever hired a programmer is lazy and incompetent?

At one point, Mark appears to have exploited a flaw in ConnectU's account verification process to create a fake Cameron Winklevoss account with a fake Harvard.edu email address.

You can't create a "fake" harvard.edu address. This isn't gmail. Every address is tied to a student id in a 1-1 relationship. So, I guess he could have "claimed" Cameron Winklevoss' account and perhaps thats what they mean...
posted by vacapinta at 2:07 AM on March 11, 2010

You can't create a "fake" harvard.edu address

Sure you can: [e-mail]. See? If there's no verification email, or you can deduce the code, then you have a functioning account with a defunct, fake, email.
posted by FuManchu at 4:14 AM on March 11, 2010 [1 favorite]

And you know, I'm not such a hater of facebook, but I'm always surprised when people talk as if it brought something new to the internet. When it started, the only thing really unique about it was its exclusivity. Had it been open to everyone when it first opened, I doubt many of the Ivy Leaguers who helped establish the network effects would have joined. It's the "you can't join" business model, well established for years.

The guys he screwed over weren't just trying to establish yet-another-networking site, either, from what I've read. They were ready to spend lots of cash on events and promotion. It sounds dumb in retrospect, but at the time it was a good theory of how to establish a strong membership base in a small community.

I'm surprised that the guys made off with millions from the lawsuit, but I'm also surprised so many people think Zuckerberg did much original.
posted by FuManchu at 4:26 AM on March 11, 2010

I'd agree that he didn't do anything very original, and would add that his genius mostly seems to have consisted of doing what every other developer in the world with a passing interest in social networks was doing at the time, but at Harvard. Lots of people can come up with ideas, and some people can execute them, but only in the white-hot reactor core of ambition that is Harvard would an embryonic social enabler seem like something worth contending, even while still in vitro. All those guys, both the douches that couldn't code and the douche that could, had from the outset a firm grasp of the fact that a social net birthed in the center of the Ivy League galaxy would eventually be a very valuable thing.
posted by $0up at 5:19 AM on March 11, 2010

I'm sure it's a great link, but I'm lazy and just going to wait for the movie starring Justin Timberlake.... The Social Network

Wait, Release Date: 15 October 2010 (USA)? You weren't kidding? The only social networking movie I need had users with handles like "Acid Burn" and "Crash Override".
posted by filthy light thief at 5:36 AM on March 11, 2010

As a Harvardian who was pitched endlessly by one social network after another, I can tell you that a social net for Ivy League students were a dime a dozen, even earlier.
posted by vacapinta at 5:39 AM on March 11, 2010

xmutex: "The article's weird. What's with "We believe the following IMs were sent" and "one purported IM conversation"? You have the IMs or you don't."

Unless there's some sort of central repository (and even them) IM conversations are ridiculously easy to fake. So, they most likely have them, but can't fully rely on their authenticity.
posted by graventy at 8:37 AM on March 12, 2010

even then, rather.
posted by graventy at 8:38 AM on March 12, 2010