Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been named Time magazine’s “Person of the Year” for 2010.
Facebook is a social network service and website founded by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommates and fellow computer science students Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes, and launched in February 2004 that is operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc.
Being named as TIME Person of the Year is a real honor and recognition of how our little team is building something that hundreds of millions of people want to use to make the world more open and connected. I’m happy to be a part of that.
— Mark Zuckerberg Official Fan Page Wall Post
Facebook membership was initially limited by the founders to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and Stanford University. Facebook gradually added support for students at other universities before opening to high school students, and, finally, to anyone aged 13 and over in 2006.
2004 Facebook incorporated in the summer of 2004.
2005 Facebook started a high school version in 2005.
2006 Facebook opened to everyone over 13-years-old with a valid e-mail address.
2007 Microsoft purchased a 1.6% share of Facebook for $240 million.
2008 Facebook setup international headquarter.
2009 Facebook has positive cash flow for the first time.
2010 Facebook introduced Facebook Messaging — text messaging, instant messaging, emails, and regular messages code-named Project Titan.
On July 21, 2010, Zuckerberg reported that the company reached 500 million-users.
Zuckerberg began using computers and writing software as a child in middle school. His father taught him Atari BASIC Programming in the 1990s, and later hired software developer David Newman to tutor him privately. Newman calls him a “prodigy,” adding that it was “tough to stay ahead of him.” Zuckerberg also took a graduate course in BASIC Programming at Mercy College near his home while he was still in high school. He enjoyed developing computer programs, especially communication tools and games. In one such program, since his father’s dental practice was operated from their home, he built a sofware program he called “ZuckNet,” which allowed all the computers between the house and dental office to communicate by pinging each other. It is considered a “primitive” version of AOL’s Instant Messenger, which came out the following year.
During Zuckerberg’s high school years, under the company name Intelligent Media Group, he built a music player called the Synapse Media Player that used artificial intelligence to learn the user’s listening habits, which was posted to Slashdot and received a rating of 3 out of 5 from PC Magazine.
Microsoft and AOL tried to purchase Synapse and recruit Zuckerberg, but he chose instead to enroll at Harvard College in September 2002.
Zuckerberg majored in computer science and psychology. In his sophomore year, from his dorm room, he built a program he called “CourseMatch,” which allowed users to make class selection decisions based on the choices of other students and also to help them form study groups. He created a different program called “Facemash,” that let users at the college select the best looking person from a choice of photos. Facemash was based on Harvard College Face Books guides for students, which included the names and pictures of everyone who lived in the student dorms. At first, Facemash placed two pictures side-by-side, or pictures of two males and two females side-by-side. Visitors to the site had to choose who was ‘hotter’ and according to the votes there would be a ranking.
Facemash went up in a weekend, crashed Harvard’s servers and was shut down by the University.
Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard College in 2004. Zuckerberg launched Facebook from his Harvard dormitory room on February 4, 2004, and was obsessed and dedicated to creating open information flow for people.
Harvard students Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra accused Zuckerberg of intentionally making them believe he would help them build a social network called HarvardConnection.com (later called ConnectU). They filed a lawsuit in 2004, but it was dismissed on a technicality on March 28, 2007. The suit was refiled soon thereafter in federal court in Boston. Facebook countersued in regards to Social Butterfly, a project put out by The Winklevoss Chang Group, an alleged partnership between ConnectU and i2hub. On June 25, 2008, the case settled and Facebook agreed to transfer over 1.2 million common shares and pay $20 million in cash.
Zuckerberg’s net worth according to Forbes Magazine calculated September 2010 is $6.9 Billion, ranking #35 in the Forbes 400 and #212 in World’s Billionaires. That’s ahead of Steve Jobs, Eric Schmidt, Charles Schwab, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Oprah Winfrey and Steve Wynn; but behind Bill Gates, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, George Soros, Michael Dell, Steve Ballmer, and Jeff Bezos.
See also …
Time Person of the Year 2010
Forbes Mark Zuckerberg