Mark Zuckerberg
Mark Zuckerberg | |
|---|---|
| Occupation | Computer programmer |
Mark Elliot Zuckerberg (born May 14, 1984) is an American computer programmer known for creating Facebook, an online social directory, with the help of Harvard roommates Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. The site is used by over 17 million people at over 2,000 universities, 20,000 high schools, and 2,000 companies around the world.
Early life
Zuckerberg was raised in the Westchester County town of Dobbs Ferry, New York. He began programming computers in sixth grade. Zuckerberg attended Ardsley High School and transferred to Phillips Exeter Academy in his junior year where he took part in lots of "hacking" including stealing his teachers IP adress.
In 2003, Zuckerberg and friend Adam D'Angelo launched the Synapse Media Player. The player received high acclaim in its ability to predict songs to play based on the user's previous selections. Several software companies, including Microsoft, expressed interest in the player, though no formal deal was made. [1]
College years
Zuckerberg attended Harvard University and was enrolled in the class of 2006. At Harvard, Zuckerberg continued creating his 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 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 A version of the site was online for four hours before Zuckerberg's Internet access was revoked by administration officials.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.[2] The school alleged that Zuckerberg had hacked into House websites to harvest images of students without their permission and make money with it. Zuckerberg said he thought that information should be free and publicly available. The action taken by the board, if any, was not made public. In 2004, Zuckerberg made Facebook, took a leave of absence from the college, and a year later dropped out.
Zuckerberg launched the online social utility Facebook on February 4, 2004, for Harvard students. The website spread across the Harvard campus and within a couple of 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. The network first expanded to allow other university students to join. It became something of a network phenomenon, spreading rapidly to other places, despite some competition from similar local websites. As the website’s popularity rose and advertising revenue grew, Zuckerberg left Harvard to run Facebook full time.
In late 2004, 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. [3] 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 became the target of criticism on September 5, 2006 with the Facebook emergence of News Feed, a list of the doings of friends that was seen by some as an encouragement of digital stalking and unnecessary. Three days later, Zuckerberg responded in an "Open Letter" to the Facebook community, apologizing for the sudden unwelcome feature, providing new privacy options, but ultimately defending the feature and his belief in free information flow. Zuckerberg contended that the feature was a good asset to use between friends, and the privacy settings allow for information to be blocked from users who are not friends with the person.
Zuckerberg currently works at Facebook's Palo Alto, California headquarters.
References
- Mark E. Zuckerberg ’06: The whiz behind thefacebook.com - by Michael M. Grynbaum, The Harvard Crimson, June 10, 2004
External links
- Current Magazine interview with Mark Zuckerberg
- NNDB page for Mark Zuckerberg
- Part of Business 2.0's List of "10 people who don't matter" for refusing a $750 million buyout offer
- 'BusinessWeek' graphic: "The Bad Boy: Mark Zuckerberg"
- New Yorker Article about Facebook
- Synapse Media Player from Softpedia.com