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2 0 t h e f a c e b o o k e f f e c t Differential Geometry course to see if she had enrolled in that as well,or you could just look under her name for the courses she had enrolledin. As Zuckerberg said later, with a bit of pride at his own prescience,you could link to people through things. Hundreds of students im-mediately began using Course Match. The status-conscious students of Harvard felt very differently about a class depending on who was in it.Zuckerberg had written a program they wanted to use.Mark Zuckerberg was a short, slender, intense introvert with curly brownhair whose fresh freckled face made him look closer to fteen than thenineteen he was. His uniform was baggy jeans, rubber sandalsevenin winter and a T-shirt that usually had some sort of clever picture orphrase. One he was partial to during this period portrayed a little monkey and read Code Monkey. He could be quiet around strangers, butthat was deceiving. When he did speak, he was wry. His tendency was tosay nothing until others fully had their say. He stared. He would stare atyou while you were talking, and stay absolutely silent. If you said some-thing stimulating, hed nally re up his own ideas and the words

wouldcome cascading out. But if you went on too long or said somethingobvious, he would start looking through you. When you nished, hedquietly mutter yeah, then change the subject or turn away. Zuckerbergis a highly deliberate thinker and rational to the extreme. His handwrit-ing is well ordered, meticulous, and tiny, and he sometimes uses it to llnotebooks with lengthy deliberations.Girls were drawn to his mischievous smile. He was seldom withouta girlfriend. They liked his condence, his humor, and his irreverence.He typically wore a contented expression on his face that seemed to sayI know what Im doing. Zuck, as he was known, had an air about himthat everything would turn out ne, no matter what he did. It certainlyhad so far.On his application for admission to Harvard two years earlier, hecould barely t all the honors and awards hed won in high schoolprizes in math, astronomy, physics, and classical languages. It alsonoted he was captain and most valuable player on the fencing team and

T h e B e g i n n i n g 2 1 could read and write French, Hebrew, Latin, and ancient Greek. (Hisaccent was awful, so he preferred ancient languages he didnt have tospeak, he told people with typical dry humor.) Harvards rareed socialstatus was neither intimidating nor unfamiliar. Hed attended the elitePhillips Exeter Academy, where you are expected to proceed to the IvyLeague. Hed transferred there as a kind of lark. Hed gotten bored aftertwo years at a public high school in Dobbs Ferry, New York, north of New York City.Zuckerberg is the second-oldest of four children of a dentist fatherand a psychologist mother, and the only boy. The family home, thoughthe largest in the neighborhood, remains modest. Its dental ofce inthe basement is dominated by a giant aquarium. The elder Zucker-berg, something of a ham, is known as painless Dr Z. His websiteannounces We cater to cowards, and a sign outside the home ofceshows a satirical scene of a wary dental patient. Marks sisters, like him,are academic stars. (His older sister Randi is now a senior marketer atFacebook.) From his early years Zuckerberg had a technical bent: thetheme of his bar mitzvah was Star Wars.The suite

was one of the smallest in Kirkland House. Each of the twobedrooms came with bunk beds and a small desk. Zuckerbergs roommate was Chris Hughes, a handsome, towheaded, openly gay literatureand history major with an interest in public policy. They dismantledthe bunksit was fairer, they decided, if nobody had to sleep on top.But now the two single beds took up almost all the space. There washardly room to move. The desk was useless anywayit was piled highwith junk. In the other bedroom was Moskovitz, a hardworking, Brillo-haired economics major who was himself no intellectual slouch, andhis roommate, Billy Olson, an amateur thespian with an impish streak.Each boy had a desk in the common room. In between were acouple of easy chairs. It was, like the entire suite, a mess. Zuckerberghad a habit of accumulating detritus on his desk and nearby tables.Hed nish a beer or a Red Bull, put it down, and there it would stayfor weeks. Occasionally Moskovitzs girlfriend would get fed up and

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throw out some garbage. Once, when Zuckerbergs mother visited, shelooked around the room embarrassedly and apologized to Moskovitz forher sons untidiness. When he was growing up he had a nanny, sheexplained.This warren of tiny rooms on the third oor pushed the boys towardgreater intimacy than they might have shared under less constrainedconditions. Zuckerberg was by nature blunt, even sometimes brutallyhonesta trait he may have acquired from his mother. Though hecould be taciturn he was also the leader, simply because he so oftenstarted things. A habit of straight talk became the norm in this suite.There werent a lot of secrets here. The four got along in part becausethey knew where each stood. Rather than getting on one anothersnerves, they got into one anothers projects.The Internet was a perennial theme. Moskovitz, who had littletraining in computing but a natural penchant for it, kept up a constantrepartee with Zuckerberg about what did and did not make sense on-line, what would or would not make a good website, and what mightor might not happen as the Internet continued its inroads into everysphere of modern life. At the beginning of the semester, Hughes hadzero interest in computing. But by

midyear he too had become fasci-nated by the constant discussion of programming and the Internet, andstarted chiming in with his own ideas, as did Moskovitzs roommate,Olson. As Zuckerberg came up with each new programming project,the other three boys had plenty of opinions on how he should build it.In the common room of Suite H33 in Kirkland House, Ivy Leagueprivilege and high geekdom converged. What happened there turnsout not to have been common, but at the time it seemed pretty routine.Zuckerberg was hardly the only entrepreneur beavering away on a busi-ness in his dorm room. That wasnt too noteworthy at Harvard. Downevery hall were gifted and privileged children of the powerful.Its presumed at Harvard that these kids are the ones who will go onto rule the world. Zuckerberg, Moskovitz, and Hughes were just threeeggheads who loved to talk about ideas. They didnt think much aboutruling the world. But from their funky, crowded dorm room wouldemerge an idea with the power to change it.

T h e B e g i n n i n g 2 3 Emboldened by the unexpected success of Course Match, Zucker-berg decided to try out some other ideas. His next project, in October,he called Facemash. It gave the Harvard community its rst look at hisrebellious irreverent side. Its purpose: gure out who was the hottestperson on campus. Using the kind of computer code otherwise used torank chess players (perhaps it could also have been used for fencers),he invited users to compare two different faces of the same sex and saywhich one was hotter. As your rating got hotter, your picture would becompared to hotter and hotter people. A journal he kept at the time, which for some reason he postedalong with the software, suggests Zuckerberg got onto this jag whileupset about a girl. is a bitch. I need to think of something tomake to take my mind off her, he wrote, adding Im a little intoxi-cated, not gonna lie. Perhaps that pique is what led him to the idea,mused about in the journal, of comparing students to farm animals.Instead, according to the journal, Billy Olson came up with the ideaof comparing people to other people and only occasionally putting ina farm animal. By the

time the program launched, the animals weregone completely. Another Becks is in order, Zuckerberg wrote as hecontinued his Facemash chronicles. The entire project was completedin an eight-hour stretch that ended at 4 .., said the journal.The photos for the Facemash website came from the socalledfacebooks maintained by each of the Harvard houses where under-graduates live. They were the pictures taken the day students arrived fororientationthe kind of clumsy, awkwardly posed shots almost everyone would prefer to disavow. Zuckerberg cleverly found ways to obtaindigital versions from nine of Harvards twelve houses. Student newspa-per the Harvard Crimson later called it guerrilla computing. In mostcases he was able to simply hack in over the Web. At Lowell House afriend gave Zuckerberg temporary use of his log-in. (The friend later re-gretted it.) At another house, Zuckerberg snuck in, plugged an Ethernetcable into the wall, and downloaded names and photos from the housecomputer network.The fact that he was doing something slightly illicit gave Zucker-berg little pause. He could be a touch headstrong and liked to stir things

2 4 t h e f a c e b o o k e f f e c t up. He didnt ask permission before proceeding. Its not that he sets outto break the rules; he just doesnt pay much attention to them.He started running the Facemash website on his Internet-connectedlaptop in mid-afternoon of Sunday, November 2. Were we let in [toHarvard] for our looks? the site asked on its home page. No. Will webe judged by them? Yes. Zuckerberg emailed links to a few friends,later claiming he had only intended them to test it out and make sug-gestions. But once people started using it, they apparently couldnt stop.His testers alerted their own friends and Facemash became an instantunderground hit.The Crimson somewhat eloquently opined on the appeal of thesoftware afterward, even as its editorial scolded Zuckerberg for cateringto the worst side of Harvard students: A peculiarlysquinting seniorand that hottie from your Medieval manuscripts sectionclick! Yourblockmate and the kid who always glared at you in Annenbergclick! Your two best friends respective signicant others

pause . . . click,click, click! . . . We Harvard students could indulge our fondness forjudging those around us on supercial criteria without ever having toface any of the judged in person. Yes, it was fun.One gay resident of a suite near Zuckerbergs was elated when,in the rst hour, his photo was rated most attractive among men. Heof course alerted all his own friends, who then started using the site. When Zuckerberg returned to his room at 10 .. from a meeting, hislaptop was so bogged down with Facemash users that it was freezingup. But neighbors were not the only ones suddenly paying attention toFacemash. Complaints of sexism and racism quickly started circulating among members of two womens groups Fuerza Latina and the Association of Harvard Black Women. Quickly the computer servicesdepartment got involved and turned off Zuckerbergs Web access. Bythe time that happened, around 10:30 .., the site had been visited by450 students, who had voted on 22,000 pairs of photos.Zuckerberg was later called before Harvards disciplinary Adminis-trative Board, along with the student whod given him the password atLowell House, his suite-mate Billy Olson (who, as the online journalnoted, had

contributed ideas), and Joe Green, a junior who lived in the

T h e B e g i n n i n g 2 5 next suite through the re door, who had helped out as well. Zucker-berg was accused of violations of the colleges code of conduct in theway the site handled security, copyright, and privacy. The board puthim on probation and required him to see a counselor, but decidednot to punish the others. If Zuckerberg hadnt omitted the farm animalphotos, he probably wouldnt have gotten off so lightly. He apologizedto the womens groups, claiming he had mainly thought of the projectas a computer science experiment and had no idea it might spread soquickly.Greens father, a college professor, happened to be visiting his sonthe night Zuckerberg was celebrating his comparatively light sentencefor Facemash. The sophomore had gone out and bought a bottle of Dom Perignon, which he was exultantly sharing with his Kirklandneighbors. Says Green: My dad was

trying to drill it into Marks headthat this was a really big deal, that hed almost gotten suspended. ButMark didnt want to hear it. My dad came away with the notion that Ishouldnt do any more Zuckerberg projects. It would later prove to bea very expensive prohibition.But to everyone else, the episode was a clear sign: Zuckerberg hada knack for making software people couldnt stop using. That came aslittle surprise to his roommates. They knew he had even been talkingto Microsoft and other companies about selling a program hed writ-ten with a friend as his senior project at Exeter, called Synapse. Thesoftware watched what kind of music someone liked so it could sug-gest other songs. His friends called the program The Brain and wereespecially excited when they heard Zuckerberg might get as much as amillion dollars for it. If that happened, they pleaded, could he pleasebuy a large atscreen TV for the common room?Zuckerberg kept making little Web programs, like one he createdquickly to help himself cram for his Art in the Time of Augustus course.He had barely attended the class all rst semester. As the nal loomed,he cobbled together a set of screens with art images from the class. Heemailed the other class members an invitation to log in and use this

The Facebook Effect by David Kirkpatrick DownloadPrintMobileCollectionsReport Document Info and Rating friends Movies Facebook videos the social network the facebook effect david kirkpatrick Simon&Schuster Sections show all prev | next 2 the facebook effect 4 the facebook effect 6 the facebook effect 8 the facebook effect 10 the facebook effect 12 the facebook effect 14 the facebook effect 16 the facebook effect 20 the facebook effect Share & Embed Keep reading! Buy the book now.

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