Social Networking and the Internet

The concepts of social networking are not new, and many of the components
of the early Facebook were originally pioneered by others.
Zuckerberg has been accused several times of stealing ideas to create
Facebook. But in fact his service is heir to ideas that have been evolving
for forty years.
Something like Facebook was envisioned by engineers who laid the
groundwork for the Internet. In a 1968 essay by J. C. R. Licklider and
Robert W. Taylor titled "The Computer as Communication Device/7
the authors asked, "What will on-line interactive communities be like?
In most fields they will consist of geographically separated members,
sometimes grouped in small clusters and sometimes working individually.
They will be communities not of common location, but of common
interest." The article crept further toward the concept of social
networking when it said, "You will not send a letter or a telegram; you
will simply identify the people whose files should be linked to yours." As
a key employee in the Advance Research Projects Agency of the Department
of Defense, Licklider helped conceive and fund what became the
ARPAnet, which in turn led to the Internet.
A decade or so later, a few pioneers were beginning to spend time in
such online communities. The first service on the Internet that captured
substantial numbers of nontechnical users—long before the invention
of the World Wide Web—was the Usenet. Begun in 1979, it enabled
people to post messages to groups dedicated to specific topics. It functions
to this day. In 1985, Stewart Brand, Larry Brilliant, and a couple of
others launched an electronic bulletin board called The Whole Earth
'Lectronic Link, or Well, in San Francisco. In 1987, Howard RheinSocial
Networking and the Internet
gold, a big user of the Well, published an essay in which he coined the
term virtual community to describe this new experience. "A virtual community
is a group of people who may or may not meet one another face
to face/' Rheingold wrote, "and who exchange words and ideas through
the mediation of computer bulletin boards and networks."
More and more people became familiar with electronic communication,
initially by commenting in online groups and chat rooms.
The French postal service was the first to bring these concepts to a
mass consumer audience when it launched a national online service
there called Minitel in 1982. Then America Online started in 1985,
initially under another name. In 1988, IBM and Sears created an ambitious
commercial online service called Prodigy. Shortly, however, AOL
came to dominate the business in the United States. On these services
people typically invented or had assigned a quasi-anonymous username
for themselves, which they used for interacting with others. I was Davidk4068
on AOL. By the early 1990s, ordinary people began using
electronic mail, again typically using addresses that did not correspond
to their names. Though they maintained email address books inside
these services, members did not otherwise identify their real-life friends
or establish regular communication pathways with them. Later in the
decade, instant-messaging services took hold the same way—people
used pseudonymous labels for themselves, not their names.
In the early days of the World Wide Web, the notion of an online
community advanced a little further. Services like TheGlobe.com,
Geocities, and Tripod emerged and enabled users to set up a personal
home page that could in some cases link to pages created by other
members. Mark Zuckerberg's first website was one he created on Geocities
when still in junior high school. The popular fee-based dating site
Match.com launched in 1994 filled with personal information, but for
a very specific purpose. Classmates.com debuted in 1995 as a way to
help people, identified by their real names, find and communicate with
former school friends.
The era of modern social networking finally began in early 1997.
That's when a New York-based start-up called sixdegrees.com inaugurated
a breakthrough service based on real names. Two Internet socithe
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ologists, danah boyd and Nicole Ellison, articulated in a 2007 paper
the salient features of a true social network: a service where users can
"construct a public or semi-public profile," "articulate a list of other
users with whom they share a connection," and "view and traverse their
list of connections and those made by others within the system." You
establish your position in a complex network of relationships, and your
profile positions you in the context of these relationships, usually in
order to uncover otherwise hidden points of common interest or connection.
Another element must be added to explain the trends that led
to Facebook—an online profile based upon a user's genuine identity.
The sixdegrees service was the first online business that attempted
to identify and map a set of real relationships between real people using
their real names, and it was visionary for its time. Its name evokes the
speculative concept that everyone on earth can be connected through
an extended chain of relationships that begins with your immediate
friends, proceeds to the next "degree"—the friends of your friends, and
on until the sixth "degree."
Andrew Weinreich, sixdegrees' founder and a lawyer, was himself
an inveterate networker. The World Wide Web was just beginning to
get traction among ordinary people. At sixdegrees' launch in early 1997,
Weinreich invited several hundred people assembled at New York's
Puck Building to join immediately at one of the twenty PCs set up there
in the room. "It no longer makes sense for your Rolodex to live on your
computer," he proclaimed. "We'll place your Rolodex in a central location.
If everyone uploads their Rolodex, you should be able to traverse
the world!"
Members normally joined sixdegrees after receiving an email invitation
from an existing member. This method of recruitment would be
imitated by many subsequent social networks. It sounds obvious to us
now, but at the time it was revolutionary. The service allowed you to create
a personal profile listing information about you and your interests,
based on your real name. Then it helped you establish an electronic
connection with friends. You could search through profiles and ask
friends to introduce you to interesting people you found. There were
two key features on sixdegrees when it launched. The first was "connect
me." If you put in someone's name, it wduld create a map of your relationship
to them through the service's various members. The other was
"network me/' which enabled you to identify certain characteristics you
were looking for, so the service could identify members who matched
those qualities. A doctor in Scarsdale who likes chess, perhaps?
But, as Weinreich now ruefully concedes, "We were early. Timing
is everything." The service was hugely expensive to develop and operate.
It hired ninety employees, bought lots of expensive servers and database
software licenses from Oracle, and paid Web-development firms
Sapient and Scient millions to develop features. And what did all this
expense make possible? A service that most people used at a painfully
slow speed on a dial-up modem. And there were other severe limitations.
Profiles may have had your name, career data, and favorite movies,
but they lacked photographs. After all, few people back then had
digital cameras. The lack of photos was such an obvious problem that in
1999 Weinreich seriously considered asking members to send in photo
prints of themselves so interns could upload them assembly-line style.
It was unclear to people —members and nonmembers alike —
whether sixdegrees was intended as a dating service, a business networking
service, or both. Nonetheless, by 1999 sixdegrees had reached 3.5
million registered users and a larger company bought it for $125 million.
But it never generated much revenue, and in the wake of the dotcom
bust its new owner shut the money-losing company down in late
2000. Figuring that this was the beginning, not the end, of social networking,
lawyer Weinreich and his partners had the foresight to win a
very broad patent covering sixdegrees7 innovations, a patent that would
later figure in the history of Facebook. Weinreich talked about networks
like his as the "operating system of the future."
Though sixdegrees broke the ice, it took years before others ventured
into the waters and built what can be considered genuine social
networks. In 1999, two ethnic-focused sites, BlackPlanet and Asian Avenue,
launched with limited social networking functions. A Swedish
social network for teenagers called LunarStorm launched January 1,
2000. Cyworld, a hugely popular service in Korea, added social networking
capabilities in 2001.
It wasn't until 2001 and 2002 that the social networking bug hit Silicon
Valley and San Francisco. Most of the entrepreneurs and venture capitalists
there were still in shock following the precipitous slide in valuations
and revenues for Internet companies that began in early 2000.
Companies were closing and the mood was grim, especially for consumer
Internet companies. New ones were hardly receiving any investment
money in 2001 and 2002. But a few hardy souls recognized that
sixdegrees might have simply started too soon.
Plaxo, the Internet company that Sean Parker founded with friends
in 2001, wasn't a social network, but it had a lot in common with them.
Plaxo was a contact management service. After new members uploaded
their contacts, it relentlessly peppered those people with requests to update
their information, always pressing them to join as well. It was obnoxious,
but it worked often enough. Parker was thinking much like Andrew
Weinreich at sixdegrees—put your Rolodex in a central location and let
us manage it for you. Parker liked the Plaxo concept because it was viral —
one user could lead to an entire chain of users. Plaxo also foreshadowed
a crucial aspect of Facebook—it maintained unique identifying information
for individuals based upon that person's network of contacts.
In late 2001, an entrepreneur and local pioneer named Adrian
Scott launched a social network called Ryze. Scott aimed to eliminate
any uncertainty about Ryze's purpose. It was not a dating site. It was
for businesspeople. Its name was intended to evoke the way members
could "rise up" by improving the quality of their personal business network.
Members' profiles focused on work accomplishments and they
networked with co-workers and business contacts. It planned to make
money by charging employers and others to search its databases for prospective
employees, consultants, etc. Though it never much took hold
except among San Francisco's tech cognoscenti, it inspired and set the
stage for many developments that followed.
Jonathan Abrams, a local programmer, Ryze member, and inveterate
partyer, saw an opportunity to focus on the nonwork part of people's
lives. He built a very social network for consumers and called it
Friendster. Though it wasn't exactly a dating site, it offered many tools
to help members find dates. Abrams gambled that he could take customers
away from Match.com, as the idea was that you'd meet more interesting
people if you got to know the friends of your friends. Members
were expected to use their real names, and Friendster gave you a novel
tool to keep track of people—the very one that sixdegrees' Weinreich
had pined for. Their pictures appeared next to their names right on
their profile. This was a breakthrough. You could search to learn which
people lived near you who were already friends of a friend. If you liked
their picture, you could try to connect.
When Friendster launched in February 2003 it was an immediate
hit. Within months it had several million users. To join you needed an
invitation from an existing user, which were much in demand. Pretty
soon people were talking about Friendster as the "next Google." It even
reportedly turned down a $30 million buyout offer from Google itself.
Back in Boston, Mark Zuckerberg took notice and joined, as did other
Harvard undergraduates, including the Winkelvoss twins.
Friendster seemed to be hitting the big time. Abrams made magazine
covers. But by the middle of the year the experience of users started
spiraling downward. Millions were joining and Friendster's servers were
slowing. It couldn't manage its success. Pages took twenty seconds to
load. It also started to have public relations troubles —it engaged in
a very public battle with so-called "fakesters," users who were deliberately
creating Friendster profiles using phony names and identities,
including cartoon characters and dogs. Abrams was resolute that people
on Friendster should use their real names, and he kicked lots of the
fakesters off. Aiming in part to solve its expensive technical challenges,
the company took a big infusion of money in fall 2003 from two eminent
venture capital funds—$13 million from Benchmark Capital and
Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.
A recent visit to the San Francisco office of Friendster founder
Abrams, now operating an online invitations business called Socializr,
finds him scruffy-bearded, contrite, and still eager to party. The first
thing he does when I walk in is offer me a tequila. He interrupts the
interview several times to reiterate the offer, despite my repeated rethe
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fusals. "The site didn't work well for two years—that's a fact," he concedes,
finally getting down to business. Then he explains how a series
of engineering mis judgments prevented Friendster from repairing its
performance problems until long after he was removed by the investors
as CEO in March 2004.
Abrams is one of social networking's great innovators, but he willingly
concedes he built on the ideas of others. "The concepts were not
new," he says. "What was new was the vibe of it, the design, the features."
But the fact is, as Sean Parker puts it, "Jonathan cracked the code. He
defined the basic structure of what we now call a social network."
In Friendster's wake, a throng of social networking sites blossomed
in San Francisco attempting to duplicate its appeal. Each tackled the
idea of connecting people in a slightly different way. One was Tickle,
a service which, on observing Friendster's broad-based appeal, altered
its own service, which had previously been based on self-administered
quizzes and tests. Two of the other new social sites—Linkedln and
Tribe.net—were founded by friends of Abrams.
Reid Hoffman had been the lead angel investor in Friendster's very
first financing, putting in $20,000 of the total $100,000 Abrams raised.
Hoffman is a pivotal figure in the history of social networking. One
of Silicon Valley's most thoughtful executives, he carries a substantial
amount of industry credibility in his stout frame. Way back in August
1997 he started a dating service called SocialNet, which tried to find
matches based on information users put in a profile. Some call it the
very first social network, though Hoffman doesn't. In any case, it didn't
do very well as a business (though when it was sold, its investors made
their money back). But in May 2003, three months after the launch of
Friendster, Hoffman founded Linkedln, a social network for businesspeople.
Hoffman believed that social networking was likely to divide
into two categories—personal and business—so this was not a conflict
with his support of Friendster. Linkedln, which thrives to this day, has
a lot in common with Ryze. Your profile is basically your resume. Users
look for jobs and ask others for business recommendations or advice.
But in keeping with its businesslike attitude, it started without photos.
(Hoffman added that capability later.)
Mark Pincus plays Laurel to Hoffman's Hardy. Skinny, mediumheight,
and hyperactive, Pincus was another Friendster investor and
Hoffman's buddy. In May 2003, the same time that Hoffman was
launching Linkedln, Pincus unveiled Tribe.net, a social network where
members could create a "tribe" around a specific interest. Tribe.net was
originally intended to help members share Craigslist-type classifieds so
they could buy things from people they knew. Its tribal quality, however,
quickly became its trademark, and its most cohesive online tribes
were not the ordinary-Joe ones Pincus had envisioned. They included
regular attendees at the annual Burning Man festival in Nevada as well
as devotees of alternative sexual practices, more interested in just connecting
than in buying and selling things.
Sean Parker fell in with this San Francisco social networking mafia.
At that time, Parker shared a house with Stanford students in Palo Alto,
where Friendster was already taking off, and several of these guys were
already in his own real-world social network. Ryze's Adrian Scott had
been an early Napster investor. And Tribe's Pincus had founded Freeloader,
the Arlington, Virginia, start-up where Parker interned in 1994
at age fifteen. Soon Parker was hanging out with them and their friend
Abrams of Friendster.
Parker and Abrams quickly bonded. And the more he hung around
Abrams, the more Parker became fascinated by Friendster. He began
spending lots of time at the Friendster offices. He helped Abrams find
additional investors and acquired a small amount of Friendster stock
himself. That was just when the service started to bend and break under
the load of its newfound popularity. "I watched from the sidelines as
they lost the war," says Parker now. "The story always was: 'One more
month, one more month. We'll get it working.'" (Friendster was later
resuscitated, but too late for the U.S. market. Now about 60 percent of
users are in the Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia.)
In the summer of 2003, just as Tribe.net and Linkedln began to grow,
an unexpected development got Pincus and Hoffman worried. They
learned that the patent held by the now-extinct sixdegrees was being
put up for auction by its new owners. The patent is broad and sweeping.
It describes a social network service that maintains a database, enables
a member to create an account, then encourages him or her to invite
others to connect to their network via email. If this other person accepts
the invitation and confirms his friendship, the service creates a two-way
communications connection. These processes are at the heart of most
social networks.
Lawyers for the two entrepreneurs told them that in the wrong
hands the patent could be used to stop both of their companies, or
pretty much any social networking firm. They decided to try to buy it.
They also knew that Friendster was getting millions of dollars from the
VCs, and worried that with more resources Friendster might attempt
to elbow into their parts of the industry. Owning the patent was a
form of defense. However, neither company's board would authorize
buying the patent. So Hoffman and Pincus decided to use their own
money.
But they weren't the only ones who had recognized the patent's
potency. Yahoo was beginning to realize it might have missed the social
networking boat. It entered the auction and actually put in the highest
bid. But Hoffman and Pincus, gung-ho, were willing to pay faster and
won with a bid of $700,000.
The two now say they just wanted to keep the patent out of the
hands of larger players like Yahoo or Friendster. "We were worried that
someone was going to buy the patent and then sue all the early social
networking companies," says Hoffman now. "We bought it defensively,
to make sure no one would kill the nascent industry."
But even as these entrepreneurs were creating a new industry in
San Francisco, an unlikely competitor emerged from nowhere, four
hundred miles south in Los Angeles. MySpace began as one of scores
of Friendster clones—MySpace co-founder Tom Anderson was an avid
Friendster user. Anderson got the idea to start MySpace in part out of
frustration as Friendster slowed and crashed. But, according to Stealing
MySpace, the definitive history of MySpace, by Julia Angwin, Anderson
also thought he could deliberately appeal to the so-called fakesters, "to
create a site where users could create any identity they liked." He and
co-founder Chris DeWolfe put few restrictions on how you could use
MySpace.
The two were employees of an unwieldy and disorganized Net
conglomerate called eUniverse, which secretly installed spyware on
users' PCs and sold expensive and questionably advertised merchandise.
There they applied their libertine values to the creation of the
new service. Anderson and DeWolfe took a kitchen-sink approach. If
something had proven popular on the Web, the commercially minded
pair wanted it in MySpace. When their service launched on August 15,
2003, only six months after Friendster and three months after Tribe.net,
it included games, a horoscope, and blogging along with a Friendsterlike
profile page for members.
While Friendster's Abrams was a bit of a control freak, fighting a
lengthy losing battle to protect his particular vision of a real identitybased
service, MySpace took a generally lax approach to just about everything.
That suited members just fine. For one thing, it was less rigid
about who could join than other social networks. You didn't need an invitation
from an existing member. You could use either a real name or
a pseudonym. And one of the features members liked best was not even
intentional. An initial programming error allowed members to download
Web software code —called HTML—onto their profiles. People
quickly began using it to tart up their sites. Ever adaptive, the MySpace
founders noted members7 enthusiasm for this freedom and embraced
the error as an asset.
Member-created designs were how MySpace got its distinctive
Times Square look—all flashing graphics and ribald images. But while
this look might have been unintentional, it was in keeping with the
MySpace ethos—if you could pretend to be anybody, you also had the
freedom to make your profile look like anything. And you didn't even
always know who a MySpace member was. That made it difficult to
limit your connections to genuine friends. People began adding friends
willy-nilly, the more the better. It became a competition —how many
could you have? As for behavior on the site, along with plenty of conventional
conversation there was a definite tilt toward the sexual. On
Friendster the look of a profile was fixed for consistency and Abrams
wanted you to use your real name for connecting to other real people.
Such niceties were disregarded by MySpace's Anderson and DeWolfe.
As Angwin carefully explains in Stealing MySpace, the canny
founders had superb timing. The world was ready for a mass-market
social network. The sixdegrees service came too soon —it lacked the
right online environment in which to thrive. But that landscape had
finally emerged. In 2003, Angwin notes, the percentage of Americans
with broadband Internet access rose from 15 percent to 25 percent.
Broadband not only meant faster viewing times, it also made uploading
photos easier. Digital cameras were becoming common and affordable.
Crucially, a wider variety of people were getting fast Net speeds. For
the first time lots of families—including those with teenage girls—had
broadband. Had Friendster not broken down under the strain of success,
it might have appealed to this crowd, but MySpace nicely stepped
into the void.
MySpace initially spread among the relatively hip Los Angeles
friends of Anderson and DeWolfe. The founders marketed their service
in clubs to both bands and audiences. Shortly afterward it became an
essential promotional tool for bands in L.A. It didn't take long before
enterprising musicians all over the country began adopting MySpace.
Along with the bands came the bands' audience—teenagers.
MySpace was hip and a great site to find out about bands, but it
also leaned toward the sexual. Holding MySpace parties in nightclubs
around the country became another of the site's promotional tools. The
implicit message: MySpace was a digital club where wild behavior was
welcome. A disenchanted Friendster user who called herself Tila Tequila
joined MySpace, bringing her fan club with her. She was a buxom
young Vietnamese model with a yen for attention. Her profile was full
of pictures of her wearing very skimpy clothing.
Though the site's minimum age was supposedly sixteen, plenty of
younger kids created profiles claiming to be older. It wasn't unusual for
thirteen-year-old eighth-grade girls to post photos of themselves wearing
only a bra. Parents groups at junior highs and high schools all over
the country convened alarmed meetings about the dangers of social
networking.
By the time Thefacebook launched in February 2004, the flamboyant
MySpace had more than a million members and was quickly
becoming the nation's dominant social network. Thefacebook offered
users limited functions, a stark-white profile page, and was limited to
students at elite universities. The contrast in tone couldn't have been
greater.
The first social network explicitly intended for college students had
begun at Stanford University in November 2001. It was probably also
the first real social network ever launched in the United States. This
little-known service, called Club Nexus, was designed by a Turkish doctoral
student in computer science named Orkut Buyukkokten as a way
for Stanford students to improve their social life. An undergraduate political
science major named Tyler Ziemann managed the nontechnical
parts of the project.
Club Nexus was revolutionary and had a raft of features —probably
too many. It allowed members to create a profile using their real
names, and then list their best on-campus friends, who were known
as "buddies" in Club Nexus lingo. Buddies who were not already
members then automatically received an email inviting them to join
the service. Only students with a Stanford-issued email address could
join, and that email authentification ensured that each person was
who they said they were. You could chat, invite friends to events, post
items in a classifieds section including personal ads, write bloglike
columns, and use a sophisticated search function to find people with
similar interests. Students used it to find study partners, running buddies,
and dates. Buyukkokten himself once bragged that what made
it different from any other website was "you can create really big
parties."
Within six weeks Club Nexus had 1,500 members at Stanford,
whose student body totaled about 15,000. But after it reached about
2,500, usage leveled off. The service was just too complicated. Buyukkokten
was a talented programmer who had loaded it with every interesting
feature he could think of. But that made it difficult to use and
diffused activity among many different features. You didn't get the sense
there were many others in there with you.
Once the two men got their degrees in 2002, they wanted to commercialize
their venture. Recognizing that student use was tepid, they
made what some might call a foolish decision, considering the subsequent
successes of Facebook—they focused instead on alumni. They
created a company called Affinity Engines, which began marketing
a modified version of Club Nexus called InCircle to college alumni
groups. Their first client was the Stanford Alumni Association. By 2005
its customers included alumni networks at thirty-five schools, including
giants like the University of Michigan. But not long after Affinity Engines
started, Orkut Buyukkokten left the company and went to Google.
A year or so after he joined Google, the entrepreneurial programmer
approached Marissa Mayer, a top company product executive,
and told her that over the weekend he'd built the prototype for a new
social network. Mayer and Google's executives, who by policy encourage
entrepreneurship among employees, embraced his project. Google
was thinking of calling the project "Eden" or "Paradise." Then one
day Adam Smith, a product manager working with Buyukkokten, told
Mayer that the engineer owned the Web address Orkut.com. The two
felt Buyukkokten embodied the spirit of his service, so they just decided
to name it after him.
The well-conceived Orkut, a social network open to anyone,
launched in January 2004, just two weeks before Thefacebook.com. It
initially thrived in the United States and was holding its own against
a surging MySpace. But by the end of 2004 it had, somewhat oddly,
been tightly embraced by Brazilians. A grassroots campaign there to
win more members than Orkut had in the United States captured the
imagination of young Brazilians. After they succeeded, the service acquired
a distinctly Brazilian and Portuguese-speaking cast. Americans
began to drop away. Today Orkut, still owned by Google, remains one
of the world's largest and most sophisticated social networks, yet more
than half its membership is Brazilian. Another 20 percent live in India.
Google's diminished expectations for it can perhaps be gleaned from
the fact that in 2008 it moved Orkut's headquarters to Brazil.
Club Nexus was the first college-specific social network, but by
the 2003-2004 school year similar sites were popping up at a number
of schools. The Daily Jolt, a sort of discussion community, had been
around since 1999 as a kind of campus bulletin board and was operating
at twelve schools. Collegester.com —"a virtual community of free,
useful, and enjoyable services 'for the students, by the students'" —had
been launched in August 2003 by two University of California at Irvine
alumni. An online matchmaking service called WesMatch was thriving
at Wesleyan University. Its entrepreneurial founders had launched a
version at Williams College and were expanding to Bowdoin, Colby,
and Oberlin. At Yale, the student-run College Council launched a
dating website called YaleStation on February 12—only a week after
Thefacebook's debut. By the end of the month about two-thirds of undergraduates
had registered. Then there was CUCommunity, which
had taken off at Columbia in January. Both the Yale and Columbia
sites were getting lots of members before Thefacebook arrived.
In late 2003 the Ivy League seems to have collectively decided that
campus facebooks should go online. Student governments at Cornell,
Dartmouth, Princeton, Penn, Yale, and Harvard, among others, were all
complaining to college administrations that their campus facebook was
not in digital form. The idea was no secret. A sense that the time had
come helped push Zuckerberg to create Thefacebook and accounts for
its name. Students everywhere had also been influenced by the rapid
ascendancy of Friendster, and many were dismayed to see it stumbling.
By fall, MySpace was already making waves in Los Angeles and in the
music world.
Aaron Greenspan, a Harvard senior, launched a service there in
September 2003 called houseSYSTEM. It allowed residents of Harvard
residential houses to buy and sell books and to review courses, among
other functions. It also invited students to upload their photographs to
something called the Universal Face Book. houseSYSTEM was controversial
for how it treated student passwords and never got much usage,
though hundreds of students signed up to try it.
Separately, Divya Narendra claims to have come up with the idea
for a Harvard-specific social network in December 2002. He later
teamed up with the Winkelvoss brothers to build Harvard Connection,
according to some of the voluminous legal documents filed in the
lawsuit they brought against Zuckerberg and Facebook. The identical
towering Winkelvoss twins—known to some Harvard classmates as "the
Winklevii"—worked hard at rowing for years and made the finals for
men's pair rowing at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. They came in sixth
and last, but it was a huge achievement. Previously they'd won a gold
medal at the Pan-American Games in Rio de Janeiro. The two athletic
blond uber-WASPs couldn't be more different from the scrawny, nerdy,
brainy Jews who founded Thefacebook.
The three worked fitfully on the idea that would become Harvard
Connection over the next year. Since none of them were programmers
themselves, they hired people to help. Two successive computer science
students tried and failed, in the founders' opinion, to get Harvard
Connection right.
During the first months of Harvard's fall 2003 semester, Zuckerberg
began making waves with ad hoc bad-boy applications that were
intrinsically social —first Course Match, then Facemash. Narendra and
the Winkelvosses read about him in the Crimsons coverage of the Facemash
episode. They got in touch and arranged a meeting. He agreed to
help out, but says now he thought of it as just another of his many social
software "projects."
Zuckerberg worked off and on writing code for Harvard Connection.
After a few weeks he appears to have lost interest, though he apparently
didn't make that clear to the Winkelvosses and Narendra. They
began to complain that he was taking too long. At one point Zuckerberg
apologized for a delay, explaining he had forgotten to bring the
charger for his laptop home with him for the Thanksgiving holidays.
Eventually Harvard Connection's trio accused Zuckerberg in a federal
lawsuit of stealing their intellectual property. The case was settled in
mid-2008 with the requirement that parties not disclose details. But
some trial documents became public, including emails between the
complainants and Zuckerberg. These exchanges give a picture of what
Harvard Connection was intended to be. In one, Cameron Winkelvoss
included proposed text for a page: "Harvard Connection has compiled
a list of the premiere nights of the hottest clubs and lounges in the Boston
area. We have brokered deals with promoters at these clubs to give
all of our registered users reduced admission on these given nights."
This sort of discounted partying seems to have been a major focus of
the planned site.
On December 6, Cameron Winkelvoss emailed Zuckerberg again:
"One idea I came up with is an 'incest rating/ . . . Essentially it is a
measure of how close your interests and the person's interests you are
looking at a r e . . . . It would be funny to see how closely related and how
'incestuous7 it would be to request a date with a given person." He also
suggested the site provide recommendations on who a member should
date, and mused that maybe Harvard Connection should deceive users
by pretending that these matchups were determined by software algorithm:
"Perhaps there could be some random element incorporated
into it (obviously people viewing the site shouldn't know this, for all
they know it's a thoughtfully calculated recommendation)". Winkelvoss
considered himself to be creating, as he put it here, a "dating site."
The emails appear to show that Zuckerberg began avoiding the
three Harvard Connection founders. By January 8, 2004, he emailed
Cameron: "I'm still a little skeptical that we have enough functionality
in the site to really draw the attention and gain the critical mass necessary
to get a site like this to run." Yet in late November he had written,
"Once I get the graphics we'll be able to launch this thing. . . . It seems
like everything is working." The Harvard Connection guys repeatedly
requested a meeting. When the four finally convened on January 14,
Zuckerberg said he didn't have any more time to work on the project.
Zuckerberg also had a little involvement with houseSYSTEM creator
Greenspan. The two met for dinner in early January in the Kirkland
dining room. At the meeting, Zuckerberg invited Greenspan to partner
with him to create his new project, which he didn't describe in detail.
But the older student demurred. In a 333-page self-published, self-justifying
autobiography he writes, "I didn't like the idea of working for
someone who had just been disciplined for ignoring privacy rights on
the f acebook effect
a massive scale." (He's referring to Facemash.) Greenspan, two classes
ahead of Zuckerberg, had run his own small software company since he
was fifteen and clearly felt superior to the sophomore.
However, at the same meeting he invited Zuckerberg to incorporate
his project, whatever it was, into houseSYSTEM. But Zuckerberg
said he didn't want to do that because houseSYSTEM was "too
useful," according to the book. Greenspan writes that this statement
confused him. "It just does too much stuff," Zuckerberg continued,
according to the book. "Like, it's almost overwhelming how useful
it is." Today, Zuckerberg won't say much about houseSYSTEM, except
that "the trick isn't adding stuff, it's taking away." houseSYSTEM
eventually disappeared. Zuckerberg classmate Sam Lessin, himself a
programmer and now an Internet entrepreneur, recalls it as "a huge
sprawling system that could do all sorts of things." By contrast, he says,
Thefacebook was almost obsessively minimal. "The only thing you
could do immediately was invite more friends. It was that pureness
which drove it."
Thefacebook launched on February 4. Six days after that, Cameron
Winkelvoss sent Zuckerberg a letter saying he had misappropriated the
Harvard Connection founders' work and owed them damages. The letter
demanded Zuckerberg stop working on Thefacebook. Winkelvoss
and his partners complained to the Administration Board—the same
body that had disciplined Zuckerberg for Facemash. A Harvard dean
got involved and asked Zuckerberg for his account of what happened.
In a long letter he wrote the dean on February 17, Zuckerberg said
that from his first work on the project, he had been "somewhat disappointed
with the quality of the work the previous programmers had
done on the site." He called it "messy and bloated." He dismissed the
ideas of the Winkelvoss brothers and Narendra. "My most socially inept
friends at the school had a better idea of what would attract people to
a Website than these guys." He complained about their planning. "I
wasn't happy with the way they had failed to come through with their
promises of advertising, the necessary hardware to run the site, or even
graphics for the site (last time I checked, their front page was still using
an image straight out of a Gucci ad)."
"I'm kind of appalled," he continued, "that they're threatening me
after the work I've done for them free of charge. . . . I try to shrug it off
as a minor annoyance that whenever I do something successful, every
capitalist out there wants a piece of the action." He ended his letter
about what he called "ridiculous threats" by saying, "I didn't go through
the differences between my site and theirs because the two are completely
different." The dean decided not to get involved in the dispute.
Were the two services substantially different? As Cameron Winkelvoss's
emails indicate, Harvard Connection was intended largely as a
party guide and dating service. The intention was to "broker deals with
promoters," taking a cut in the process. Thefacebook was noncommercial.
It aimed to replace offline facebooks. It was centered on information
about individuals. Everything on Thefacebook was generated by its
users, while Harvard Connection was going to include content including
"reviews of nightclubs."
The Harvard Connection, rebranded ConnectU, finally launched
in late spring 2004. That fall, ConnectU's founders, assisted by lawyers
who usually worked for the Winkelvosses' affluent father, sued Zuckerberg
in federal court in Boston. The lawsuit asserted that Zuckerberg
stole ideas including "creating the first niche social network for college/
university students"; "serving as a directory of people and their interests
and qualifications, a forum for the expression of opinion and ideas,
and a safe network of connections"; requiring members to register using
their ".edu" email addresses; and launching at Harvard and then extending
to other schools, with an eventual plan to include "every accredited
academic institution domestically and internationally."
During the time he was working for Harvard Connection, Zuckerberg
may have become uneasy about the fact that he was already
working on his own social network. He certainly should have alerted
the Winkelvoss brothers and Narendra earlier about what to expect.
He was rude. He became very uncooperative. But long before he met
the Winkelvosses and Divya Narendra he already was thinking about
what kind of social software was possible on the Internet. That's why the
Harvard Connection project interested him in the first place. The civil
lawsuit filed on behalf of the three alleges behavior considerably worse
than rudeness: "copyright infringement, breach of actual or implied
contract, misappropriation of trade secrets, breach of fiduciary duty,
unjust enrichment, unfair business practices, intentional interference
with prospective business advantage, breach of duty of good faith and
fair dealing, fraud, and breach of confidence." The complainants asked
to take over the entire Facebook site and be paid damages equal to
its value. Pretty strong stuff for a supposed ten-hour project for which
Zuckerberg never had a written contract and was never paid.
Zuckerberg probably refined his own ideas during the course of
working on Harvard Connection, but there don't seem to be elements
in common between the sites that had not already been used by other
services in the past. Every social networking plan on the planet by this
time was influenced by Friendster. It did prove critical for Thefacebook
to use .edu addresses for registration, but other sites at colleges had already
begun taking a similar approach. Club Nexus limited itself to
Stanford-only email addresses as early as fall 2001.
In September 2004 when they filed suit against Thefacebook, ConnectU
claimed fifteen thousand users at two hundred colleges. Thefacebook
competed with it vigorously. ConnectU did lead to one huge
success for its founders, however—a 2008 financial settlement of the
lawsuit. It gave the ConnectU's creators plenty of money to go away—
reportedly $20 million in cash as well as stock in Facebook worth at least
$10 million. ConnectU was already moribund, but now it shut down.
Aaron Greenspan also accused Zuckerberg of stealing his ideas. In
his autobiography, titled Authoritas: One Student's Harvard Admissions
and the Founding of the Facebook Era, he writes that he "invented The
Facebook while attending Harvard College." In April 2008 he petitioned
the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to cancel the trademark "Facebook."
He claimed he was the rightful owner, because he pioneered
the name months earlier than Zuckerberg as part of houseSYSTEM.
Greenspan served as his own attorney. The Trademark Trial and Appeal
Board decided his claims were plausible enough to let the action move
forward. Some months later, Facebook settled with Greenspan for an
undisclosed sum.

Greenspan doesn't accuse only Zuckerberg. He writes in his book
that the Winkelvoss brothers and Narendra took ideas from him, too,
and that Harvard Connection was also an imitation of houseSYSTEM.
Social networking has now extended across the entire planet. Facebook
is the world's largest such network. It is the rare high school and college
student who does not routinely use Facebook or MySpace. These systems
have become so pervasive for communication that young people
barely use email anymore. From sixdegrees to Friendster to Facebook,
social networking has become a familiar and ubiquitous part of the Internet.