Welcome. I promised a new series, and here it is. This one’s about facebook. Hope you enjoy. Let’s dive in.
Before I go into facebook itself, let’s address why Facebook came to be. Mark Zuckerberg and his fellow peers were at Harvard, and they had at best, a dysfunctional system if even one. Well, you would think, with no good platform to connect students at any university or at any level, Mark Zuckerberg had a stroke of brilliance. That’s not entirely true.
In fact, the first website they ever created was Facemash, and it is one of the most controversial digital platforms to exist. Here’s the gist of it. The site used ID photos of female undergraduates taken without their permission from the university’s online directories and paired with one another. Users were asked which one was hotter. The homepage of the website even stated, “Were we admitted for our looks? No. Will we be judged by them? Yes.” It was heavily criticized, and the website was shut down soon but the controversy lies in the punishment. It is still unclear how Mark and his partners in crime were punished, as none of them even got as little as a suspension.
Anyway, coming back to the story, Harvard had already invented a facebook, but that was merely a student directory with basic information and a photo. It wasn’t particularly useful, and Zuckerberg openly criticized it. He and fellow Harvard student Eduardo Saverin both agreed to invest $1000 each into the website and in 2004, launched The Facebook. It was initially just a connecting platform limited to Harvard students. It was one of the first signs of social media. You have to be accepted by invite and it was purely for connecting with fellow peers and nothing more.
Even this time, Zuckerberg hacked into a newspaper, Crimson, login attempts and got data from them. What had happened was, Harvard accused Mark of stealing their idea and got Crimson to investigate. They decided to investigate by going into The Facebook. After the hacking, a lawsuit was filed and later settled. Despite all this, The Facebook was immensely popular among students at Harvard, and number of users increased exponentially within months.
Of course, the expansion wasn’t immediate and as we’ve already seen, not without controversy either. Stay tuned.
One more note: Even though I write about the hacking and misusing data, in no way, shape or form am I endorsing this. Do NOT do this; it is morally and ethically wrong.
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