Facebook - Social Networking site Founder
Mark Zuckerberg (born May 14, 1984) is an American computer programmer and Internet
entrepreneur known worldwide for his creation - Facebook. He is the chief executive
and president. Facebook was co-founded as a private company in 2004 by Zuckerberg
and classmates Dustin Moskovitz, Eduardo Saverin, and Chris Hughes while they were
students.
In 2010, Mark Zuckerberg was named Time magazine's Person of the Year. As of 2011,
his personal wealth is estimated to be $13.5 billion.
He was born in Dobbs Ferry, New York, in a well-educated family and had an excellent
academic career. After graduating from Exeter in 2002, Zuckerberg enrolled at Harvard
University. By that time he has already achieved a ‘reputation as a programming
prodigy’. Later Facebook founder studied psychology and computer science and belonged
to Alpha Epsilon Pi, a Jewish fraternity. It was at that time that he built a program
called CourseMatch, which helped students choose their classes based on the course
selections of other users. He also invented Facemash, which compared the pictures
of two students on campus and allowed users to vote on which one was more attractive.
The program became wildly popular, but was later shut down by the school administration
after it was deemed inappropriate.
Zuckerberg launched Facebook from his Harvard dormitory room on February 4, 2004.
An earlier inspiration for Facebook may have come from Phillips Exeter Academy,
the prep school from which Zuckerberg graduated in 2002. It published its own student
directory - ‘The Photo Address Book’ which students referred to as ‘The Facebook.’
It started off as just a ‘Harvard thing’ until Zuckerberg decided to unfold it to
other schools. He first expanded it at Stanford, Dartmouth, Columbia, New York University,
Cornell, Brown, Yale and then at other schools that had social contacts with Harvard.
In May 2007, Mark set-up Facebook platform, something which enables social applications
to be created within Facebook and therefore hosts great appeal to developers. Recent
statistics show that there are 800,000 active developers using this spin-off service
worldwide. On November 6, 2007, Zuckerberg announced a new social advertising system
called Beacon, which enabled people to share information with their Facebook friends
based on their browsing activities on other sites.
As of January 2011, Facebook has more than 600 million active users. Zuckerberg’s
one of the most impressive achievements is that he is expanding his portfolio constantly
thereby making regular improvements and changes to the website leading it towards
success by connecting the world uniformly. It looks as years from now, the Mark
Zuckerberg biography will be looked upon as a defining moment in social networking
and entrepreneurship history.
