The Invention of Facebook 👨‍💻

Morning social networker!

This is the original Facebook landing page circa 2005:

Pretty cool, huh?

Check out the very bottom – ‘a Mark Zuckerberg production.’

You know what Zuck was producing prior to this basic site with a huge paragraph announcing each and every university they were available at?

Wrong.

The original Mark Zuckerberg production – and the original Facebook for that matter – was a website to rate Harvard hotties.

It was 2 years earlier. 2003.

Mark Zuckerberg was a Harvard student by day and maniacal, self-taught programmer by night.

Actually he was just kind of a maniacal, self-taught programmer all the time.

He really didn’t see a need for school if he could learn to build things on his own.

So one day Zuck’s roommates challenged him to create a website that would be more popular than Harvard’s dining hall website..

Boring.

But by my calculations (and a really stupid rabbit hole), that would mean:

30,000 web visits per day.

That was the number to beat.

So Zuckerberg stays up all night scraping the Harvard student directory for names and photos of students.

Surely he’d be using these names and photos to make it easier for new students to meet one another.

Right, Mark?

Are you lying to me?

I think that’s a double negative.

Huh?

Uhh–

Overnight, Mark had built FaceMash – a “hot or not” game to rate Harvard students on their looks.

Here’s the original landing page:

Now, remember those calculations we did earlier on the dining hall’s website traffic?

Ya?

Super unnecessary.

Mark’s FaceMash website SMOKED it.

Within hours, FaceMash had received 450,000 views.

Mark had created a viral hit that took Harvard’s campus by storm.

But 2 days later, he’s got a problem:

So Mark shuts down FaceMash but spins it into a legitimate Harvard student directory – TheFacebook.

At first you could only get on with an @harvard.edu email address.

But as the amount of people on the social network grew, so did its need to expand to other schools.