Mark Zuckerberg Ritchie Rich

Mark Zuckerberg Ritchie Rich, a photo by firoze shakir photographerno1 on Flickr.

photo courtesy
www.valleyfaces.com/wp-content/images/MarkZuckerberg.jpg

2009
ushers
the reinvention
of Mark Zuckerberg
Ritchie Rich
a more powerful sales pitch
a new dream stitch
without any hitch
his detractors
nervously bitch
a Midas touch
some Itch

I was reading about Mark Zuckerberg on the latest issue of GQ ..

About Mark Zuckerberg Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Zuckerberg

Mark Zuckerberg, (born May 14, 1984) is an American computer programmer and entrepreneur. As a Harvard student, he created the online social website Facebook, a site popular among American college students, with fellow computer science major students and his roommates Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. He serves as Facebook's CEO. He has been the subject of controversy for the origins of his business[2] and his wealth[3].

Time Magazine added Zuckerberg as one of The World's Most Influentional People of 2008. Zuckerberg fell under the Scientists & Thinkers category for his web phenomenon, Facebook, and ranked 52 out of 101 people. The list consisted of international revolutionaries that honors people from Barack Obama and Dalai Lama to Michael Phelps and Brangelina..


Mark Zuckerberg was born in Boca Raton, Florida, and raised in West Palm Beach, Florida, by his parents, Edward and Karen Zuckerberg, who are both doctors. Early on, Zuckerberg enjoyed making computer programs, especially communication tools and games. He started programming when he was in middle school. While he was attending Phillips Exeter Academy in high school, he built a program to help the workers in his dad's office communicate and a version of the game Risk. He also built a music player named Synapse that used artificial intelligence to learn the user's listening habits. Microsoft and AOL tried to purchase Synapse and recruit Zuckerberg, but instead he decided to attend Harvard University.[4]

[edit] College years

Zuckerberg attended Harvard University and was enrolled in the class of 2006. At Harvard, Zuckerberg continued creating his projects. In 2003, he created Coursematch, a site that allowed students to see other students enrolled in the same classes.

Later in 2003, he created facemash.com, a Harvard-specific image rating site similar to Hot or Not. Zuckerberg developed this as a prank to protest that there was no directory of students' images at Harvard. It was only online for four hours before university officials took it down. The computer services department brought Zuckerberg before the Harvard University Administrative Board, charging him with violating rules on computer security and intellectual property. [3].

In 2004, he created a tool to help students in one of his classes, The Rome of Augustus, study for their final exam. The tool allowed students to post relevant information they had to learn about historic events and it quickly became the study guide people used instead of their text books. The marks on the 2004 final exam in that class were higher than any other year.

At Harvard, Zuckerberg was also a member of Alpha Epsilon Pi, a Jewish college fraternity.

[edit] Facebook
Zuckerberg (right) with Robert Scoble in 2008

Main article: Facebook

[edit] Founding

Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook from his Harvard dorm room on February 4, 2004. It quickly became a success at Harvard and more than two-thirds of the school's students signed up in the first two weeks. Zuckerberg then decided to spread Facebook to other schools and enlisted the help of roommate Dustin Moskovitz. They first spread it to Northwestern, UCLA, Harvard and Yale and then to other Ivy League colleges and schools in the Boston area, including Boston University and Boston College. By the beginning of the summer, Zuckerberg and Moskovitz had released Facebook at almost forty-five schools and hundreds of thousands of people were using it.

[edit] Moving to California

Zuckerberg moved to Palo Alto, California, with Moskovitz and some friends during the summer of 2004. According to Zuckerberg, the group planned to return to Harvard in the fall but eventually decided to remain in California. To date, he has not returned as a student to the college. They leased a small house which served as their first office. Over the summer, Zuckerberg met Peter Thiel who invested in the company. They got their first office on University Avenue in downtown Palo Alto a few months later. Today, the company has seven buildings and several hundred people in downtown Palo Alto, forming what Zuckerberg calls an "urban campus".

[edit] News Feed

On September 5, 2006, Facebook launched News Feed, a product to show what your friends were doing on the site. Zuckerberg was criticized as some saw News Feed as unnecessary and a tool for cyberstalking. The first piece of news ever on a Facebook News Feed appeared in Zuckerberg's own facebook profile. It read, "Kerry sucks at tennis."

[edit] Facebook Platform

On May 24, 2007, Zuckerberg announced a Facebook Platform, a development platform for programmers to create social applications within Facebook. This announcement sparked a lot of interest in the developer community. Within weeks, many applications had been built and some already had millions of users. Today, there are more than 400,000 developers around the world building applications for Facebook Platform.

On July 23, 2008, Zuckerberg announced Facebook Connect, a version of Facebook Platform for building social applications on other websites.

[edit] Facebook Beacon

On November 6, 2007, Zuckerberg announced a new social advertising system at an event in Los Angeles. A part of the new program, called Beacon, enabled people to share information with their Facebook friends based on their browsing activities on other sites. An eBay seller, for instance, letting friends know automatically what they have for sale via the Facebook news feed as they list items.

The program came under heavy privacy concerns from both privacy groups and individual users. Zuckerberg and Facebook failed to respond to the concerns quickly, and on December 5, 2007, Zuckerberg ultimately wrote a blog post on Facebook[5] taking responsibility for issues with Beacon and offering an easier way for users to opt out of the service.

[edit] ConnectU Controversy

Zuckerberg's Harvard classmates, Divya Narendra, Cameron Winklevoss, and Tyler Winklevoss, claim he stole their idea for their own site, ConnectU. A lawsuit was filed in 2004 and has been dismissed without prejudice on March 28, 2007, but was never ruled on. It was refiled soon thereafter in U.S. District Court in Boston, and a preliminary hearing was scheduled for July 25, 2007.[6] At the hearing the judge told ConnectU parts of their complaint were not sufficiently pled and gave them the ability to refile an amended complaint. On June 25, 2008, the case was settled and Facebook agreed to pay an undisclosed amount of cash and stock.[7]

As part of the lawsuit, in November 2007, confidential court documents were posted on the website of Harvard alumni magazine 02138. They included Zuckerberg's social security number, his parents' home address and his girlfriend's address. Facebook filed to get the documents taken down, but the judge ruled in favor of 02138.[8]

[edit] Microsoft investment in Facebook

On October 24, 2007, Facebook Inc. sold a 1.6% stake to Microsoft Corp. for $240 million, spurning a competing offer from online search leader Google Inc.[9]

[edit] References

1. ^ [1]
2. ^ news.com article about 02138
3. ^ [2]
4. ^ "Hacker. Dropout. CEO.".
5. ^ The Facebook Blog | Facebook
6. ^ PC World - Facebook Tries to Fend Off Copyright-Infringement Claim
7. ^ U.S. judge backs Facebook deal in suit over origins | Technology | Reuters
8. ^ news.com article about 02138
9. ^ Microsoft invests $240 million in Facebook - U.S. business - MSNBC.com