Mark Zuckerberg
wrote Facemash, the predecessor to Facebook, on October 28, 2003, while
attending Harvard as a sophomore. According to The Harvard Crimson, the
site was comparable to Hot or Not, and "used photos compiled from the
online facebooks of nine houses, placing two next to each other at a time and
asking users to choose the 'hotter' person" Mark Zuckerberg co-created Facebook
in his Harvard dorm room. To accomplish this, Zuckerberg hacked into the
protected areas of Harvard's computer network and copied the houses' private
dormitory ID images. Harvard at that time did not have a
student "facebook" (a directory with photos and basic information),
though individual houses had been issuing their own paper facebooks since the
mid-1980s.
Facemash attracted 450 visitors and 22,000
photo-views in its first four hours online. The site was quickly forwarded to
several campus group list-servers, but was shut down a few days later by the
Harvard administration. Zuckerberg faced expulsion and was charged by the
administration with breach of security, violating copyrights, and violating
individual privacy. Ultimately, the charges were dropped.
Zuckerberg
expanded on this initial project that semester by creating a social study tool
ahead of an art history final, by uploading 500 Augustan images to a website,
with one image per page along with a comment section. He opened the site up to
his classmates, and people started sharing their notes.The following semester,
Zuckerberg began writing code for a new website in January 2004. He was
inspired, he said, by an editorial in The Harvard Crimson about the
Facemash incident. On February 4, 2004, Zuckerberg launched
"Thefacebook", originally located at thefacebook.com.
