Mark Elliot Zuckerberg
Introduction
As of June 2011, Facebook had more than 500 million active users from all over the world. Additionally, 50 per cent of Facebook’s active users log on to the site in any given day (www.facebook.com). Phrases such as ‘status update,’ and ‘wall post’ have become part of every-day conversation in English-speaking countries. To understand the scope of Facebook’s global reach, one only needs to look at the number of translations available on the site: 70. Indeed, the same percentage of Facebook users resides outside the United States. All this is possible in no small part due to Facebook’s co-founder, CEO and president Mark Elliot Zuckerberg – one of the world’s youngest billionaires.
Biographical Information
Mark Elliot Zuckerberg was born on May 14 1984 in New York, the first of four children of a psychiatrist mother and dentist father (H.W. Wilson Company, 2008). At an early age, Zuckerberg developed an interest in computers, his father introducing him to Atari BASIC programming in the early 1990s, which Zuckerberg used to create a messaging program. This program was used by his father in his dental office and by the family around the house (Woog, 2009). His father then hired software developer David Newman to oversee young Zuckerberg’s instruction on computers (Miller-Jones, 2011).
Zuckerberg joined Ardsley High School where he continued developing computer programs, mostly communication tools and games. In addition, he excelled in fencing, whose team he was appointed captain of. He also won prizes in physics, math and classics studies – he often recited lines from epic poems such as Aeneid in college. By this time, Zuckerberg had joined Phillips Exeter Academy, a prep school where he designed a music player, which he called Synapse Media Player (Miller-Jones, 2011). Declining offers for employment at Microsoft and AOL, Zuckerberg instead opted to join Harvard College in September 2002 (Miller-Jones, 2011).
Harvard
It is in Harvard College that the foundations of what was to become of the world’s most popular social networking sites were laid. In February 2004, less than one and a half years after joining college, Zuckerberg launched Facebook from his dorm room at Harvard. The inspiration for Facebook apparently came from Phillips Exeter Academy’s student directory where students would list their class years, telephone numbers and physical proximity to friends. It was here that Zuckerberg, together with his college colleagues Dustin Moskovitz, Eduardo Saverin and Chris Hughes, got the idea to launch a site that would be used by Harvard students to associate with each other. However, the co-founders of Facebook soon saw an opportunity to extend Facebook beyond its Harvard boundaries, making it available to students in Stanford, Columbia, New York University, Dartmouth, Yale and other schools.
This site created by Zuckerberg and his colleagues allowed users in these schools to create their own profiles, communicate with other uses and upload photos. Zuckerberg soon dropped out of Harvard after his second year to dedicate his time to Facebook, and moved to Palo Alto, California. Even though it was still only open to students in Ivy League schools, Facebook had more than a million users by the end of 2004 (Hasday, 2011). In 2005, Facebook became accessible to students in other colleges as well as high schools and international schools, bringing the site’s membership to about 5 million users by the end of the year (Woog, 2009). All along, Zuckerberg and his colleagues received offers to sell Facebook from major corporations such as Yahoo!. However, they opted to focus on expanding Facebook by providing more features to its users and making it more secure. It is because of such reasoning that Facebook has continued to attract more users and has expanded beyond perhaps what was previously imagined by its creators.
Challenges
The journey to becoming one of the world’s youngest billionaires has however not come without its challenges for Mark Zuckerberg. In 2006, Zuckerberg was accused by the creators of Harvard Connection, a social networking site founded in December 2002, of basing his Facebook idea on their idea and illegally using source code intended for the website, which he had originally been hired to create (Hasday, 2011). A settlement was reached in February 2008. However, legal disputes over the matter continued into 2011 in regards to the value of the stock that had been part of the settlement. More personal challenges for Zuckerberg arose from the publication of a book, “The Accidental Billionaires” by Ben Mezrich, in which Zuckerberg’s story was retold. Mezrich later sold the rights to screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, who turned it into a critically acclaimed movie, “The Social Network.” However, Zuckerberg pointed out that while they may have gotten some facts right, some scenes, characters and dialogue were in fact fictional (Woog, 2009).
The biggest personal challenge for Zuckerberg however, came from the fallout between him and his friend and fellow Facebook co-founder, Eduardo Saverin. Saverin filed a lawsuit against Zuckerberg claiming that he had been frozen out of the company’s affairs after its headquarters had moved to California (Miller-Jones, 2011). In the movie, “The Social Network,” Zuckerberg was portrayed as having betrayed Saverin even after Saverin had provided a huge percentage of the start-up capital. Saverin had stayed behind at Harvard after Zuckerberg had relocated to Palo Alto and with time, found his stake in the company to have reduced significantly. The lawsuit was settled out of court with both parties signing a non-disclosure agreement (Miller-Jones, 2011).
In addition to personal problems, the company that Zuckerberg co-founded has been on the receiving end of controversies. In June 2010 for instance, the Pakistani Deputy Attorney General launched an investigation into the founders of Facebook following a contest that was hosted on the site in which contestants were required to “draw” Muhammad (Hasday, 2011). This also led to the blocking of the site in Pakistan, a situation that only changed once the contest was removed from the site. Facebook has also been criticized for its lax security, seeing that anyone can access information about any other person in the world. Leitch and Warren concluded in their paper that Facebook poses a number of “real life security issues and threats” to the user (Leitch & Warren, 2009).
Conclusion
While Facebook may not be full proof, Zuckerberg and his co-founders have continued to streamline the site to ensure that its users’ security is not threatened. More so, Facebook has helped millions of people get and keep in touch with each other regardless of geographical location, something not deemed possible a few years ago. Indeed, the site remains a true testament to the fact that Mark Zuckerberg’s dream of bringing people together was possible.
References
Hasday, J. L. (2011). Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook. Greensboro, NC: Morgan Reynolds Publishers.
H.W. Wilson Company. (2008). Current biography yearbook, Volume 69. Bronx, NY: H. W. Wilson Co.
Leitch, S. & Warren, M. (2009). Security Issues Challenging Facebook. Perth, Australia: Edith Cowan University Press.
Miller-Jones, E. R. (2011). Mark zuckerberg. Greensboro, NC: Vdm Publishing.
Woog, A. (2009). Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook creator. Detroit, MI: KidHaven Press.
http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics
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