How did Facebook begin?

While millions of people go on Facebook per day, hardly anyone knows the true origin of Facebook. Where, who, why, how and when it started.

Sure, most of us know a man named Zuckerberg created it while at University, but do we know where the idea came from? Do we know what he did before Facebook? Do we know how he managed to get passed all the other social networks? How does he make all this money of a social website?

Facebook is now the biggest social network and second biggest website on the internet. With near to one billion users, 1/6 of the world is connected with one website.

So where did I begin?

It all began at Harvard University, where Zuckerberg had taken psychology and computer science. The weird thing about this story is many believe Zuckerberg was always working on Facebook - and that most of his time in Harvard was devoted to Facebook's launch. I can tell you this is wrong, he's stated on many occasions that on most of his Harvard life, he was working on other projects, or sitting around with friends talking about the possibility of 'Facebook' or another social network.

From an early age, Mark Zuckerberg had interaction with computers and software. His Father taught him code and bought him programming kits. Mark was very drawn into the world of computers; but he enjoyed many other activities apart from programming. In his early school years he did a number of projects and activities - including physics, astronomy, poetry and fencing.

In his later years in compulsory education, he started creating and editing programs on the web. His biggest achievement in his later school years was the Synapse Media Player. After this Microsoft and AOL tried to get him on board their team, but he decided to enlist in Harvard instead.

After the first few weeks in Harvard, he'd already established a name for being a "computer geek." His friends spent much of their time establishing better relationships between the computer and themselves. Mark would bring up the idea of social websites a lot in informal meets with college friends - he stated on a BBC2 Programme "We would always talk about the idea of running a social network website and how great it would be, but none of us thought we would."

Mark's first 'project' for the school was Coursematch, a program which allowed college students to create study groups and make decisions on projects. He then created Facemash, which was a 'hot or not' scheme. To do this, he hacked into the Harvard I.D. files and take the pictures from there - then posting them onto the website. People would vote out of 2 pictures which one was hot and which one was not. The hottest would be top of the ranking system...and vise versa.

Zuckerberg did tell complainers he was 'slightly intoxicated' when he did this. In the coming weeks after uploading the website, he received quite a few complaints of intrusion of privacy and cyber-bullying. He took down the website after the Harvard Paper ran an article on it, claiming it to be a malicious website. Mark and his roomates told askers "it was just a bit of fun."

There then came another opportunity for a program - an online Face Book, which allowed all classmates from Harvard to chat with each other and find out what others like. Many had expressed the idea to the school, but they didn't seem keen on it. Mark got wind of this, and said if nobody else wanted to do it - he would. In an interview with the Harvard Crimson, he said "it would take the University years to come around to it. I could do it better than them, and I can do it within a week."

TheFacebook (www.thefacebook.com) as it was originally known, was first opened on February 2004. Within the week, over 15,000 people had joined the social website.

This is where the Facebook allegations started, according to three Harvard students, Mark had taken the idea from them after he'd agreed to help them with coding. While Mark still denies anything to do with stealing, he has paid them to stop going to the press. (I wonder, if they had made it, would it be successful?)

Mark was keen on getting Facebook more popular. He employed four top computer brains in Harvard to help him promote and develop the website. After a while, he pushed the website to Ivy League universities and then onto all universities within the United States and Canada. The website was still restricted to just universities though.

Zuckerberg kept Facebook's launch growing by allowing more and more universities to join. After a while, he even allowed High Schools to join by invitation. After a while, he and his team decided to open Facebook to anyone over 13 who had an e-mail address.

During this time of worldwide launching, he moved to California with a few friends; to be in the capital of technology. During this time, he realised that Facebook was not going to just be a little social network; but one of the biggest of all time. This was the reason he pulled out of Harvard.

He dropped the 'the' from Facebook in 2005, after he wanted to obtain the domain name [www.facebook.com]. He did for $200,000. Zuckerberg was getting a large amount of media attention for his website and quite a lot of investment by technological companies. Shares in the website were flying, 1% of Facebook would of costed you over $50m.

The expansion of Facebook was huge, within a few years, almost everyone had heard of Facebook and almost everyone wanted to know about Mark Zuckerberg.

Zuckerberg was very 'anti-press' and 'anti-interviews', he devoted much of his time to Facebook and to issues other than media. When interviewed he was normally quite shy and didn't really seem to be enjoying himself. He told many interviewers he most enjoyed his work and not being asked questions. On pressing subjects, like privacy, he seemed very bad at answering - normally cowering and becoming heated.

But less about his interview skills. Everyone wanted to know him - but not just know him, take his idea off him. It started with Yahoo!, who offered $1 billion for Facebook and then Microsoft offered $15 billion. Mark denied both offers, telling the media "We're not really looking to sell the company...We're not looking to IPO anytime soon. It's just not the core focus of the company."

There you have it, the full entry into how Facebook came to be and how it didn't come into anyone else's hands along the way. You may have watched Facebook's movie, 'The Social Network'. Zuckerberg has said while some of the things on there are true, he disagreed with many of the scenes. He told reporters "some of the scenes are twisted into a movie fashion. While there may be some truth within; it's hyped truth."