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The Invention of Facebook šØāš»
(3 minute read)
Morning social networker!

This is the original Facebook landing page circa 2005:

Pretty cool, huh?
Check out the very bottom ā āa Mark Zuckerberg production.ā

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 ā and the original Facebook for that matter ā 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 didnāt see a need for school if he could learn to build things on his own.
So one day Zuckās roommates challenged him to create a website that would be more popular than Harvardās 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 heād 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 thatās a double negative.


Huh?

Uhhā


Overnight, Mark had built FaceMash ā a āhot or notā game to rate Harvard students on their looks.
Hereās the original landing page:

Now, remember those calculations we did earlier on the dining hallās website traffic?
Ya?
Super unnecessary.
Markās FaceMash website SMOKED it.
Within hours, FaceMash had received 450,000 views.
Mark had created a viral hit that took Harvardās campus by storm.
But 2 days later, heās got a problem:



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

Then high schools:

Then the world:

Today they touch 3 billion people around the world š¤Æ
Stay Cute,
Henry & Dylan š
P.S if you enjoyed this lesson, forward it to a friend.
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P.P.S Click below to watch another founderās video š