The Liquor Cabinet

It seems as if one of the requirements for being in college is publishing your entire life’s details on Facebook. That guy Jenny met for a brief five minutes at the party last weekend, your partner on a class paper, even your local bartender. If you’ve been around them in life, chances are you’ve looked them up. But do you know the origins of Facebook? How exactly did Mark Zuckerberg come up with the idea? The answer might not be what you think.

The base of the idea for Facebook was thought of on October 28th, 2003. It was a Tuesday night and Zuckerberg was sitting at his computer, apparently drunk, writing in his blog. He was looking at various students photos posted on the schools network, amazed at just how ugly some of the kids at Harvard were.

I’m a little intoxicated, not gonna lie. So what if it’s not even 10pm and it’s a Tuesday night? What? The Kirkland facebook is open on my computer desktop and some of these people have pretty horrendous facebook pics. I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of farm animals and have people vote on which is more attractive. It’s not such a great idea and probably not even funny, but Billy comes up with the idea of comparing two people from the facebook, and only sometimes putting a farm animal in there. Good call Mr. Olson! I think he’s onto something.

So amazed at this fact, he wanted to compare all the students to farm animals. Thats right. The very social network you’re a part of was originally rooted in an application to compare you to a horses ass. From here Zuckerberg proceeded to scan and download every publicly available student photo from the network to begin coding his application.

Eventually, this application would evolve into something called ‘FaceMatch’. This program would put two peoples pictures side by side, and let you click on which one was more attractive. It would then aggregate all the data and rank each person from most attractive to least attractive.

This application got Zuckerberg in a bit of hot water with the administration at Harvard. In the eyes of Harvard, Zuckerberg didnt have legal permission to use everyones photos. Since Harvard’s network was technically private, the ‘Ad Board’ at Harvard did the next worst thing to being expelled.

Court: All right. Did you also develop before FaceBook a program called FaceMatch?
Zuckerberg: Yeah.
Question: Okay. Can you describe that for us briefly?
Zuckerberg: It was somewhat of a joke, but I mean basically what it was is it took all of Harvard’s students I.D. pictures, and it would, and it basically like allowed the student body population to rank all the photos according to the attractiveness of the people in the photos by using the chess ranking algorithm for taking two players which had different ranks and assigned new ranks based upon who won a match. So I mean, it would show two at a time and then you can click on one and that person would be more attractive.
Court: And this was pictures of the undergraduate student body at Harvard; is that correct?
Zuckerberg: Yeah
Court: Did you get in any trouble for doing that?
Zuckerberg: Yeah

Court: Who was making complaints?
Zuckerberg: The University
Court: Specifically, whom did you receive complaints from?
Zuckerberg: I dont remember exactly.
Court: So within four hours after you launched it, you received a complaint or one or more complaints from somebody at the university?
Zuckerberg: Yeah. I heard from people within the school and then like — by the end of that night they had taken away my internet connection but the site was already down before that.
Court: Who is they?
Zuckerberg: The schools IT department
Court: And did you have to — did you receive any other complaints about FaceMash other than the initial ones?
Zuckerberg: Well, I got a formal complaint from the school and eventually got in a lot of trouble for it.
Court: What kind of trouble did you get into?
Zuckerberg: I forgot what it’s called. I got put on probation I think.
Court: What were the terms of the probation.
Zuckerberg: It was basically just like dont do anything worse or dont do anything bad or else you’ll probably get kicked out from school. Probation is like one step less than getting kicked out.

Shortly thereafter, The Crimson, Harvard’s newspaper had a story about his software.

Much of the trouble surrounding the facemash could have been eliminated if only the site had limited itself to students who voluntarily uploaded their own photos. A site that allows us to succumb to the guilty pleasure of judging our friends and enemies in an e-Darwinist free-for-all would be acceptable—and hilarious—so long as its targets all choose to opt themselves into the spotlight.

Zuckerberg later used this student newspaper article in his defense against ConnectU, stating that it was where his idea, rooted in comparing you to animals and changed into a voting platform, evolved into FaceBook. At the beginning of that spring semester, FaceBook officially launched at Harvard and attracted over 4,000 students in the first few weeks. That semester would be Zuckerberg’s last. By the end of May, Facebook had spread to “28 or 29 schools” with 150-200,000 registered users. It was then that the founders decided to make the trek to California to sublet a house and program all summer.

In his testimony Mark made it sound like the only thing they did was sleep and program. At the end of their arranged sublet, they hadnt moved out yet. One of the managers of the property had come over to notify them that they had to vacate and noticed large amounts of damage done to the property including damage done to the roof after they built a zip line.

“After getting up on the roof to check the chimney where they had zip line running from chimney over to telephone pole beyond pool.

• All the furniture was in the garage, broken, and ‘buried’
• Mirrors broken/chipped
• Decorations from the wall pulled off and thrown on the floor
• Other various furnishings in the garage
• Grill dumped all over back yard
• Landscaping ruined
• Laundry room door broken off
• Pool heater broken
• Broken glass in the pool/filter
• Part of the roofing broken

But the dirtiest secret in the FaceBook deposition wasnt any of this. It was surrounding the Behavior of the then president Shawn Parker.

Zuckerberg: I didnt think he was a good manager of people. I didnt think some of the things he did reflected well on us when he was hiring people.
Court: What sort of things were those?
Zuckerberg: He was just a little erratic.
Court: What do you mean erratic?
Zuckerberg: Not consistent in his behavior. Sometimes he freaked people out.
Zuckerberg: How did he freak people out?
Zuckerberg: I think when he was talking to people he generally often did not make a good first impression. They just thought he was weird or like out of control or something. So that was one thing. And then he was managing different parts of the business, like the sales team and that wasn’t doing that well.
Court: Other than freaking people out and having trouble managing the salespeople, did you have any other criticisms of Shawn Parker?
Zuckerberg: Well, I said that I didnt think he was good at operating the role of president and he had like put the company in danger with some legal issues.
Court: What did he do?
Zuckerberg: And this is most confidential?
Court: Yes.
Zuckerberg: He was arrested for cocaine posession. I guess he was at a party with one of the employees of the company

So there you have it. Zuckerberg had an idea to compare students to farm animals, which evolved into an attractiveness rating program, and with the help of Harvard’s student newspaper, it finally turned into the initial idea for FaceBook. Then, while expanding its website they managed to completely trash their sublet and hire/fire a president with a big cocaine problem.

Who says Harvard students are boring?