The College Fix

“Who are you gonna send it to?”

“Just a couple of people. The question is, who are they gonna send it to?”

Thus begins a scene from the upcoming film “The Social Network,” which tells the story of the founding of Facebook, the now-ubiquitous social networking service, at Harvard in 2004. The scene in question involves a young Mark E. Zuckerberg, formerly of the class of 2006, and his friend Eduardo L. Saverin ’05. The two have just created Facemash.com—a hot-or-not rating website that offered Harvard students the opportunity to rank their peers by attractiveness—and sent out a link to some friends. After a rapid-fire montage of students gleefully ranking their friends and roommates, the Harvard network crashes from the amount of traffic it has generated.

“Unless this is a coincidence, I think this is us,” says Saverin.

“It’s not a coincidence,” Zuckerberg replies bluntly.

Following the short-lived Facemash, Zuckerberg’s next creation was a site all too familiar to us now—Facebook.com. Soon after launching the site from Kirkland House in February 2004, Zuckerberg took a leave of absence—from which he would never return—in order to work on the site. Months later, he was engaged in a federal copyright lawsuit. Cameron S.H. Winkelvoss ’04, Tyler O.H. Winkelvoss ’04, and Divya K. Narendra ’04 had founded a site called Harvard Connection (later to become ConnectU), and claimed that Zuckerberg had stolen the idea from them. Later, he was also sued by co-founder Saverin, who felt unfairly shut out of the company.

Read the full story at the Harvard Crimson.

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