Mark Zuckerberg

Not many people would become a self-made billionaire at the very young age of 23 and not everyone could create a network whose reputation could catch like fire across the planet. That person is none other than Mark Zuckerberg and the network is Facebook, which of course needs no introduction. This young American computer programmer and internet entrepreneur is one of the five co-founders of this network and can be regarded as the protagonist behind its creation. Let’s know more about the life and various circumstances that led Mark Zuckerberg create this masterpiece of a network.

Birth and Growing Up:

Mark Zuckerberg was born to Edward Zuckerberg and Karen on May 14, 1984 in White Plains, New York. His mother and father were psychiatrist and a dentist respectively. He was their only son along with three daughters Randi, Donna and Arielle and they were raised in Dobbs Ferry town which is about 10 miles north of New York City. A Jew by birth, Mark Zuckerberg followed Atheism as soon as he had his Bar Mitzvah, the coming of age ceremony celebrated among the Jews at the age of 13.

Days of Education:

Mark excelled in every category of subject he was interested in during his school days. He had shown excellent interest in classics at Ardsley High School and he won prizes in Science and Classical Studies during his junior year in Philips Exeter Academy.

Obsession with Computers and Software:

During the middle school years, Mark was tutored by software developer David Newman hired by his father after teaching him the Atari BASIC programming in the early 90s. Mark proved to be an excellent student and Newman described that it was always tough for him to stay ahead of Mark. His obsession with software development can be proven by the fact that he took a graduate course in that at Mercy College while he was still in high school!

ZuckNet:

It is clearly evident that Mark Zuckerberg enjoyed developing software applications since childhood. With this enormous interest he even designed a software application called “ZuckNet” which allowed the communication between the computers at his home and his dad’s dental office. This was even considered as the basic version of the following year’s release AOL’s Instant Messenger. A well-recognized writer Jose Antonio Vargas described Mark as the kid who created computer games while the other kids would generally play them. Zuckerberg himself told that there were many friends of his who were good artists and he would create some games basing on the pictures they drew.

Not Just a Computer Nerd!

Many of us would think that Mark Zuckerberg is a computer nerd right from the start because of his creation of this ultimate social media network. But we would be deceived by that fact. He was not at all a typical geek. In fact he was a fencing star and the fencing captain for his team during the school days. He also had immense interest in Greek odysseys and other classic like Roman epic poem Aeneid written by Virgil.

Entering Harvard:

Mark Zuckerberg built a music player called Synapse built on an algorithm which would detect the user’s listening habits. This was posted on the news website Slashdot and was well received by PC magazine. Both Microsoft and AOL tried to purchase this software and recruit Mark but both their efforts resulted in vain as Zuckerberg opted to enroll at Harvard after graduating from Exeter in 2002.

Facemash and TheFacebook:

During his sophomore year at Harvard, Zuckerberg built a program called “CourseMatch” which enabled the new students to select classes based on the course selections of the already enrolled users. During his 2nd year at Harvard, Mark Zuckerberg wrote a program for a software called “Facemash” which would allow the students at Harvard to rate two students, whose photos were compared in the same page, either hot or not. For this purpose, he hacked the Harvard’s then network facebooks which contain the photos and identities of the students at the universities. This was later shutdown by Harvard as it violated a number of privacy laws and Zuckerberg faced expulsion, but later all the charges against him were dropped.

Later, he started to write a code for a wider social network that would enable the students at Harvard to communicate with each other. Zuckerberg took this as a challenge and completed this within a week after stating that he could create a better network than the University was planning to. After one of his friend’s suggestion, he put this network on Kirkland House online mailing list where he saw it registered by a number of students over just one night. He named this “TheFacebook”.

Zuckerberg was later accused by three senior students that he stole the idea of creating a social network in Harvard after making them believe that he would write a code for that and deceiving them. They had reported it to the newspaper Harvard Crimson which filed a lawsuit against him which was subsequently settled later.

The Rise of Facebook:

When TheFacebook had received an enormous reception among the Harvard community, Mark Zuckerberg had decided to spread it to other schools and universities as well even though he had not planned this before. In 2004 he, along with his roommate Dustin Moskovitz, promoted this network across different universities like Stanford, Dartmouth, Columbia, New York University, Cornell, Penn, Brown and Yale. After buying a network domain ‘facebook.com’ in 2005 for $200,000, they had removed ‘The’ from the original network name making it just Facebook.

Career Growth:

Apart from the inception of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg was involved with a number of other networks and platforms establishments. Some of themwere Wirehog, Platform, Beacon, Connect and interner.org.

•    Wirehog was a peer-to-peer file sharing network which was established by Mark Zuckerberg, Andrew McCollum, Adam D’Angelo and Sean Parker and it was meant to be a competing service to the already established campus-only service i2hub. It was later suspended as one of its uses on Facebook, photo sharing, was introduced into Facebook itself.

•    A development platform for the application developers known as Facebook Platform was announced by Mark Zuckerberg on May 24 of 2007 which can be used for creating different social applications for Facebook. It had received an enormous response that more than 800,000 developers around the world built applications through that.

•    Beacon, a social advertising system, was introduced into Facebook not much time later which enables the users to share the information regarding their browsing activities on other websites. When this had become a concern for privacy issues, Mark Zuckerberg offered a simpler way for the users to opt out of that service.

•    Facebook Connect, a version of Facebook Platform was announced by Zuckerberg on July 23rd of 2008.

•    In the backend of August 2013, Zuckerberg launched a domain Internet.org which would enable about 5 billion people who are not connected at that time to connect to the internet. It was also meant to provide a number of opportunities for the job seekers and open up new markets.

Accolades and Achievements:

•    Zuckerberg became a billionaire by the age of 23 as a result of his creation Facebook. The number of worldwide users reached one billion as of 2012.

•    He was awarded with the prestigious Time Magazine “Person of the Year” in 2010.

•    He has been named among the 100 wealthiest and most influential people in the world.

•    The Jerusalem post ranked him first among the most influential Jews in the world in 2011 and he garnered that for 3 consecutive years till now.

•    His personal wealth is expected to be $27.9 billion as of February of 2014. He is one of the wealthiest CEOs who receive $1 nominal salary per year.

MARRIAGE:

Mark Zuckerberg married his long-time girlfriend, whom he met at a fraternity during his sophomore year at Harvard, Priscilla Chan on May 19, 2012. The occasion was simply celebrated in the backyard of his house and the daywas also marked as Chan’s graduation celebration from medical school.

INSPIRATION TO YOUNG DEVELOPERS:

Mark Zuckerberg has proved to be a great inspiration to all the young software developers across the world. His talent, achievements and openness have been a boost to many people out there making them believe that one can achieve anything with talent and determination to become successful.