Harvard’s computer services department filed a complaint, alleging that Zuckerberg had violated copyrights; he had also potentially violated guidelines around student IDs. When it came time for his hearing, Zuckerberg repeated the explanation that he’d given the student groups. The site had been a coding experiment. He was interested in the algorithms and in the computer science behind what made the site work. He never expected the project to go viral, he insisted, and he apologized if any of his fellow students felt that their privacy had been violated. In what would become a familiar pattern, he got off with a scolding and agreed to meet regularly with a university counselor.
Then he returned to the business of creating a private, student-only social network. Several of his peers were circling the same idea, most notably Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, who along with the equally well-connected Divya Narendra had approached Zuckerberg about writing code for their effort. But Zuckerberg was focused on one student already well ahead of him. Earlier that fall, a junior named Aaron Greenspan introduced a networking site called “the Face Book.” It was a simple site, designed to look professional. Greenspan’s idea was to create a resource that could be useful to professors or job hunters. But the earliest iterations of “the Face Book” drew criticism for allowing students to post personal details about classmates, and the Harvard Crimson slammed the project as a possible security risk.2 The site quickly stalled as a result of the pushback.
Greenspan reached out to Zuckerberg after hearing his name around campus, and the two developed a competitive friendship. When an instant message popped up from Zuckerberg on January 8, 2004, Greenspan was surprised; he hadn’t given Zuckerberg his AOL username. The two had sat through an awkward dinner in Kirkland House earlier that night, during which Zuckerberg had fended off Greenspan’s questions on the type of projects he was interested in pursuing next. But over chats,3 Zuckerberg floated the idea of combining his in-development social network with Greenspan’s project. Greenspan pushed back on the suggestion that he redesign his site and asked Zuckerberg if he wanted to incorporate what he was building into what Greenspan had already launched.
“It would be sort of like how delta has song airlines,” Greenspan wrote.
“Delta owns song airlines,” Zuckerberg responded.
Zuckerberg wasn’t enthusiastic about tailoring his ambition to fit what Greenspan had built, and he wondered aloud if they might become competitors instead. Zuckerberg wanted his creation to be less formal. Users were more likely to talk about hobbies or their favorite music in their living rooms than in their offices. If the social network felt “too functional,” he told Greenspan, users wouldn’t share as much. He wanted to design a place to “waste time.”
He also revealed that he was already thinking about the ways personal data might be repurposed. Greenspan’s site asked users to share specific bits of information toward a specific purpose. Phone numbers allowed classmates to connect; addresses provided meeting places for study groups. “In a site where people give personal information for one thing, it then takes a lot of work and precaution to use that information for something else,” Zuckerberg wrote. He wanted users to share data in an open-ended way, expanding and diversifying the kinds of information he could collect.
The two discussed sharing a common database of users, along with the idea of automatically registering students for both versions of Thefacebook (as the name was now being styled) when they signed up for one. Their conversations ebbed and flowed, but Zuckerberg ultimately decided that his own project offered unique features, and he preferred his more casual design.
Zuckerberg intuited that the success of his site depended on the willingness of his fellow students to share intimate details about themselves. He was fascinated by human behavior; his mother was a practicing psychiatrist before she had children, and he was a psychology major. He focused on how easily students shared personal information. Every drunken photo, every pithy joke, and every quotable story was free content. That content would drive more people to join Thefacebook to see what they were missing. The challenge was to make the site a place where users mindlessly scrolled: “I kind of want to be the new MTV,” he told friends.4 The more time that users spent on Thefacebook, the more they would reveal about themselves, intentionally or not. The friends whose pages they visited, the frequency with which they visited those pages, the hookups they admitted to—every connection accelerated Zuckerberg’s vision of an expansive web of social interactions.
“Mark was acquiring data for the sake of data because, I think he is a lot like me. I think he saw that the more data you had, the more accurately you could build a model of the world and understand it,” said Greenspan, who continued to keep in touch with Zuckerberg after he launched his competing site. “Data is extremely powerful, and Mark saw that. What Mark ultimately wanted was power.”
Zuckerberg’s site assured students that because the network was limited to Harvard, it was private by design. But Facebook’s earliest terms of service made no mention of how users’ personal details (which they hadn’t yet come to think of as their individual data) could be used. In later years, Zuckerberg would tout, over and over again, the power of his invention to connect people—the whole world, in fact. But in those early days, his focus was altogether different. In one online chat,5 he made clear just how much access he had to the data he had accumulated. Zuckerberg began the conversation with a boast, telling one friend that if he ever needed information on anyone at Harvard, he should just say the word:
Zuck: i have over 4000 emails, pictures, addresses, sns
Friend: what!? how’d you manage that one?
Zuck: people just submitted it
Zuck: i don’t know why
Zuck: they “trust me”
Zuck: dumb fucks
In January 2005, Zuckerberg shuffled into a small conference room at the Washington Post for a business meeting with the chairman of one of the oldest and most venerated newspapers in America. Zuckerberg was about to celebrate the one-year anniversary of his social media company, Thefacebook. More than a million people were using his site, putting the twenty-year-old in rarefied company. Zuckerberg accepted his celebrity status among like-minded techies, but going into this particular meeting, he was visibly nervous.
He was uncomfortable in the political corridors of Washington, DC, and unfamiliar with the clubby world of East Coast media. Just six months earlier, he had moved to Palo Alto, California, with a few friends from Harvard.6 What had begun as a summer vacation experiment—running Thefacebook from a five-bedroom ranch house with a zipline strung over the backyard pool—had turned into an extended leave of absence from school, one spent meeting venture capitalists and entrepreneurs who were running some of the most exciting tech companies in the world.