【032】Mark Zuckerberg

Mark Zuckerberg was born in 1984, and he is an American computer programmer and Internet entrepreneur. He is best known for co-creating the social networking site Facebook, and he is chief executive of it. Facebook was born in his dormitory. Facebook was co-founded as a private company in 2004 by Zuckerberg and his classmates of Harvard University. In 2010, Zuckerberg was named Time magazine's Person of the Year. As of 2011, his personal wealth was estimated to be $17.5 billion making him one of the world's youngest billionaires.

 

       Personal life

Zuckerberg was born in 1984 in White Plains, New York. His mother is a psychiatrist and his father is a dentist. His girlfriend is Priscilla Chan, a Chinese-American girl.

 

       Early years

Zuckerberg began using computers and writing software as a child in middle school. His father taught him BASIC Programming in the 1990s, and later hired software developer David Newman to tutor him privately. Newman calls him a "prodigy". Zuckerberg also took a graduate course in the subject at Mercy College near his home while he was still in high school. He enjoyed developing computer programs, especially communication tools and games. He built a software program named "ZuckNet" for his father and it can be used between the house and dental office to communicate with each other. During Zuckerberg's high school years, he built a music player that used artificial intelligence to learn the user's listening habits.

 

       Harvard years

He studied psychology and computer science in Harvard University. In his sophomore year, he wrote a program he called CourseMatch, which allowed users to make class selection decisions based on the choices of other students and also to help them form study groups. A short time later, he created a different program he initially called Facemash. At first, he placed two pictures, or pictures of two males and two females. Visitors to the site had to choose who was "hotter" and according to the votes there would be a ranking.

 

The site went up over a weekend, but by Monday morning the college shut it down because its popularity had overwhelmed Harvard's server and prevented students from accessing the Internet. In addition, many students complained that their photos were being used without permission. Zuckerberg apologized publicly.

 

Around the time of Facemash, however, students were requesting that the university develop an internal website that would include similar photos and contact details. "Mark heard these pleas and decided that if the university won't do something about it, he will, and he would build a site that would be even better than what the university had planned." Facemash is the original version of Facebook.

 

       Facebook

Facebook is the world’s largest social network, and website launched in February 2004. Now Facebook has more than 800 million active users around the world, and roughly 200 million in the United States, about two-thirds of the population. It just likes the Xiaonei website in China.