Nan
Blue eyed, freckled, very young looking 26 year old creator of Facebook is Time Magazine’s Person of the Year for 2010. A fine choice. I read, among other pieces about Mark Zuckerberg, a detailed article in the September 20th New Yorker and being mighty impressed by the creator of this worldwide social club, I wanted to write about Zuckerberg in this column. But no Sunday since September was free of a topic that got higher priority. Now I feel is the correct time to write about this somewhat controversial young man voted Person of the Year by Time. I am not in Facebook, mine or others, though invited by several to join the happy cyber social club. My refusal, let’s admit it, is because I am conservative and move very slowly into new territory. For me e-mailing and Skype is quite enough to keep in touch and actually I felt Facebook and its concept and ‘practice’ was too wide for my liking. I have no time; and if I want to keep up with a friend or relative I phone or e-mail that person. But apart from me and a couple of other stick-in-the muds, all are Facebookers. Nonetheless, I was very interested in this young software developer since a grandnephew in the States did earn a huge amount through creating a computer game or two. He could have earned millions (dollars) but just at that time there was a downturn in Silicon Valley.
The article I got most of my facts from is, as I said, in the New Yorker titled "The Face of Facebook: Mark Zuckerberg opens up" by Jose Antonio Vargas, who traveled around with Mark Zuckerberg for months to interview him. Mark is an interview-shy, busy person who seems to prefer shadow to limelight.
As you well know, Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook while at Harvard. "I’m trying to make the world a more open place," he said. And thus became the ‘boy king of Silicon Valley,’ and is set to become one of the richest on earth and the youngest billionaire. Vanity Fair named him ‘Our new Caesar’. A friend of Mark says, "He has been over-programmed’ and of course there are the allegations that he developed on an idea of others, stole it really.
Beginnings
It began thus. Mark at age eleven built a software programme that facilitated the sending in of patients in his father’s dental clinic without calling out names or numbers. Members of the family could ping each other to keep informed of the other’s whereabouts. He named it ZuckNet. He was also into developing computer games for his friends. His father had him tutored by a software developer - David Newman - who came to his home once a week to help the computer prodigy in the advanced use of computers.
Soon thereafter he took a graduate computer course in a college and on the first day when his father took him in there the father was sharply reprimanded: "You cannot bring a child into class with you." He went to Exeter Academy where he excelled in fencing and in the classics but computers was his strongest subject. For his senior project, with a friend he wrote a software package that defined users’ listening habits through artificial intelligence. He called the package Synapse which was soon known on blogs. Microsoft and AOL both wanted to buy it and recruit the teenager but he declined the offer. Instead he opted to join Harvard in 2002.
In his first year he developed Course Match to help students select their courses of study. He was developing Facemash, where people looked at photographs displayed and decided which s/he liked better to make friends with, when three other upperclassmen of Harvard - Divya Narendra, twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevos - in the same field approached him, this now renowned software wizard, for help in their development of Harvard Connections. He worked with them, then dropped out of the team and developed Facebook and had to face the accusation of having pilfered their idea and taken it over and developed it as his own. This Mark counter argues by pointing out Harvard Connection was primarily for dating within the Harvard fraternity while his Facebook emphasized networking. The twins went on to obtain their MScs at Oxford and accused Mark: ``He stole the moment, he stole the idea, he stole the execution." The case went to courts and was initially settled by Facebook paying the three 65 million USDs. But it’s back in court since the twins are claiming more. His father is a dentist, while his mother, Karen is a psychiatrist who gave up practicing to bring up her children and work in her husband’s dental clinic in their home in Dobbs Ferry, New York. She has Mark and three daughters: Randi, Donna and Arielle. He has a girl friend, Priscilla Chan, a Chinese American from Boston. They first chatted while waiting in line to use a washroom. Friends expect them to marry soon. In September he wrote in his Facebook page: "Priscilla Chan is moving in this weekend"
Success
Facebook’s headquarters is a two storeyed building in Palo Alto. When Zuckerberg developed Facebook and it was growing, MTV Networks offered him 75 million to buy it. Yahoo! and Microsoft offered more. Yahoo! then upped the offer in 2006 to a billion dollars but Mark refused to sell. "It’s not about the price. This is my baby, and I want to keep running it. I want to keep growing it." No wonder the high offers since the site ‘is a directory of the world’s people, a place for private citizens to create public identities.’ In six years, 5,000 million people have joined Facebook and 879 are friends of the creator. The site is the biggest social network. It is estimated that one of every 14 persons has a Facebook account. "His ultimate goal is to create and dominate a different kind of Internet and to go beyond Google which was launched when he was in school."
Already films have been made with him or a close enough substitute as chief protagonist. Books have been written about a computer wizard resembling him, even a sci-fi story. Hollywood’s unauthorized version of his life "The Social Network" released on October 1st last year is ‘a classical story of friendship, loyalty, betrayal and jealousy’ since they make much of the story of the four Harvard students. Mark says he will not see it.
The last interview of Vargas with Mark Zuckerberg was by telephone, where the latter quoted Latin and gave its English translation. "Fortune favors the bold" he said and "a nation/empire without bound." Vargas commented how apt the quotations were. Mark typed back "Again though these are the most famous quotes in the Aeneid, not anything particularly that I found" He always had a classical streak in him, his friends and family say. "He has an imperial tendency. He as really into Greek Odysseus and all that stuff - knows no boundaries in time and greatness."
Sunday Island
