New pretender to Facebook throne
p2pnet news | Product News:- Did Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg lift the idea from Harvard University students Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and Divya Narenda?
They reckon he did. But now Aaron Greenspan, yet another of Zuckerberg’s Harvard contemporaries, says they’re all wrong: Facebook was his invention.
Six months before Facebook started and eight months before the Winklevoss / Narenda ConnectU went online, “Greenspan established a simple Web service that he called houseSYSTEM,”says the New York Times going on:
An e-mail message, circulated widely by Greenspan to Harvard students on September 19, 2003, describes the newest feature of houseSYSTEM, as “the Face Book,” an online system for quickly locating other students. The date was four months before Zuckerberg started his own site, originally “thefacebook.com.” (Greenspan retained his college e-mail messages and provided The New York Times with copies of his communications with Zuckerberg.)
Later, the two students, who both graduated in 2004, exchanged e-mail about their separate projects. When Greenspan asked what Zuckerberg was planning and suggested the two integrate their systems, Zuckerberg responded, a month before starting his own service: “I actually did think about integrating it into houseSYSTEM before you even suggested it, but I decided that it’s probably best to keep them separated at least for now.”
Greenspan, now 24, “appears to be a clear example of a truism in this high-technology region: establishing who is first with an idea is often a murky endeavor at best, and frequently it is not the inventor of an idea who is the ultimate winner,” says the NYT, adding:
If Zuckerberg did borrow some of Greenspan’s concepts, he may have simply been working in a grand Harvard tradition. After all, it was a young Harvard dropout, Bill Gates, and his classmate, Paul Allen, who almost three decades earlier copied a version of the Basic programming language, designed by two Dartmouth college professors, to jump-start the company that would grow into the world’s most powerful software firm.
Meanwhile, “If you could pin it down to just one thing, what is the one most important thing you have learned about business?” – asks ZeroMillion of Greenspan.
His response? “The person you should trust the most is yourself, and no one else.”
Anyway, perhaps Barbara Grizzuti Harrison had it right. “There are no original ideas,” she said. “There are only original people.”
Also See:
reckon he did – Facebook faces off, July 24, 2007
New York Times – Who founded Facebook? A new claim emerges, September 1, 2007
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