MARK ZUCKERBERG : THE SOCIAL MEDIA HERO

MARK ZUCKERBERG’S EARLY LIFE

Mark Zuckerberg was born on May 14, 1984, in White Plains, New York. Mark was the second of 4 children and the only son. He hand her sister was raised at Dobbs Ferry, New York. Mark’s father, Edward Zuckerberg, is a dentist and mother, Karen Zuckerberg, is a psychiatrist.

The first time he was interested in programming is when he was at elementary school. The fact that the world is divided between programmers and users, Mark found out when he was 10 years old and got his first PC Quantex 486DX on the Intel 486.

The first programming language he learned was Atari BASIC Programming by his father, and when Mark was about 12, he used Atari BASIC to create a messenger, which he called “ZuckNet.” It made all the computers connected to each other and allowed to transfer messages between the house and dental office. His father installed the messenger on his computer in his dentist office, and the receptionist could inform him when a new patient arrived. Mark also enjoyed developing games and communication tools and as he said he was doing it just for fun. His father, Edward Zuckerberg, even hired a computer tutor David Newman, who gave his son some private lessons.

TEENAGE DAYS OF MARK ZUCKERBERG

Synapse Media Player

In his high school day, he wrote an artificially intelligent media player Synapse for MP3-playlists that carefully studied the preferences of a user and was able to generate playlists ‘guessing,’ which tracks a user wanted to listen to. Microsoft and AOL got an unusual interest in Synapse media player and wanted to acquire it. However, the young talent rejected the offer of the IT-giants and then politely  rejected their invitation  to  cooperate. Just  like that, Mark Zuckerberg refused from dozens, maybe even hundreds of thousands of dollars, and work at one of the top IT-corporations.

Soon Mark Zuckerberg studied at the Academy of Phillips Exeter, an exclusive preparatory school in New Hampshire. He showed good results there in science and literature, receiving a degree in classics. He also showed a great talent in fencing and even became the school captain of the fencing team. Yet Mark Zuckerberg stayed fascinated by coding and wanted to work on the development of new software.

In 2002, after graduating Phillips Exeter, Zuckerberg entered Harvard University. By his second year in the Ivy League, he had gained a reputation as a software developer on campus.

THE RISE OF FACEBOOK

In mid 2003 he met with Divya Narendra along with his twins partners Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss. They started a discussion on making a social network exclusively for Harvard student. In the discussion with Mark, Narendra said that the project would be called Harvard Connection (later renamed to ConnectU), and its members would post on the Internet their photos, personal information, and useful links. The tasks of Mark Zuckerberg included programming the site, which would allow the system to work as quickly as possible.

After a private meeting with Narendra and the Winklevoss twins, Zuckerberg agreed to join in the work, but the potential of his new partners he estimated skeptically. While working on Harvard Connection, he got a fantastic idea for his own social network.

On February 04, 2004, Mark Zuckerberg registered the domain name TheFacebook.com, now known throughout the world as Facebook.com. However, it functioned only within Harvard.

After Zuckerberg and his partner Eduardo Saverin realized that there were already 4,000 users registered on Facebook, they came to the conclusion that they needed services of new programmers. One of them was a Mark’s neighbor, Darren Moskowitz, who further opened the Facebook service to students at Columbia University, Stanford, and Yale.

Some time later, the registration was opened to all students. The main condition was the availability of an email address in the .edu zone, which also indicated a person’s belonging to the education sector.

It must be said that at first this tactic worked out nicely. The project attracted audience attention of sufficient quality. When a user was trying to sign up, he had to fill out a detailed profile, and in addition to the email address in the .edu zone, it was requested to add a real profile picture. If people used avatars instead of real pictures their profiles were deleted.

Soon, Facebook went beyond the education sector, becoming more and more popular. Mark Zuckerberg started looking for investors. The first investments Mark received from one of the founders of PayPal, Peter Thiel, who is well known throughout Silicon Valley. Peter Thiel allocated $500,000, and that amount was sufficient for immediate Facebook purposes. The project began to evolve rapidly. In less than a year after it was founded more than 1 million people joined the social network. For further development of Facebook, the Accel Partners invested in Facebook $12.7 million and then Greylock Partners added to this amount $27.5 million.

By 2005, Facebook became accessible for all educational institutions and universities in the USA. Zuckerberg still believed that his project is a social network for students, but the interest of users to Facebook grew exponentially. Then it was decided to make a registration accessible to the public. And after this, a Facebook ‘epidemic’ started.

The main thing that immediately attracted users in Facebook is that friends who meet in real life now could communicate with each other online. It was something new.

The Facebook audience grew rapidly, but the monetization of the project still remained unclear. Everyone expected that the main instrument should be context advertising. The fact is that every Facebook user fills sufficiently detailed profile, which can be used to show relevant advertisements. Obviously, that would open up enough options to advertisers, who may be of interest to their audience. But Facebook continued to grow its audience. When they got over 50 million users, large companies began to offer Zuckerberg to sell them the project. So, one time even Yahoo! offered $900 million dollars for Facebook. Impressive sum, but it absolutely did not satisfy Mark. Now facebook worth is about $370 Billion.