General thoughts on why Mark was successful

• I think his experience with Synapse is partially responsible for the aggressiveness with which he expanded Facebook.  I think it primed him to be ready to exploit an opportunity where he could grow an app into something he could sell for a lot of money.  I think if he hadn't had that experience, he might have been more lax about growing Facebook.
• FB was created to solve a problem all students at Harvard had.  It wasn't just a dating site, where only people looking for a partner would have a reason to join.  Everyone could feel comfortable joining it and get value from it.
• Although he says he built the first version of Facebook in a week, it's important to understand that he had built at least two websites prior to that: Facemash and his network-visualization site.  So it's not like he was learning how to build a web app for the first time while he was creating Facebook.

General Links

• FirstVersions - Facebook
  
  • 2004: 
    • https://www.quora.com/What-features-did-the-first-version-of-Facebook-have
      

      • According to Facebook's first technical executive, Adam D'Angelo, there were only eight features when the site launched. D'Angelo wrote about them on his platform, Quora.

      • They are:

        • User accounts (with real names required), restricted to @harvard.edu email addresses

        • Friends, including friend requests

        • Invitations (no contact importer; you had to enter each email address individually)

        • Profiles, with a single photo for each user

        • Ability to list user metadata like gender, birthday, dorm, phone number, favorite music, favorite books, "about me," courses (structured)

        • Search by name, class year, courses, other metadata

        • Some privacy restrictions to limit who could see your profile (friends only, only people in my class year)

        • A feature to visualize a user's friend graph, which was later cut

      • Features that were not included:

        • Messages

        • The wall

        • Status updates

        • Photos beyond the single profile pic

        • Groups

        • News feed - the home page was mostly wasted space which would show site-wide announcements, friend requests, and pokes.

        • Notifications (nothing happened except for friend requests and pokes)

        • Events/parties

        • Notes

  • 2005: 
  • 2006:  
  • 2007: 
• FaceMash (recreation)
• UWisconsin - The Zuckerberg Files
• Harvard Crimson articles
  • You can just do a search on google for "site:https://www.thecrimson.com/ 'thefacebook.com'" or "site:https://www.thecrimson.com/ 'zuckerberg'" and limit results to 2003 to 2005.

...

• 2017.10.08 - Zuck's FB profile - Post: AOL Instant Messenger
  • Growing up, I lived in a different town from most of the kids I went to school with.
  • A lot of my interaction with [my high school friends] was through AIM. I developed a lot of empathy for the nuances of how people expressed emotions and ideas online, and I became very focused on improving how this worked.
  • I always loved coding. I vividly remember riding home on the bus across that bridge after school thinking to myself that now I had the whole evening to build things on my computer. Fridays were the best, and I remember being even more excited because I had the whole weekend to build things.
    
    Those early projects and experiences had a lot of the seeds of what would become Facebook.
    • I hacked together a tool that let me set myself as if I'd been idle for a long time, even if I was actually at my computer.
    • I built a tool that let me send messages with the letters fading between any colors I wanted. It was simple, but it was fun to build and it made my messages look different.
    • One day my dad saw me using AIM and asked if I could set it up in his office so he could communicate with the other dentists and hygienists. I told him I didn't think AIM was ideal and since he controlled the network in his office I could make him something better.  I built him a system I called ZuckNet that he used for many years afterwards. In addition to chatting one-on-one, he could broadcast an update to everyone in the office at the same time. It also saved every message you received so you wouldn't lose them when you closed your chat window, and it queued up messages to be delivered later if a person wasn't online at the time. Everything was encrypted so sensitive information could be secure. These were all features that solved pain I felt using AIM.
• 2019.02.04 - The Atlantic - Before It Conquered the World, Facebook Conquered Harvard

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