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September 04, 2007, 02:52 PM ET
Feuding Over Facebook's Founding
Before there was Facebook, there was … what, exactly? Mark Zuckerberg, who founded the site while studying at Harvard University, gets most of the credit for bringing social networking to college. But several of his classmates have stepped forward to dispute the tale of Facebook’s conception.
First came the creators of ConnectU, a like-minded social-networking site that made its debut just four months after Facebook. ConnectU’s creators say they hired Mr. Zuckerberg to do some programming, only to have him turn around and steal their idea. They’ve filed an ambitious lawsuit asking a U.S. District Court in Boston to give them control of Facebook along with all of the site’s assets.
And now there’s Aaron Greenspan, another Harvard alumnus, who says his experimentation in social networking predates both Facebook and ConnectU. Half a year before Facebook was unveiled, he built a Web site called houseSYSTEM. That site, he says, included a feature called “the Face Book,” which let students quickly locate their classmates.
But Mr. Greenspan’s site never really took off—and this month Mr. Zuckerberg was photographed, beaming, on the cover of Newsweek.
“I’ve had a long time to think about this, and I’m not as bitter as I was a year ago,” Mr. Greenspan told The New York Times. But clearly he feels aggrieved: He’s now shopping an autobiography, Authoritas: One Student’s Harvard Admissions, that describes the university’s social-networking battle in detail. —Brock Read
Categories: Company-Watch, Student-Life
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