Who invented Facebook?
Answers
Answer:
A Credit to Rolling Stone for its unauthorized history of the popular social-networking site Facebook.
The driving question: Whose idea was it anyway? We don’t quite get an answer, but we do get a good story.
You may have heard about the lawsuit against Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg by three of his former Harvard classmates who accuse the 24-year-old billionaire of stealing their ideas. A fourth student filed a petition with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, claiming he created an online facebook first.
Many reporters have followed these cases, but Rolling Stone’s Claire Hoffman distinguishes herself by looking deep into court documents and putting together a detailed and dramatic narrative. Equally important, Hoffman gives us insight into the process of invention, especially in the tech area. Instead of the old light-bulb-over-the-head model, she finds a smart, obsessively motivated person developing an idea that isn’t entirely his own.
In this case, Zuckerberg readily acknowledges that he wasn’t the first to come up with the idea for an online facebook:
The idea of a social-networking site, [Zuckerberg] told the Crimson, was in the air at Harvard. ‘There aren’t very many new ideas floating around,’ he said. ‘The facebook isn’t even a very novel idea. It’s taken from all these others….’
Zuckerberg has a good point: There isn’t all that much new under the sun. And, also in his favor, he did manage to take the facebook idea the furthest. That said, you probably won’t like Zuckerberg much by the end of the piece.
But Zuckerberg had no interest in giving [an adviser and fellow Harvard classmate Aaron] Greenspan any credit for creating Facebook, let alone a piece of the action. In December of 2004, when Greenspan decided to ‘admit defeat’ and ask Zuckerberg for a job at the rapidly expanding company, all those months of advice proved worthless. ‘We’re looking for someone with more engineering experience—like, 10 to 15 years,’ Zuckerberg told him. The guy who first created an online facebook for Harvard couldn’t even get a job at Facebook.
The problem with a collective invention process is that credit becomes hard to assign—especially with tempting piles of cash at stake.
And there’s a further complication. Given the gaps that exist between morality and legality, the article has two tangles to sort out: One, who actually came up with the idea for the site, and two, whose input the courts should acknowledge—which is to say remunerate.