Mark Zuckerberg the founder of facebook

Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommates and fellow computer science students Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes.

The website's membership was initially limited by the founders to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League,

and Stanford University. It gradually added support for students at various other universities before opening to high school students, and, finally, to anyone

aged 13 and over.January 2009 study ranked Facebook as the most used social network by worldwide monthly active users, followed by MySpace.

Mark Zuckerberg wrote Facemash, the predecessor to Facebook, on October 28, 2003, while attending Harvard as a sophomore. According to The Harvard Crimson,

the site was comparable to Hot or Not,and "used photos compiled from the online facebooks of nine houses, placing two next to each other at a time and asking

users to choose the 'hotter' person".To accomplish this, Zuckerberg hacked into the protected areas of Harvard's computer network, and copied the houses'

private dormitory ID images. Harvard at that time did not have a student "facebook"(a directory with photos and basic information). Facemash attracted 450

visitors and 22,000 photo-views in its first four hours online.The site was quickly forwarded to several campus group list-servers, but was shut down a

few days later by the Harvard administration. Zuckerberg was charged by the administration with breach of security, violating copyrights, and violating individual

privacy, and faced expulsion. Ultimately, however, the charges were dropped.Zuckerberg expanded on this initial project that semester by creating a social

study tool ahead of an art history final, by uploading 500 Augustan images to a website, with one image per page along with a comment section.He opened the site

up to his classmates, and people started sharing their notes.The following semester, Zuckerberg began writing code for a new website in January 2004. He was inspired,

he said, by an editorial in The Harvard Crimson about the Facemash incident.On February 4, 2004, Zuckerberg launched "The facebook", originally located at

the facebook.com.Six days after the site launched, three Harvard seniors, Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra, accused Zuckerberg of

intentionally misleading them into believing he would help them build a social network called HarvardConnection.com, while he was instead using their ideas to

build a competing product.The three complained to the Harvard Crimson, and the newspaper began an investigation. The three later filed a lawsuit against

Zuckerberg, subsequently settling.Facebook incorporated in the summer of 2004, and the entrepreneur Sean Parker, who had been informally advising Zuckerberg,

became the company's president.In June 2004, Facebook moved its base of operations to Palo Alto, California.It received its first investment later that

month from PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel.The company dropped The from its name after purchasing the domain name facebook.com in 2005 for $200,000.Facebook

launched a high school version in September 2005,which Zuckerberg called the next logical step.At that time, high school networks required an invitation to join.

Facebook later expanded membership eligibility to employees of several companies, including Apple Inc. and Microsoft.Facebook was then opened on September

26, 2006, to everyone of ages 13 and older with a valid email address.On October 24, 2007, Microsoft announced that it had purchased a 1.6% share of Facebook for

$240 million, giving Facebook a total implied value of around $15 billion.