Facebook is the largest social network on the planet, it has over 1.2 billion active people every month, and a lot has been said about its creation, even a film was made that was quite successful in the world the whole
In a recent interview Mark Zuckerberg he detailed the creation of the social network while he was still a student at Harvard University in the USA, the idea to achieve Facebook, which then had a completely different name, coming to him after completing a project for one of the courses he was taking.
More specifically, Mark Zuckerberg created a website where users were randomly shown various pieces of art, which he had to learn about for an exam and about which he knew absolutely nothing, and they had to write down what they thought was historically significant art.
He shared that website with his college colleagues and gathered the necessary information to write an essay to be able to pass the respective course, the grades obtained by him and those who visited the website and filled in information being very good.
Starting from this idea, Mark Zuckerberg created a website through which he offered Harvard students the opportunity to share any kind of information with the people around them, the creation of the initial version of the service lasting only 2 weeks, although Zuckerberg was working on multiple projects simultaneously.
From here on, the initial version of Facebook became extremely popular among students, the website was improved, the availability was extended, and little by little we reached where we are today.
For the final the class — called the "Rome of Augustus", it was an art history class — there were all theses pieces of art in the class and they were going to show you a handful and you would need to write an essay about the historical significance of that piece of art. I hadn't paid much attention in the class because I was programming other things so when it came time for the final I was like oh I'm screwed, I don't know any of this stuff.
So as a study tool I built a little service that showed you at random one of the pieces of art and let you enter what you thought was significant from an art history perspective. So I sent it out to the email list for the class and said hey I have a study tool, and everyone just filled in what is significant about all the pieces of art and it ended up being this great social study tool.
I think the grades on the test that year were higher than they had been in the past. So there were all these different projects, I probably did like 10 different things like this when I was at Harvard. I thought I should put some of this stuff together to create a tool where people can share whatever they want with the people around them. And that was how the first version of Facebook came.
It only took me two weeks to build the first version of Facebook because I had so much stuff before then.
