While working on The Crimson, Harvard’s student newspaper, I heard someone talking about a sophomore named Mark Zuckerberg who had been summoned before Harvard’s ‘Ad Board,’ the university’s disciplinary body, to face accusations of breaching security, violating copyrights and infringing individual privacy.
Days earlier, Zuckerberg had hacked into the student photo directories of nine of Harvard’s twelve Houses (Harvard’s equivalent to the Oxbridge colleges) and used the information to create a website called Facemash.com, a take-off on a popular webpage called ‘Hot or Not?’ which enabled users to compare the attractiveness of two randomly selected students. In less than a day, the number of hits on the site quadrupled to give a total of 22,000, but Zuckerberg was forced to take the site down in response to outrage expressed by certain students and university administrators.
The Ad Board had already forced two friends of mine to leave Harvard. Zuckerberg was not so unlucky, and in spite of violating Harvard copyright and infringing on student privacy, he was let off with a warning.
Following the publicity that he gained from Facemash, three seniors approached Zuckerberg to see if he would do the coding for a social networking site for Harvard students that they had been working on, called Harvard Connection. Two of the seniors, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, were Olympic-level rowers from Greenwich, CT and members of the Porcellian, Harvard’s most secretive and exclusive finals club.
The third, Divya Narendra, was a former tennis teammate of mine from our high school in Queens, NY. From our perspective as high school students, Harvard seemed to possess an unattainable mystique. Upon arriving, that mystique disappeared, and was replaced by an anxious need to stay relevant among peers who were, in one way or another, going to run the world. I reacted to this pressure by attempting to ignore it, while Divya shed his wardrobe for Brooks Brothers, J Press and hopes of making a name for himself on Wall Street.
Zuckerberg agreed informally to take the job, but soon after decided to build a site of his own and stopped returning calls from Divya and the Winklevosses. A few months later, in early February, Zuckerberg launched the thefacebook.com, a site based on the popular social networking site Friendster that anyone with a Harvard e-mail address could join.
By the end of the month, the site grew to include a number of other Ivy League schools, and now, six years later, counts one in every fourteen people on the planet as a member. Zuckerberg is history’s youngest self-made billionaire, and the Winklevosses (who were at Christ Church last year doing an MBA) and Divya have, since the beginning, been litigating against Zuckerberg in an attempt to claim a piece of the spoils.
In November 2006, during a trip back to Cambridge for the Harvard-Yale game, I ran into Divya at a party at the Spee, one of Harvard’s finals clubs. This was a time when much of the Harvard community viewed Zuckerberg as a legend. It was shortly after a feature article in the New Yorker had come out which recounted the origins of Facebook, including his lawsuit against Zuckerberg. We reminisced about people we knew in common, and he seemed happy to be talking about something other than the lawsuit.
A couple of years ago, Facebook agreed to a $65 million settlement with the Winklevosses and Divya. It’s not clear, though, how much of that the three actually pocketed after legal fees, taxes, and an alleged overvaluation of the stock component of the initial settlement. Not enough, apparently, since the three have gone back to the courtroom.
To guess from Divya’s Facebook profile (it seems that even he, and now the twins as well, could not forego what has become the necessity of having one), things are going better than they were back in 2006. He is featured as a minor but significant character in The Social Network, and has even posted pictures from the movie’s premier at the New York Harvard Club.
When I go to watch The Social Network on Friday, I expect that there will be something surreal about seeing the Harvard of my undergraduate experience recreated as the backdrop to a contest amongst America’s young “power elite.” And if I experience any emotional reaction to the film at all, it will be with uneasy pangs of something that can’t quite be called nostalgia.
