Harvard student Aaron Greenspan says he came up with the idea for Facebook before Mark Zuckerberg founded the popular company of the same name.
Greenspan’s claims, backed up by emails, are the latest salvo in the controversy surrounding the true origins of the social networking company. His claims have surfaced before, but in a New York Times story just published, Greenspan goes to greater lengths at proving his case.
In 2003, Greenspan sent an email to Harvard students describing the newest feature of houseSYSTEM as “the Face Book,” an online service for finding other students. It was four months before Mr. Zuckerberg started his own site, originally “thefacebook.com.” In other emails, Greenspan also discussed key features that Zuckerberg would later implement in his own company. Greenspan even corresponded with Zuckerberg, and the two apparently talked about joining up, but Zuckerberg ultimately decided to go it alone, raising capital and creating his own vastly more successful company.
Most significantly, however, Greenspan doesn’t appear ready to sue Zuckerberg. He says he’s come to terms with Zuckerberg’s success. The real outcome of his assertions is likely to be a further weakening of the lawsuit filed by Tyler, left Cameron Winklevoss, two of the co-founders of ConnectU, who said Facebook was their idea and that Zuckerberg stole it from them, and are pursuing their claims in court.
Still, Greenspan has been critical of Zuckerberg. See his open letter to Zuckerberg, for example. In his “Authoritas: One Student’s Harvard Admissions,” a 306-page autobiography, he notes many of the features he originated before Zuckerberg, and describes his frustration at how Zuckerberg got media attention from Harvard’s Crimson (see his references to Zuckerberg here).
Tags: Facebook, houseSystem, people:Aaron-Greenspan, people:Cameron-Winklevoss, people:Mark-Zuckerberg, people:Tyler-Winklevos14 Comments
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Reggie said:
Huh? These guys think they were the first to come up with the idea to use the internet as an online school directory with a variety of direct communication features….in 2003!?!?!?!? There were hundreds of people with various things like this ten years earlier (I was one and have the webpages and domain names to prove it.) Maybe this was new at Harvard, but I highly doubt even that…
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Tamar Weinberg said:
I still have a copy of my Columbia University Facebook from 1999. The concept wasn’t foreign to me then, and it certainly wasn’t foreign to me when I joined Zuckerberg’s creation in 2004. The only innovation that Mark Zuckerberg introduced was that he brought it to the web and did so in a way that not only attracted visitors; it turned them into addicts. Kudos for Zuckerberg for making a platform that was desirable to students.
There were many Facebook-clones back in the day, but only one had a clean interface that allowed users to interact with each other with ease. That was the one that succeeded.
You can’t fault anyone else for trying, but Zuckerberg’s success was not driven by simply an idea. It was driven by the execution of that idea.
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rico said:
Hmmm…Classmates.com anyone? This is comical…
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Bob Jones said:
Completely agree… let’s assume that the idea was completely novel starting with this Aaron guy… who cares… execution was done by another and the fruit of that labor is what we see today… glad at least the ConnectU idiots’ case will be weaker now
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anonymous said:
All the beltway insiders know that Al Gore invented Facebook.
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Jitendra said:
I tend to agree with Bob Jones…Its all about the execution.
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DMACK said:
Social Networking is so boring once you hit 33.
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Ruther44 said:
I agree. Ideas are 1% of a new business.
Zuckerberg got the idea from Greenspan. Greenspan got the idea from Abraham. Abrahams got the idea from Adrian Scott (ryze.com). The issue is did ConnectU pay Zuckerberg to write code which he took to facebook. That is what really matters. And that is what the case should be judged on. btw, who has finished Aaron’s 306 page ebook yet?? -
Rex Agbulos said:
Ha? What is a Facebook? What is a ConnectU? I know about Myspace. And who is Mark or Aaron? I’ve never heard of them. I know Tom.
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Jon De Marion said:
What if Zuckerberg paid Greenspan for 2 reasons, 1st to weakening of the lawsuit filed by Tyler and 2nd to get more media attention. For that, he deserves even more credit, smart move, I wonder who is his PR advisor who also deserves a lot of credit.
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Mo said:
I signed onto facebook to get my application into their app platform and got to play with it quite a bit. I just don’t find anything patentable there. I just don’t see how those guys can sue facebook. I think their “Invite Friends to Join” feature is basically an electronic implementation of chained letters, that is why facebook spreads like a cancer.
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Alex Lavidge said:
From what I remember, back in 2001 there was Club Nexus at Stanford. It was a savvy website that resembled facebook.com in a lot of ways. http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue8_6/adamic/
The public needs to understand is that 1) social networking, and the kind of features facebook was built on, and all the ideas, have all been around for a while, before even facebook or ConnectU, and that 2) ideas are cheap (unless you have legal protection) and that creating value comes from execution, barriers to entry, putting the right teams together, and just a ton of other factors.
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leilah said:
Mr. Zuckerberg is such a self ish man..i min its ridiculous to copy someone’s work.
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Jim Ackley said:
Realistically, for something as generic as Facebook, which has been made many times by many people for many schools, etc., whoever makes something like that isn’t going to be the ONLY person in the world to think of it. There are approximately more than 6.7 billion people in the world, odds are one of them is thinking of the same thing you are at the same time. Many of them think of it but don’t or can’t put it into action. So sure they have “created” it before he did, but he’s the man who made it go big time. It’s their own fault for not releasing it for the public before he did.
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5:41 pm
Ideas vs. Execution: The Facebook Fiasco » techipedia | tamar weinberg’s blog of stuff said:
[...] getting a bit frustrated with the hundreds of posts that speak of individuals who claimed to invent [...]
9:37 am
VentureBeat » Facebook idea man pitches “Facebook for companies” said:
[...] Aaron Greenspan, the man who says he came up with the idea for Facebook earlier than Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg, grabbed attention with his claim by showing up on the New York Times this week. [...]