Competing claims about Facebook
Story of website's first days is murky
PALO ALTO, Calif. - Mark Zuckerberg is considered the founder of Facebook, the popular social networking website estimated to be worth $1 billion or more.
Three Harvard classmates, the founders of ConnectU, have long claimed that Zuckerberg stole the idea from them, and they are suing him in federal District Court in Boston.
Both parties seem to have forgotten Aaron Greenspan, yet another Harvard classmate. He says he actually created the original college social networking system, before either side in the legal dispute. And he has the e-mails to prove it.
As a Harvard student in 2003 - six months before Facebook was started and eight months before ConnectU went online - Greenspan established a simple Web service that he dubbed houseSYSTEM. It was used by several thousand Harvard students. Zuckerberg was briefly an early participant.
An e-mail message, circulated widely by Greenspan to Harvard students on Sept. 19, 2003, describes the newest feature of houseSYSTEM, as "the Face Book," an online system for quickly locating other students. The date was four months before Zuckerberg started his own site, originally "thefacebook.com." (Greenspan retained his college e-mail messages and provided The New York Times with copies of his communications with Zuckerberg.)
Later the two students, both of whom graduated in 2004, exchanged e-mail about their separate projects. When Greenspan suggested the two integrate their systems, Zuckerberg responded, a month before launching his own service: "I actually did think about integrating it into houseSYSTEM before you even suggested it, but I decided that it's probably best to keep them separated at least for now."
Zuckerberg was the first to move to Silicon Valley, raising venture capital and eventually transforming Facebook from a social networking site for the nation's college students into one of the fastest growing Internet sites for both social and business contacts.
Indeed, Greenspan, who is now 24 and moved to Silicon Valley last year, to start a company, appears to be a clear example of a truism in this high-technology region: Establishing who is first with an idea is often murky at best, and it is frequently not the inventor of an idea who is the ultimate winner.
