Facebook Fail

Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, is worth a lot of money. Like, a lot of money. $1.5 billion dollars worth of money, to be exact. He is young at twenty-four, a computer genius, and a Harvard dropout—essentially, he’s Bill Gates version 2.0, which is sort of fitting considering that, like Gates, Zuckerberg is wrapped up in all sorts of lawsuits and media frenzies.

Former college classmates of Zuckerberg’s have claimed that he stole their ideas, screwed them over, and then proceeded to become filthy rich, causing a laundry list of lawsuits to be filed by spurned computer geeks. For the most part, that’s pretty understandable, as no one likes to hear about how much money they could have made or how many yachts they could have bought with their could-have-would-have money. But does being highly unlikable—which, apparently, Mark Zuckerberg is—mean that Facebook itself was born on a bed of lies? And, perhaps more importantly, does this mean that he broke the Harvard honor code by stealing ideas?

Most sources you may find on Zuckerberg’s early college years will say the same thing: the guy was a grade-A loser who drank away his woes while locked in his dorm room on weekday nights. Which, okay, might be true, but the guy did some interesting things. One of Zuckerberg’s first websites, Facemash.com, was used to compare photos of his classmates to farm animals. Visitors to the site were then asked to compare the two and decide who was more attractive. The site was quickly shut down by the school after one too many people were deemed uglier than llamas, horses, and perhaps even roosters. And this was the start of the Facebook billionaire? It seems almost laughable.

At the same time, another student named Divya Narendra was working on a website to be called the "Harvard Connection." The idea for the site was for it to be a place for fellow classmates to socialize and do a little networking. Unfortunately, Narendra lacked the programming skills to actually complete the site, but thought, "Hey, let’s see if the farm animal guy wants to help out." Zuckerberg, out of luck and a little bored since the takedown of Facemash, readily agreed to lend a helping hand because that’s just the kind of nice, upstanding gentleman he was.

Only, he wasn’t. Not at all. Zuckerberg was hired for approximately ten hours of work. Considering that there are twenty-four hours in a day and that Zuckerberg was at the time an enrolled college student, giving him a month to write Narendra’s needed code was beyond generous. A month went by, and then another, and Zuckerberg was yet to have the code done. Soon, he kept telling Narendra, soon. But soon never came and, three months after agreeing to write the code, Zuckerberg pulled out from the job. Less than a month later, Facebook was launched.

Naturally, Narendra was and still is pretty pissed. He claimed that Zuckerberg used code that he wrote for the Harvard Connection— while he was employed by Narendra—for Facebook and that, at the bottom of it all, Zuckerberg had stolen intellectual property and used it for his own benefit. Of course, Zuckerberg swears up and down that he didn’t start writing any of the Facebook code until after he stopped working on Harvard Connection. The two later settled the dispute out of court.

As Facebook grew, Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin, another Harvard student, both put $20,000 and an endless amount of hours into the company. The success of the website continued to skyrocket and, eventually, Zuckerberg decided on moving to California, where he befriended a co-founder of Napster. Perhaps living in Silicon Valley without Saverin led Zuckerberg to believe that Saverin was unnecessary to run the company, but perhaps not; at any rate, their relationship quickly spiraled into animosity and more lawsuits. Saverin claimed that Zuckerberg was using the start-up capital for personal expenses, and Zuckerberg claimed that Saverin risked the livelihood of the entire website by freezing company bank accounts. Zuckerberg ended up kicking his friend off of the Facebook team and denying him the title of co-founder, and the two entered a series of legal battles that seemed to have no end in sight—until now.

It’s not like Mark Zuckerberg finally decided that he missed his friend, or even that he needed Saverin’s help on something. It’s a lot more self-centered than that. Word on the street is that Saverin was approached to air out any dirty laundry that he may or may not have for a book that is being written about the Facebook founding. So, concerned with his public appearance and the possible negative effects that the book could have on his company, Zuckerberg waved the white flag of peace and acknowledged Saverin as a co-founder of the site.

With those issues out of the way, one would think it would be all smooth sailing for Team Facebook. Unfortunately, it turned out to be pretty much anything but, as the website continued to be thrust into the media spotlight—this time, pertaining to murder. In mid-May of 2008, Edward Richardson was charged with murdering his estranged wife by stabbing her to death, all because she had changed her Facebook relationship status to "single" just days after their split. After the murder, he then survived a suicide attempt and was sentenced to life in prison. It would seem that Richardson was one of the most die-hard of the Facebook-Status-Is-Everything train of thought.

Just when the Facebook murder hubbub was beginning to settle, yet another murder occurred with a direct link to the social networking site. Nineteen-year-old Leon Craig Ramsden seemed to quite like substance abuse as he went on a three-day bender of beer and cocaine, shortly after which he killed another man in a bar. Shortly before the murder, he posted on his Facebook, "I’m twisted at home… I feel like killin some1 need to stay off the hard stuff." He has since been sentenced to seventeen years in prison, and Facebook has had its name written in the headlines for weeks.

While Zuckerberg is finally getting the amount of publicity that he had originally wanted for his website, it would seem that he is just not getting the kind of media attention that he dreamed of. Being related, however loosely, to two murders can’t be a walk in the park. One can only imagine that between dealing with that, writing code, and remembering to feel guilty for stabbing his friends in the back, Zuckerberg gets little sleep. Unless, of course, he is as heartless as Narendra and others seem to think, in which case, he sleeps just fine, thank you very much.

Mark Zuckerberg is on the verge of internet domination and, with hundreds of people creating accounts every day and unhealthy Facebook addictions cropping up everywhere, it looks like he might just be today’s face of the Internet community. However, with a backlash of problems and enemies facing him and his creation, perhaps you best enjoy your interweb freedom while it lasts.