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people and vote for “hot” or “not hot.” Some of the photographs were acquired by
hacking, and later Zuckerberg would face university charges for violating security
and copyright infringement. Eventually, these charges were dismissed. Had they
not been dismissed, he might have been expelled from Harvard.
Zuckerberg also tried a more socially correct form of website. For a class, he
uploaded about 500 images and pictures of ancient Rome and let people share
comments about them. This received a high grade from the professor, and some of
its features were later used in Facebook.
In 2004, Zuckerberg began work on a project called “thefacebook,” which
would later morph into Facebook. This had the nucleus of later features such as
posting pictures and allowing commentaries. Somewhat surprisingly, about 1,200
people registered on the site on its first day. Within a short time, about half of the
students of Harvard were using “thefacebook.”
However, future legal problems began to surface. Three senior Harvard stu-
dents, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and Divya Narenda, asserted that Zucker-
berg had agreed to help them create a similar project to be called Harvard Connec-
tion.
At first, Facebook was local to Harvard but soon expanded throughout the Ivy
League and then to many other colleges in the United States and other countries. In
2004, operations were moved to Palo Alto, California, and the name was changed
to Facebook after that domain name was purchased for $200,000.
Note
Incidentally, buying and selling domain names has become a minor
subindustry of the web, and it is not always an ethical industry.
Many potential domain names, especially those with the names of
famous people, are registered purely to be sold for a profit. Some-
times domain names sell for many thousands of dollars.
Facebook kept expanding, adding high schools and international universities.
Then, memberships were offered to several high-tech companies, including Mi-
crosoft and Apple. In September 2006, Facebook was opened to anyone over the
age of 13 with a valid email address.
In recent years, Facebook has added corporations as well as living people. In
fact, a Facebook page is something of a status symbol for companies, along with
being “followed” on Twitter.
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