On October 23, 2003, Mark Zuckerberg invented Facemash which would lead to Facebook the following year. On the 23rd of October, Zuckerberg got dumped by a girl and he was upset. To get his mind off of it, he decided that he would create a web site where people could decide which was hotter: a farm animal or a person. While the farm animals never got onto the site, he did create a site that compared photos of two people.

To get the photos, Zuckerberg hacked into Harvard’s computer network and took a copy of all the different houses (dormitory buildings) ID images. This meant that every image of residents soon appeared on the site. Within 4 hours, the site had 450 visitors and over 22,000 photo views. Harvard caught wind and forced him to take the site down. On top of that, he was nearly expelled, but the charges of breach of security, violating copyright and violating individual privacy were removed.

The following semester, he created a site called Thefacebook. It opened to the general public on February 4, 2004. Zuckerberg told a few of his friends who signed up. Then, they had the idea of posting it onto the Kirkland House online mailing list–Mark was a resident of Kirkland. This sent an email out to three hundred students. Once that happened, they watched as dozens of people registered for their site. By the end of the night, with people telling other people in other houses about thefacebook, the site went from no registrants to around fifteen hundred registrants.

At first, registration was restricted to students from Harvard College only. By the end of the first month, more than 50% of the undergraduate population was registered. He brought on Eduardo Saverin for business, Dustin Moskovitz for programming, Andrew McCollum for graphic art and Chris Hughes for promotion. With these four people, Zuckerbeg expanded Facebook. In March, he opened it up to Standford, Columbia and Yale. Soon after that, he further opened it up to all Ivy League schools and Boston area schools. Finally, all colleges and universities in Canada and the United States could sign up.

In the summer of 2004, they incorporated and in 2005, they purchased the domain name facebook.com for $200,00. Because of the success of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg never finished his schooling at Harvard. But, with a net worth of $4 billion, there’s little chance that he’s looking back and regretting the choice in creating one of the largest web sites on the web.