14 May,2015 08:30 AM IST | | A Correspondent
On the 32nd birthday of noted American programmer, software developer and co-founder of the social media giant Facebook, we look at some interesting trivia about the man and his creation...
Mark Zuckerberg
On the 32nd birthday of noted American programmer, software developer and co-founder of the social media giant Facebook, we look at some interesting trivia about the man and his creation...
>> Mark Zuckerberg receives a one-dollar salary as CEO of Facebook.
>> Mark Zuckerberg and his college roommates and fellow Harvard University students Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes, launched Facebook from Harvard University's dormitory rooms. The group then introduced the social networking website onto other campuses nationwide.
Mark Zuckerberg
>> Mark Zuckerberg became a billionaire as a result of Facebook's success by 2007 at the young age of 23.
>> Mark Zuckerberg made a surprise guest appearance on the January 29, 2011 episode of the hit sketch-comedy show 'Saturday Night Live', which was being hosted by Jesse Eisenberg, the actor, who played Zuckerberg in the biopic, 'The Social Network'. Although Zuckerberg was critical of the film for his inaccurate portrayal he nonetheless had a cordial and friendly meeting with Eisenberg calling his portrayal in the film as 'interesting'.
>> Mark Zuckerberg's co-creationg Facebook was preceeded by another website named 'Facesmash', written by Zuckerberg and his classmates. The website was set up as a type of "hot or not" game for Harvard students and allowed visitors to compare two student pictures side-by-side and let them choose who was "hot" and who was "not".
>> Facebook was originally named 'theFacebook' during the time of its initial release on February 4, 2004.
>> Mark Zuckerberg launched a peer-to-peer file sharing service named 'Wirehog' on August 2004 with Andrew McCollum, Adam D'Angelo, and Sean Parker in an effort to compete against i2hub a campus-only peer-to-peer file sharing service by Wayne Chang. Wirehog was a precursor to Facebook Platform applications, a development platform for programmers to create social applications within Facebook.
>> Apart from his own social networking site Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg also has accounts on Google + and Twiter. Zuckerberg had become the most followed user on Google+, outranking Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin for some time. He has maintained a private account on Twitter under the username 'zuck', although as of November 2014, the account's status is suspended. Another account 'finkd' also belonged to him.
>> In August 2013 Mark Zuckerberg launched the Internet.org project to provide Internet access to the 5 billion people who are not connected as of the launch date. In a public Facebook post, Zuckerberg mentioned that by using a three-tier strategy, Internet.org will also create new jobs and open up new markets.
>> Mark Zuckerberg as also made several philantrophic contributions. He donated an undisclosed amount to Diaspora, an open-source personal web server that implements a distributed social networking service. Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan donated $25 million to combat the ebola virus disease, specifically the ebola virus epidemic in West Africa. He reportedly donated $100million to Newark Public Schools, the public school system of Newark, New Jersey.
