Mark Zuckerberg's Success Story

President and Founder of Facebook

The distant year of 1984 is closely connected with a lot of important events, which changed the course of history, the way people live. The AIDS virus was discovered, the first megabit chip was made at Bell Labs, and Apple Computer released the first Macintosh personal computer. But this year also marks the birth of a man, who will later change the way people socialize, the way they spend their free time and even the way brands develop their marketing strategies. His name is Mark Zuckerberg and today is best known for co-creating the world-famous social networking site Facebook. He probably belongs to the last generation of people who can remember what life was like before the inception of the Internet. He is as well the young man who knows how to take advantage of modern technological advancement and to create real empire online.

Since his early ages in the middle school, Mark started studying computers and software. His father also helped him to develop his computer skills by hiring a software developer, who was able to tutor his child privately. This person was the first one, who noticed Mark’s talent, calling him a computer prodigy. Mark was never satisfied with a negative answer. He would be satisfied with a “yes,” but would argue and want logic reasons that were backed with facts or experiences, if he was not given something that he wanted. His family was positive that this relentless and strong-willed child one day would become a lawyer and in fact a very successful one.

But things didn’t evolve that way…

Young Zuckerberg started having fun in developing various games, communications tools and computer programs, which were the first beginnings of current Facebook. He even created software, which was able to connect all computers between his house and his father’s dental office. That program was called ZuckNet and was a sort of a primitive Instant Messenger.
Later Mark studied Computer Sciences at Harvard University. Social Network was a movie that was based on Zuckerbeg and his life at Harvard. It was released in October and depicts the spirit of a genius who was socially handicapped but would use strong dialogues in a monotone that hid the pain he felt inside. However, the character of Mark Zuckerberg has not been successfully handled in the movie as the actual reality of his image is quite complicated.

Interesting fact from his Harvard years is shared by his roommate Arie Hasit. According to him they had in those years Face Books, where they collected pictures and names of students. The first attempt of Mark was to build a Face site for fun, placing there pictures of four people – two man and two women for whom visitors could voted. Just two days later this site was closed by Harvard College because the traffic to this site was so big, that it overwhelmed the college server. In addition, many of the students complain that he had used their pictures without permission, that is why Mark publicly apologies. Soon the university had a need to build an internal site similar to this and the best person fordoing the job was Mark, who claimed that he is able to make this site even better than planned initially.

The official launching of Facebook was on February 4, 2004 in his Harvard room. Although planned initially to be for the needs of Harvard only, this site headlong spread over other universities and schools, gaining worldwide popularity. Currently, Facebook is #1 social network, helping people connect, make new acquaintances, communicate with friends and family, and share their likes with other people.
This is exactly how Facebook operates along with the developers who create applications for the ecosystem. They hone in on the market, introduce social media and take over the system. The biggest killer in this whole gamut is the social graph which is their great weapon. Another example of this are the Games introduced. Zynga is a company that specially designs games to play on Facebook. This is social networking at its best as they use simple methods to set high standards by introducing games that are socially accepted. You visit friends at their farms in Farmville and go on a hitting spree where you conquer friends in Mafia Wars. There are over 19 million players who indulge in Mafia Wars and over 54 million playing in Farm Ville. Zynga is just four years in the business but investors envisage that they have made a cool $ 5.4 billion already. This makes them more popular than Electronic Arts, which is second largest in the world of published games.

Facebook is an example of what can be done by purposeful and ambitious young man, who not only has a talent, but knows how to re-embody it in practice. Today more than 750 million active users take advantage of his evolutional innovation, spending over 700 billion minutes per month on it.