Week 3 - Social Networking

FACEBOOK

Mark Zuckerberg, one of the five founders of the online sensation https://www.facebook.com were only college students when they had the idea of launching Facebook into their campus (Harvard). Zuckerberg was exposed to programming and computers at a very young age by his father. His father first exposed him to Atari Basic Programming and from there, a private tutor was being hired to teach Zuckerberg. By high school, Zuckerberg was already developing communications tools and games. He had came up with the ideas for instant messenger even before AOL's IM was introduced. He even built Synapse Media Player which had received a 3 out of 5 ratings on PC Magazine.

He has already built his name as a programming prodigy by the time he was in high school. He was already building programmes for fun and he has been building many different types of programmes.

Facebook was launched on February 4, 2004 in Zuckerberg's dormitory room.. However, Zuckerberg was sued by his seniors for intentionally misleading them to believe that he was helping them build a social network and used their ideas for Facebook. Started out from Harvard, it was quickly spread to other schools like Columbia, NYU, Stanford, Dartmouth, Cornell, Penn, Brown and Yale University. From there, Facebook was slowly building up and has now became the most sought after social networking website. In 2010, there were 500 million users on Facebook.

Financial strategies were implemented on Facebook shortly after. Facebook are earning income from advertising on the site. Zuckerberg was ranked first on its 2010 list of the Top 100 most influential people of the information age.

At the age of 30, he is worth about US$ 31.6 billion.

TWITTER

Jack Dorsey, the co-founder and co-creator of https://twitter.com, is also the CEO of Square (a mobile payments company). Dorsey, Stone and Noah Glass are the co-founders of Twitter which was spun off from Obvious. As Twitter slowly grow into popularity, the founders are seeing it as a perfect opportunity to earn through the site. Dorsey has later developed a new site called Square, a platform that accepts credit and debit card payments on mobile device. 

In 2013, Dorsey even made it to the board of directors of The Walt Disney Company.

With these two successful people behind the two famous social networking sites, there is no questions how these two sites became so successful and popular among the people all around the world today.