Facebook doesn’t want you to read an article that paints its head, Zuckerberg, very negatively. From the article-about-the-article:
Facebook Inc. filed two legal motions aiming to force an independent magazine to take down from its Web site documents related to a suit over the social-networking site’s origins.
Early yesterday, Facebook’s lawyers notified 02138, an independent magazine geared at Harvard alumni, of two separate emergency motions seeking the removal of the documents from its online edition.
Ugh. Censorship is damage. Route around it. To that end, a snippet from the article itself:
During their junior year, the twins began sketching out the social network that they hoped would unify Harvard students. The idea came from Narendra, an applied math major from Bayside, N.Y., whom Cameron had met in freshman Spanish class; Narendra and the Winklevosses later lived together in Pforzheimer House. “The three of us were the best of friends,” Tyler would say. “Whenever any of us acted, we all trusted in the other person to act for the betterment of everybody in the group.”
In December 2002, Narendra told the Winklevosses of his vision for an online social network for college students. The Winklevosses liked the idea, and the three decided to bring it to life, naming it Harvard Connection. “It was intended to be a collection of profiles of individuals who wanted to get to know other individuals … at Harvard or abroad or outside of Harvard,” Narenda would say.
They would have to build a website, but none of the budding entrepreneurs had enough coding experience to do so. They needed programmers—which meant that they would have to share their ideas with outsiders. By November 2003, Narendra and the Winklevosses were ready to get Harvard Connection off the ground. The three friends, now seniors, had mapped out much of the site’s design and discussed how to attract users and advertisers. Their programmers—Sanjay Mavinkurve, Joe Jackson, and Victor Gao—had already made progress on a large chunk of the coding: front-end pages, the registration system, a database, and back-end coding. “All three of us were fairly excited about … the idea,” Narendra said.
[...]
The group planned to establish the network at Harvard, then expand to other schools. But first they had to finish the “connect” portion of the site. Gao, a senior in Mather House, had opted not to become a full partner in the venture. Instead, he asked to be compensated for hours worked and was paid about $400. The team sought an ace replacement to finish the job.
[...]
Zuckerberg was an easy choice. Then a sophomore computer science concentrator, he had recently gained campus notoriety by creating a website called “facemash” that flashed photos of two Harvard students side-by-side and asked users to click on the one they considered more attractive. To get the photos, Zuckerberg had hacked into school servers and copied pictures from house directories, informally known as facebooks.
See where this is going? Clearly I can’t pass judgement on the merits of the ConnectU vs. Facebook suit. This is at a shady intersection of IP and Contract law, and I’m sure nobody will look rosy and innocent once all the ink dries. Still, there’s enough in the article to convince you that Zuckerberg is definitely neither rosy nor innocent. If there wasn’t enough in the article, there sure is enough now that Facebook have deployed their lawyers against the site that published it.
I’m even more glad I left.
via.
