8 ms·

2005 Zuckerberg also lied point-blank when he claimed that nothing like The Facebook existed at Harvard (1:32 in the video). He knew about it, was a member and

2005 Zuckerberg also lied point-blank when he claimed that nothing like The Facebook existed at Harvard (1:32 in the video). He knew about it, was a member and heavy user during the period in which he coded his version (http://www.thinkpress.com/authoritas/timeline.pdf http://www.thinkpress.com/authoritas/timeline.pdf). He repeated this false claim in his talk at Stanford's ETL lecture series and I find it absolutely infuriating. It's also relevant that Mark appears so non-chalant about the whole endeavor in the video. That's more or less how he came off when I spoke to him a month before the site launched, except he was more coy, refusing to divulge what he was actually working on. It didn't sound like a business seeking venture capital financing whatever it was, and so I had no reason to think I should get involved. Nor did I suspect that he was actually willing to torpedo our relationship by copying my work feature for feature, seeking funding without mentioning it, and simultaneously asking for advice. Nor did I suspect anything about the fact that he was searching my Facebook for "winklevoss." And yes, I've moved on, but each time these lies are uncovered fresh, no one else takes him to task for them.

rokhayakebe 15y ago
Why did you not keep going with your project?
- thinkcomp 15y ago
  No one at The Crimson would write about my work except to accuse me of stealing passwords, which in fact was what Mark ended up doing. In contrast, Chris Hughes's French A conversation partner was on the editorial board of The Crimson, and they lived across the sidewalk from The Crimson's then-president. Sites like these need press to grow. Without press, there's no point.
  - exitloop 15y ago
    I've followed a lot of your posts on HN and Quora and created an account just to ask this question: Why do you think you deserve any credit whatsoever for Facebook's success? Social networking isn't a unique idea. Yes, Mark Zuckerberg and you both created social networks. Yes, he may have borrowed some ideas from your creation. But the most significant innovations which have driven Facebook's success - newsfeed, platform, open graph, likes - came well afterwards. By your own words though you were ready to sell HouseSYSTEM to Harvard. It's unlikely you would have had the vision to make Facebook what it is today. I know the movie is dramatized but this quote resonated with me: "Look, a guy who builds a nice chair doesn't owe money to everyone who ever has built a chair, okay? They came to me with an idea, I had a better one."
    - thinkcomp 15y ago
      Hi. Unless you think I'm going to hunt you down in the middle of the night, you know me in person but secretly hate me, or you work for Mark, I can't think of any reason why asking me a question would require a new throwaway account. Your question is leading and based on numerous false assumptions. I offered to sell Harvard a license. From the beginning I wanted to expand the site to other schools. That's why I spent a ton of time making the photo module on the home page (http://housesystem.thinkcomputer.com http://housesystem.thinkcomputer.com) modular: so that users could eventually upload their own photos to the photo album of whatever place they were at. I was inspired by the model of the Daily Jolt, which my cousin at Brown showed me during my sophomore year (2002-2003), but I thought it lacked important features. Your assertion about my lacking vision is therefore incorrect, not to mention a little insulting. I decided not to keep going with houseSYSTEM because I thought I could come up with a better idea than an integrated network for students. And I did. It's an integrated network for businesses, and as beneficial as houseSYSTEM was to the student population, what I'm working on has far more potential when you think about things on a large scale. That requires a bit of vision, don't you think? I deserve credit because I worked day and night for months to write code for a product called The Facebook that was part of an integrated environment for students, and every feature I created is available in some form on http://www.facebook.com http://www.facebook.com now, which started as an integrated environment for students with similar or identical integration. It's not about inventing social networking at all, and I've never once claimed that. But as you argue, maybe that's all just as common as building a chair. Even if Mark had never met me, he was influenced by houseSYSTEM. As Harvard tries to teach you from the minute you get there (because it's common sense), it's proper to acknowledge work that has influenced you (as I have in this post, for example). It's improper to plagiarize or make false claims. It's true, I never had the vision to make Facebook what it is today because I wholeheartedly disagree that what Facebook is today is a good thing. My Facebook would have been far smaller with fewer users, but far better. That's the vision I still have, but I'll have to call it something else when I get around to it.
      - olivercameron 15y ago
        You should really let this go. Mark was clearly inspired by you and others, but he did something that you didn't, he made something that people wanted. He out-innovated you. It's all about the execution, your idea is nothing but an idea until people are actually using it. Release what you're working on and wow us, just don't spend your time posting bitter comments on Hacker News every time Mark Zuckerberg is brought up.
  - Sayter 15y ago
    The important lesson here for HN entrepreneurs to take away is that connections can matter as much as a startup's product itself. If we are to go with the assumption that your houseSYSTEM was feature-comparative to Mark's The Facebook (and for the sake of argument, we'll assume your assessment is accurate), then Chris Hughes' person connections to The Crimson may have very well been one of the significant variables that resulted to your products having radically different futures. While it's a romantic notion to think that a sufficient amount of blood, sweat, and tears will ultimately lead to success, the reality is that an external factor such as getting into Y Combinator or having a well-timed TechCrunch article can (fairly or not) make or break a startup. Remember to get out of the office once and awhile and network. Simply delivering a product is not enough.
alex1 15y ago
"[...] it was just me programming what was a facebook, really, at that time for Harvard [...] they didn't have anything like that. [...] I realized that because I didn't have people's information like a school would in making a facebook, I had to make it interesting enough..." I think what he meant was that Harvard itself didn't provide an online facebook to its students. Wasn't Harvard supposedly working on a university-run online facebook during that time? Or am I just thinking of houseSYSTEM?
- thinkcomp 15y ago
  Each of Harvard's houses did provide a Facebook, which is why Mark was able to create Facemash in 2003. houseSYSTEM's Facebook was the first "universal face book" at Harvard University. I offered to sell or just give houseSYSTEM to Harvard, and HASCS turned me down, probably because they insisted that everything had to be done in Java using Harvard's internal iSites framework. Instead they built their own version and launched it a couple of years later.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
ltamake 15y ago
I've read up a lot on houseSYSTEM and it sounded really cool. You should have kept it going. But yeah, Zuckerburg is a liar about a lot of things. People give him a lot more credit than he deserves. I still believe the Winklevosses about him stealing their idea, it seems like the kind of thing he'd do.
- thinkcomp 15y ago
  Thanks! It would have been nice, but it was hard to find support at the time (and not much has changed). The Winklevosses aren't much better for the record. They lied on national television. Compare this (3:45): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzN6XWDEmXI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzN6XWDEmXI Q: Did you contribute information and material to the making of this movie? A: No, but we actually met with the actors after the filming. ...to this: http://www.thinkpress.com/authoritas/20090910.letter.pdf http://www.thinkpress.com/authoritas/20090910.letter.pdf "In addition, I can confirm that Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss were interviewed by Mr. Mezrich." These guys were all made for each other, though I think Paul Ceglia takes the cake for most outrageous.
olivercameron 15y ago
You do not sound like you've moved on, at all.
- Udo 15y ago
  Well, if some big thing like this passes you by so closely, it's not difficult to understand how it can really end up haunting you. Especially if there was a lot of money and treachery involved. Most developers (me included) know from personal experience how awful it is to watch someone you consider to be an asshole or a rip-off become very successful. Most of us also know how it the feels to discover that some company recently took off like a rocket with one of your ideas; usually they got the same idea independently, but if they actually copied it from you - that's a very special kind of pain. That being said, I think it's important to remember the huge success of Facebook is not just based on the initial idea. There were many social networks before Facebook. As painful as it may be to some, the most important thing Facebook did was taking the company from the initial idea to where it is now and from where I stand neither the Winklevosses nor Aaron can really claim they did that. As a developer and an ideas man myself, this is kind of a hard reality to face as well, because it means that in the end business practices and marketing are exponentially more important than concepts and programming.
gojomo 15y ago
It's not a 'lie' unless there's no reasonable truthful interpretation. If other similar efforts weren't official, weren't complete in their coverage, weren't feature-equivalent in any dimension, or weren't 'like' Zuckerberg's Facebook in any other salient way, those would all make that statement ("they didn't have anything like that") true enough for an informal summary conversation. It doesn't deserve to be labelled as "lied point-blank". (The analysis would of course be different if the question were exactly, "was there anything at all that was anything like The Facebook when you created the first version?" But that's not the case here; he's giving a autobiographical coarse narrative view as he saw it. Normal cordial conversation requires generous and magnanimous listeners who fill in the implied qualifiers for a speaker. You are not a cordial and generous listener when it comes to Facebook topics; you have an axe to grind. You detect 'lies' when no other listener would.)
blhack 15y ago
You really should let this go. People have already made up their minds about facebook, and who created it, and where the ideas came from. Even if those people are wrong, it doesn't matter. They've already decided. When people read or hear things like what you're posting in this thread, it reflects poorly on you. Yeah, it absolutely sucks if things played out the way that you say they did, but being upset about it isn't going to improve anything. To paraphrase a hacker friend of mine: "Write shit, build shit, write about building shit...let them know you by the trail of [original content] that you leave behind" The first time I've ever heard of you was in this thread. Right now, instead of knowing you as "Aaron, a brilliant hacker working on facecash and doing cool things.", I know you as "Aaron, somebody who is really caught up on a dispute he had with a college associate almost 7 years ago." If the latter is the perception you want people to have of you, continue making noise about your dispute with facebook, otherwise, don't.
- bbq 15y ago
  "You really should let this go. People have already made up their minds about facebook, and who created it, and where the ideas came from. Even if those people are wrong, it doesn't matter. They've already decided." Is it just me or is this the completely wrong attitude to take towards history?
  - blhack 15y ago
    Towards history? I'm talking about this one very specific situation. You're also taking those lines out of context. I'm saying that he is hurting his reputation because things like comments in a hn thread aren't going to change peoples' minds.
    - bbq 15y ago
      "Towards history? I'm talking one this one very specific situation." Have you ever read a (U.S.) high school history textbook? They bring a similarly simplifying tone to the thousands of singular specific situations in the past and it does everyone a disservice. "You're also taking those lines out of context." I'm guilty of this, yes. I suppose what it comes down to is that I do not share your line of reasoning; Aaron's reputation is not hurt in my eyes.
guildchatter 15y ago
I think that people enjoy listening to short, straightforward stories, without a long preface going into every single gory detail before actually reaching the main part of the story. Zuckerberg isn't in a court of law, so I'm guessing he's skipping details and bending the truth (or lying) to make his story simpler and easier to understand. He's also probably glossing over things to make his story sound more dramatic and impressive. Sorry to hear about your history with him though. That sucks. =T
Jarred 15y ago
Even though you built a social network for Harvard first, Facebook beat you. They out-manuevered you. I can completely see it being a huge regret, both not getting as far as Facebook and not joining them early on, but the best thing you can do for yourself is to just get over it and keep building cool stuff. When you get old and tell your grand-children that story, don't make it one of jealousy and bitterness. Make it something that shows them the potential of small things.
ez77 15y ago
In the timeline you present, how did you get access to the Google sarches Zuckerberg did while he was a student?
- unfasten 15y ago
  If you're talking about the following: 6:20:09 A.M. EST At about six in the morning, Mark Zuckerberg searches for "universal facebook” on Google, finding the Universal Face Book on the Quincy House houseSYSTEM web site. roam175-29.student.harvard.edu - - [06/Jan/2004:06:20:09 -0500] "GET /facebook/ HTTP/1.1" 200 5436 "http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=universal+facebook&btnG=Google+Search" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031007 Firebird/0.7" Then he knows about the search term because of the referrer being logged in his HTTP server logs. This is the standard Combined Log Format. http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/logs.html#combined http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/logs.html#combined describes each field if you're curious about the others.
  - ez77 15y ago
    Thanks! I guess now I don't understand how he was able to associate roam175-29.student.harvard.edu with Zuckerberg. But probably that is a small deduction game for such a hacker! (No sarcasm, just in case.)
    - thinkcomp 15y ago
      When a member signed in their hostname was recorded in the database with a timestamp. The Apache logs, database fields and database timestamps match.
gammarator 15y ago
I was at Harvard when Facebook launched. Within days, it had a huge, highly engaged userbase which it never lost. HouseSYSTEM, in contrast, never took off. Why do you think that was? I'd argue it had a lot more to do with the differing design and motivation of the sites than press coverage. Students signed up to The Facebook because it was cool, viral, and not officially sanctioned, not because they read about it in the Crimson. HouseSYSTEM was none of those things. You seem to think that Mark should have (then) asked you to help with Facebook or (today) acknowledge that he learned from HouseSYSTEM. I'd suggest that Mark's heavy use of HouseSYSTEM showed him mistakes to avoid and thereby encouraged Facebook's adoption. Maybe he thought you were too invested in the choices you'd made with HouseSYSTEM to start fresh.
- thinkcomp 15y ago
  Actually, most of my college friends rarely use Facebook anymore. They haven't for years. Many have terminated their accounts. I think that you're right that some aspects of houseSYSTEM's design hindered it. However, it was never officially sanctioned.

rokhayakebe 15y ago

Why did you not keep going with your project?

thinkcomp 15y ago
No one at The Crimson would write about my work except to accuse me of stealing passwords, which in fact was what Mark ended up doing. In contrast, Chris Hughes's French A conversation partner was on the editorial board of The Crimson, and they lived across the sidewalk from The Crimson's then-president. Sites like these need press to grow. Without press, there's no point.
- exitloop 15y ago
  I've followed a lot of your posts on HN and Quora and created an account just to ask this question: Why do you think you deserve any credit whatsoever for Facebook's success? Social networking isn't a unique idea. Yes, Mark Zuckerberg and you both created social networks. Yes, he may have borrowed some ideas from your creation. But the most significant innovations which have driven Facebook's success - newsfeed, platform, open graph, likes - came well afterwards. By your own words though you were ready to sell HouseSYSTEM to Harvard. It's unlikely you would have had the vision to make Facebook what it is today. I know the movie is dramatized but this quote resonated with me: "Look, a guy who builds a nice chair doesn't owe money to everyone who ever has built a chair, okay? They came to me with an idea, I had a better one."
  - thinkcomp 15y ago
    Hi. Unless you think I'm going to hunt you down in the middle of the night, you know me in person but secretly hate me, or you work for Mark, I can't think of any reason why asking me a question would require a new throwaway account. Your question is leading and based on numerous false assumptions. I offered to sell Harvard a license. From the beginning I wanted to expand the site to other schools. That's why I spent a ton of time making the photo module on the home page (http://housesystem.thinkcomputer.com http://housesystem.thinkcomputer.com) modular: so that users could eventually upload their own photos to the photo album of whatever place they were at. I was inspired by the model of the Daily Jolt, which my cousin at Brown showed me during my sophomore year (2002-2003), but I thought it lacked important features. Your assertion about my lacking vision is therefore incorrect, not to mention a little insulting. I decided not to keep going with houseSYSTEM because I thought I could come up with a better idea than an integrated network for students. And I did. It's an integrated network for businesses, and as beneficial as houseSYSTEM was to the student population, what I'm working on has far more potential when you think about things on a large scale. That requires a bit of vision, don't you think? I deserve credit because I worked day and night for months to write code for a product called The Facebook that was part of an integrated environment for students, and every feature I created is available in some form on http://www.facebook.com http://www.facebook.com now, which started as an integrated environment for students with similar or identical integration. It's not about inventing social networking at all, and I've never once claimed that. But as you argue, maybe that's all just as common as building a chair. Even if Mark had never met me, he was influenced by houseSYSTEM. As Harvard tries to teach you from the minute you get there (because it's common sense), it's proper to acknowledge work that has influenced you (as I have in this post, for example). It's improper to plagiarize or make false claims. It's true, I never had the vision to make Facebook what it is today because I wholeheartedly disagree that what Facebook is today is a good thing. My Facebook would have been far smaller with fewer users, but far better. That's the vision I still have, but I'll have to call it something else when I get around to it.
    - olivercameron 15y ago
      You should really let this go. Mark was clearly inspired by you and others, but he did something that you didn't, he made something that people wanted. He out-innovated you. It's all about the execution, your idea is nothing but an idea until people are actually using it. Release what you're working on and wow us, just don't spend your time posting bitter comments on Hacker News every time Mark Zuckerberg is brought up.
- Sayter 15y ago
  The important lesson here for HN entrepreneurs to take away is that connections can matter as much as a startup's product itself. If we are to go with the assumption that your houseSYSTEM was feature-comparative to Mark's The Facebook (and for the sake of argument, we'll assume your assessment is accurate), then Chris Hughes' person connections to The Crimson may have very well been one of the significant variables that resulted to your products having radically different futures. While it's a romantic notion to think that a sufficient amount of blood, sweat, and tears will ultimately lead to success, the reality is that an external factor such as getting into Y Combinator or having a well-timed TechCrunch article can (fairly or not) make or break a startup. Remember to get out of the office once and awhile and network. Simply delivering a product is not enough.

alex1 15y ago

"[...] it was just me programming what was a facebook, really, at that time for Harvard [...] they didn't have anything like that. [...] I realized that because I didn't have people's information like a school would in making a facebook, I had to make it interesting enough..." I think what he meant was that Harvard itself didn't provide an online facebook to its students. Wasn't Harvard supposedly working on a university-run online facebook during that time? Or am I just thinking of houseSYSTEM?

thinkcomp 15y ago
Each of Harvard's houses did provide a Facebook, which is why Mark was able to create Facemash in 2003. houseSYSTEM's Facebook was the first "universal face book" at Harvard University. I offered to sell or just give houseSYSTEM to Harvard, and HASCS turned me down, probably because they insisted that everything had to be done in Java using Harvard's internal iSites framework. Instead they built their own version and launched it a couple of years later.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

ltamake 15y ago

I've read up a lot on houseSYSTEM and it sounded really cool. You should have kept it going. But yeah, Zuckerburg is a liar about a lot of things. People give him a lot more credit than he deserves. I still believe the Winklevosses about him stealing their idea, it seems like the kind of thing he'd do.

thinkcomp 15y ago
Thanks! It would have been nice, but it was hard to find support at the time (and not much has changed). The Winklevosses aren't much better for the record. They lied on national television. Compare this (3:45): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzN6XWDEmXI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzN6XWDEmXI Q: Did you contribute information and material to the making of this movie? A: No, but we actually met with the actors after the filming. ...to this: http://www.thinkpress.com/authoritas/20090910.letter.pdf http://www.thinkpress.com/authoritas/20090910.letter.pdf "In addition, I can confirm that Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss were interviewed by Mr. Mezrich." These guys were all made for each other, though I think Paul Ceglia takes the cake for most outrageous.

olivercameron 15y ago

You do not sound like you've moved on, at all.

Udo 15y ago
Well, if some big thing like this passes you by so closely, it's not difficult to understand how it can really end up haunting you. Especially if there was a lot of money and treachery involved. Most developers (me included) know from personal experience how awful it is to watch someone you consider to be an asshole or a rip-off become very successful. Most of us also know how it the feels to discover that some company recently took off like a rocket with one of your ideas; usually they got the same idea independently, but if they actually copied it from you - that's a very special kind of pain. That being said, I think it's important to remember the huge success of Facebook is not just based on the initial idea. There were many social networks before Facebook. As painful as it may be to some, the most important thing Facebook did was taking the company from the initial idea to where it is now and from where I stand neither the Winklevosses nor Aaron can really claim they did that. As a developer and an ideas man myself, this is kind of a hard reality to face as well, because it means that in the end business practices and marketing are exponentially more important than concepts and programming.

gojomo 15y ago

It's not a 'lie' unless there's no reasonable truthful interpretation. If other similar efforts weren't official, weren't complete in their coverage, weren't feature-equivalent in any dimension, or weren't 'like' Zuckerberg's Facebook in any other salient way, those would all make that statement ("they didn't have anything like that") true enough for an informal summary conversation. It doesn't deserve to be labelled as "lied point-blank". (The analysis would of course be different if the question were exactly, "was there anything at all that was anything like The Facebook when you created the first version?" But that's not the case here; he's giving a autobiographical coarse narrative view as he saw it. Normal cordial conversation requires generous and magnanimous listeners who fill in the implied qualifiers for a speaker. You are not a cordial and generous listener when it comes to Facebook topics; you have an axe to grind. You detect 'lies' when no other listener would.)

blhack 15y ago

You really should let this go. People have already made up their minds about facebook, and who created it, and where the ideas came from. Even if those people are wrong, it doesn't matter. They've already decided. When people read or hear things like what you're posting in this thread, it reflects poorly on you. Yeah, it absolutely sucks if things played out the way that you say they did, but being upset about it isn't going to improve anything. To paraphrase a hacker friend of mine: "Write shit, build shit, write about building shit...let them know you by the trail of [original content] that you leave behind" The first time I've ever heard of you was in this thread. Right now, instead of knowing you as "Aaron, a brilliant hacker working on facecash and doing cool things.", I know you as "Aaron, somebody who is really caught up on a dispute he had with a college associate almost 7 years ago." If the latter is the perception you want people to have of you, continue making noise about your dispute with facebook, otherwise, don't.

bbq 15y ago
"You really should let this go. People have already made up their minds about facebook, and who created it, and where the ideas came from. Even if those people are wrong, it doesn't matter. They've already decided." Is it just me or is this the completely wrong attitude to take towards history?
- blhack 15y ago
  Towards history? I'm talking about this one very specific situation. You're also taking those lines out of context. I'm saying that he is hurting his reputation because things like comments in a hn thread aren't going to change peoples' minds.
  - bbq 15y ago
    "Towards history? I'm talking one this one very specific situation." Have you ever read a (U.S.) high school history textbook? They bring a similarly simplifying tone to the thousands of singular specific situations in the past and it does everyone a disservice. "You're also taking those lines out of context." I'm guilty of this, yes. I suppose what it comes down to is that I do not share your line of reasoning; Aaron's reputation is not hurt in my eyes.

guildchatter 15y ago

I think that people enjoy listening to short, straightforward stories, without a long preface going into every single gory detail before actually reaching the main part of the story. Zuckerberg isn't in a court of law, so I'm guessing he's skipping details and bending the truth (or lying) to make his story simpler and easier to understand. He's also probably glossing over things to make his story sound more dramatic and impressive. Sorry to hear about your history with him though. That sucks. =T

Jarred 15y ago

Even though you built a social network for Harvard first, Facebook beat you. They out-manuevered you. I can completely see it being a huge regret, both not getting as far as Facebook and not joining them early on, but the best thing you can do for yourself is to just get over it and keep building cool stuff. When you get old and tell your grand-children that story, don't make it one of jealousy and bitterness. Make it something that shows them the potential of small things.

ez77 15y ago

In the timeline you present, how did you get access to the Google sarches Zuckerberg did while he was a student?

unfasten 15y ago
If you're talking about the following: 6:20:09 A.M. EST At about six in the morning, Mark Zuckerberg searches for "universal facebook” on Google, finding the Universal Face Book on the Quincy House houseSYSTEM web site. roam175-29.student.harvard.edu - - [06/Jan/2004:06:20:09 -0500] "GET /facebook/ HTTP/1.1" 200 5436 "http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=universal+facebook&btnG=Google+Search" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031007 Firebird/0.7" Then he knows about the search term because of the referrer being logged in his HTTP server logs. This is the standard Combined Log Format. http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/logs.html#combined http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/logs.html#combined describes each field if you're curious about the others.
- ez77 15y ago
  Thanks! I guess now I don't understand how he was able to associate roam175-29.student.harvard.edu with Zuckerberg. But probably that is a small deduction game for such a hacker! (No sarcasm, just in case.)
  - thinkcomp 15y ago
    When a member signed in their hostname was recorded in the database with a timestamp. The Apache logs, database fields and database timestamps match.

gammarator 15y ago

I was at Harvard when Facebook launched. Within days, it had a huge, highly engaged userbase which it never lost. HouseSYSTEM, in contrast, never took off. Why do you think that was? I'd argue it had a lot more to do with the differing design and motivation of the sites than press coverage. Students signed up to The Facebook because it was cool, viral, and not officially sanctioned, not because they read about it in the Crimson. HouseSYSTEM was none of those things. You seem to think that Mark should have (then) asked you to help with Facebook or (today) acknowledge that he learned from HouseSYSTEM. I'd suggest that Mark's heavy use of HouseSYSTEM showed him mistakes to avoid and thereby encouraged Facebook's adoption. Maybe he thought you were too invested in the choices you'd made with HouseSYSTEM to start fresh.

thinkcomp 15y ago
Actually, most of my college friends rarely use Facebook anymore. They haven't for years. Many have terminated their accounts. I think that you're right that some aspects of houseSYSTEM's design hindered it. However, it was never officially sanctioned.