Facebook

Introduction
Facebook is a social networking site that was created to profile students and staff of Harvard University in February of 2004. The site has more than 500 million active users, with 70% of its users outside of the United States. Facebook is used as a platform to contact friends, display pictures, and to talk about yourself and your interests with others. "There are over 900 million objects that people interact with including groups, pages, events, and community groups." The average Facebook user is connected to at least 80 events, groups, or pages. (Facebook)

Controversial History
Mark Zuckerberg, a former Harvard student, was the creator of Facebook. The original site called "thefacebook" launched on February 4, 2004. Two other students from Harvard, soon after the launch of "thefacebook," accused Zuckerberg of stealing their idea for a social networking site, which they called "ConnectU," (Gardner). Another Harvard student, Aaron Greenspan, filed a lawsuit for stealing the idea stating that he was the original creator of the college networking site before either Zuckerberg or the students who created "ConnectU," (Markoff).

Zuckerberg vs. Greenspan
In 2003, Greenspan launched a site called "houseSYSTEM" and had a feature called "the Face Book." This feature was used to quickly locate other students. After graduating in 2004, both Zuckerberg and Greenspan exchanged e-mails about each other's projects and Greenspan asked Zuckerberg to combine the two projects (Gardner). Zuckerberg responded to the email with "I actually did think about integrating it into houseSYSTEM before you even suggested it, but I decided that it's probably best to keep them separated at least for now," (Markoff).

Zuckerberg's social networking site was the first to gain popularity and profit. Greenspan's lawyer contacted Zuckerberg about how he my have taken the idea from Greenspan, but Zuckerberg declined to serve as a witness fearing a new lawsuit would begin. Greenspan has accepted the possibility that Zuckerberg had maybe stolen some of his ideas (Gardner).

Facebook vs. UConnect
The lawsuit between Facebook and UConnect was settled in the summer of 2008. Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and partner Divya Narendra all claimed that they hired Zuckerberg to work on their site. Zuckerberg denied the accusations but as a result of the case Facebook had to pay the creators of UConnect $65 million. (Gardner)