As a child, Mark Zuckerberg created computer games. As he admitted, they were all disgusting. But they helped him learn to program. At the age of 12, Zuckerberg wrote a messenger program he called Zuknet. In the future, Mark’s father, a dentist, began to use it so that the assistant in the reception would not shout at the whole office about the clients who had come, but simply notify him in electronic format. Messenger is also useful for family communication.
In 2002, when Mark Zuckerberg entered Harvard, he already had a reputation as a talented programmer. He soon created the Coursematch app, where students could post exactly which classes they were taking. As Zuckerberg himself later said, he was upset by the lack of a common way for everyone to get to know other people and learn about their lives. When asked by a journalist for Die Welt am Sonntag about how Coursematch became Facebook, Zuckerberg said that the final exam in art history played a key role. Zuckerberg devoted almost all of his time to programming and felt that, most likely, he would fail this exam, for which it was necessary to write an essay on the value of this or that art object. Then Zuckerberg made an app that showed a randomly selected item from the collection and allowed you to leave comments about it. The exam results were high. After doing a few more tests, Mark thought it would be nice to make an app where people can share their thoughts on whatever they want – this was the first version of Facebook.
This is the truth of Mark Zuckerberg. Another version of events is believed by his fellow students at Harvard, to whom Facebook paid $ 65 million in 2009. Divya Narendra and the Winklevoss brothers accused Zuckerberg of stealing their idea, technology, design, and business plan when they hired him as a developer for their dating site. According to them, Zuckerberg, having familiarized himself with all the details, instead of honestly doing his job, made his website, which later became Facebook. The details of the trial were kept secret, and lawyers on both sides even asked to remove the journalists from the courtroom. Be that as it may, Facebook conquered the world, and we can no longer imagine our life without this application.
Facebook invests heavily in startups and technology. The number of companies acquired by Facebook exceeds fifty. In June 2012, Zuckerberg’s company bought Face.com, an app that allows you to recognize faces in images. In the same year, Facebook acquired Instagram for $ 1 billion, which was already incredibly popular and could become a serious threat to Facebook – so the company decided to buy its competitor. In 2014, Facebook spent $ 2 billion on virtual reality developer Oculus VR. Virtual reality can allow not only sharing memories and events with friends but also transmitting your feelings to them.
Finally, Facebook’s biggest investment is WhatsApp messenger. This purchase cost $ 19 billion. Facebook’s messenger was released as a separate application only in 2015, that is, after the acquisition of WhatsApp. By the way, despite the global success of WhatsApp, only a few percent use it in the US. The main way of communication for Americans is SMS (more than 60%), then Facebook Messenger (15%), and only last but not least WhatsApp with 2%. This is most likely because WhatsApp solves the problem of communication between people from different countries, while most Americans do not have such a problem. Zuckerberg and WhatsApp creator Ian Koum have parted ways about monetizing the messenger, and the latter recently left Facebook. And today it’s hard not to notice that after a conversation with friends on WhatsApp on social networks, ads for the things that you discussed, or the pictures that you sent, start to appear amazingly. If not, take a closer look.
