Facebook is one
good example of how a simple idea can become one great enterprise such as it is
today.
Where did the idea behind Facebook come from?
Most of us are now
familiar with the story that Facebook was started by Mark Zuckerberg with some
friends in his dorm during his college days at Harvard University. But maybe only a few know that the humble seed
of this great business idea was actually “planted” about a couple of years before
he went to Harvard.
 | |
| Google Photo |
This seed may have started germinating in
Phillips Exeter Academy, a private boarding school for grades 9 to 12 located
in Exeter, New Hampshire. Exeter is a
prestigious preparatory school and is listed among the “best 10” of elite and
famous boarding schools in the New England region of the U.S. such as Philips
Andover, Deerfield Academy, St. Paul’s and Choate Rosemary Hall.
The school has a
closely-knit community of students that lives on campus most of the time. The students like to be referred to as “Exonians”
and pride themselves in having a strong group identity with rich culture and
traditions.
This
is the environment where Mark spent the last two years of high school before he
went to Harvard. Every year, each new
and returning student gets a student directory.
Upon arrival Mark got his own copy as well of “The Photo Address Book”
which students fondly call as “The Facebook”.
Possibly,
Mark’s years at Exeter may have an effect on his mindset. Those two years gave him a lot of
opportunities to observe and be part of the school’s socialization process and
lifestyle. This period may have a great
influence on him to form in his mind the basic concept of “social community”
which is what Facebook is all about. It
lay there dormant in fertile the soil of his mind just waiting for the right time to germinate.
Steffan Antonas, a Boston-based web
designer and developer, wrote on his site about those years of Mark at Exeter in
2009: Did Mark Zuckerberg's Inspiration for Facebook Come Before Harvard?
“We interviewed several of Zuckerberg’s peers
this week, and they all confirmed what David W. Farrant, class of 2000, had to
say: ‘The front cover says The Photo
Address Book was such a mouthful. Everybody called it that’”.
Steffan
wrote: “ ‘Facebooks’ were (and still are) a huge part of the students' social
experience and culture at prep schools such as Exeter. Every school in the Big
Ten prints and distributes one for its students annually. When students arrive
on campus each fall, the rhythm of their social lives is predominantly set by
their dormitories, their class year (i.e. seniority), and their proximity to
friends in other houses. Because students aren't allowed cell phones on campus
and living accommodations are in such flux from year to year (they change
houses and phone numbers annually), these ‘Facebooks’ are a valuable resource
for students”.
He continued: “Of course, not only
do students need the directory to find and contact their peers, but the books
become part of the culture of bonding between classmates and friends, as
students use it to see where their peers live, who's hot and who's not, who
lives with who, and who the new kids are. Sounds an awful lot like how people
use Facebook online now, right? Of course, it also describes an early
pre-Internet social culture, facilitated by photo directories, that students
enjoyed long before Zuckerberg even made it to high school, a culture he
happened upon and got to participate in by a stroke of pure luck and glorious
opportunity”.
“But
the story doesn’t stop there” wrote Antonas. “In Zuckerberg's senior year, the student council, headed by student
body president Kris Tillery, successfully lobbied the administration to have
the school's IT department put the full contents of Exeter's Photo Address Book
online. By the time Zuckerberg graduated, the website was put up at
http://student.exeter.edu/facebook, with the URL directory (i.e.
"facebook") named after the students' pet name for the physical book
and effectively shortened to something useful. Tillery was unavailable for
comment”.
Antonas further
added: “In our interviews, some of Zuckerberg's peers pointed us to this
screenshot of the original website hosted on the school's .edu domain. The
screenshot was posted in the public Facebook group 'Exonians' in 2006
and is still there. Some of the comments about the screenshot (which date back to
2007) refer to it as "the original Facebook" and refer to the Photo
Address Book as ‘the physical Facebook’”.
Today, the school's student.exeter.edu/facebook
website is no longer online said Antonas and he was not able to confirm if
Zuckerberg himself was involved in, or responsible for the student council
initiative that made the directory online.
There are those,
however, who reacted on Steffan’s article: “Actually, the ‘Facebook’ at Exeter is still online and available (to
students and faculty) today, contrary to the article”.
Interestingly, 'facebook' is a sort of a generic terminology for the
student directory commonly distributed in schools even way back.
Here’s another interesting reaction: “In 1998 the movie
dead man on campus came out... in that movie the quote says, ‘You’re Rachel,
right? Yeah how’d you know? Oh, the facebook. Oh you memorized the facebook!’ Colleges have been using the word facebook way
before Zuckerberg.”
“Every college
has one,” ventured another commentator, “and every college called it a
facebook. That's why originally it was limited to individual ecosystems in
individual colleges".
What makes all
the difference is that during Zuckerberg’s senior year at Exeter, it is
possible that when the directory was made online after the student council
lobbied the administration, he may have been aware of its existence and this
could have made an impact on his consciousness.
As to what
really happened later at Harvard and how Facebook evolved into what it is today - over
a billion users and growing by the day, $4.3 billion in revenues in 2102 and just last week (July 25, 2013), Wall Street reported its stock prices soared to new heights that it hasn't reached before - are interesting angles for new stories about Facebook.
