This is the wiki page [that I slightly edited to preserve לשון נקיה] that relates the history of Facebook. It is KOL KOOLO TUMAH!!!
I for one am proud to be a member of a community where there is a debate whether it is modest to feature pictures of women. In the outside world women are dehumanized [read further!] and the most base animalistic parts of the male are brought to the fore on a constant basis. Most advertisements are just appealing to the animal in man by showing pictures of attractive women that have NOTHING to do with the product but they know that men will associate the product with the picture and buy it. Every movie, TV show etc. has central elements that are about appealing to man's base desires. This is NOT a world that we want to be part of. Mitzrayim was called ערות הארץ - the nakedness of the land. Let us leave....
Facemash, Facebook’s predecessor, opened on October 23, 2003. Initially, the website was invented by a Harvard student, Mark Zuckerberg, and three of his classmates – Andrew McCollum, Chris Hughes and Dustin Moskovitz. Zuckerberg wrote the software for the Facemash website when he was in his second year of college. The website was set up as a type of “[pretty] or not” game for Harvard students. The website allowed visitors to compare two student pictures side-by-side and let them decide who was [pretty] or not.
That night, Mark Zuckerberg wrote the following blog entries:
I'm a little intoxicated, not gonna lie. So what if it's not even 10 pm and it's a Tuesday night? What? The Kirkland dormitory facebook is open on my desktop and some of these people have pretty horrendiedous facebook pics. I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of some farm animals and have people vote on which is more attractive.
— 2:49 pm
Yea, it's on. I'm not exactly sure how the farm animals are going to fit into this whole thing (you can't really ever be sure with farm animals...), but I like the idea of comparing two people together.
— 11:10 am
Let the hacking begin.
— 2:57 pm
According to The Harvard Crimson, Facemash "used photos compiled from the online facebooks of nine Houses, placing two next to each other at a time and asking users to choose the ['prettier'] person". To accomplish this, Mark Zuckerberg hacked the "facebooks" Harvard maintained to help students identify each other and used the images to populate his Facemash website. That the initial site mirrored people’s physical community—with their real identities—represented the key aspects of what later became Facebook.
"Perhaps Harvard will squelch it for legal reasons without realizing its value as a venture that could possibly be expanded to other schools (maybe even ones with good-looking people...)," Zuckerberg wrote in his personal blog. "But one thing is certain, and it’s that I’m a jerk for making this site. Oh well. Someone had to do it eventually..." The site was quickly forwarded to several campus group list-servers. However, the website was shut down by Harvard executives a few days after it opened. Mark Zuckerberg faced charges of violating copyrights, breach of security, and violating individual privacy for stealing the student pictures that he used to populate the website. He later faced expulsion from Harvard University for his actions. However, all the charges were eventually dropped.
