Technology History | Harvard Yard — The Facebook Harvard Was Already Building

The Harvard Crimson published its account on 9 February 2004, five days after thefacebook.com went live, and the number it printed was 650.

That was the count of registered students as of the previous afternoon, with Zuckerberg predicting 900 by the following morning.

The retellings have compressed it since. The Crimson's own tenth-anniversary piece put those 650 users inside the opening 24 hours, and other accounts print 1,200 in a day; the contemporaneous report describes a slower curve.

Mark Zuckerberg launched the site on the afternoon of Wednesday 4 February 2004, after about a week of coding, from a room in Kirkland House.

The idea belonged to the campus before it belonged to him. Each residential House printed its own "face book" of student photographs, and the College had no single online directory covering all of them.

What the Crimson also recorded, and what almost nobody repeats, is that Harvard was already building one.

The director of residential computing told the paper the project was underway and a high priority, and that the College intended to finish it by the end of that spring semester.

Zuckerberg's response is the line the article is remembered for: "I can do it better than they can, and I can do it in a week."

He had reason to want his reputation repaired. The previous October he had put up Facemash, which paired photographs taken without permission from House face books and asked visitors to rate which student looked better.

It came down within days and took him before the Administrative Board.

The new site made a point of the opposite, verifying Harvard email addresses and giving each member controls over who could look them up by year, House, or class.

Within days of the launch, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and Divya Narendra brought the Crimson their allegation that Zuckerberg had stalled their own HarvardConnection while building a competitor. The dispute settled in 2008.

The room itself is not a destination and should not be treated as one.

Kirkland House is a student residence, closed to visitors, and the people living there now have nothing to do with 2004.

Harvard Yard, about five minutes' walk north, is open and free, and it is the honest place to stand.

The cover photograph shows the Yard in autumn; the second shows the Kirkland House entrance from the public street.

Photo: Tim Sackton, CC BY-SA 2.0, and Daderot, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons