Last updated: September 2007
Facebook was MY idea!

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerburg has come under fire again as another ex-Harvard student has made claims that he invented a precursor to the social networking site.

Aaron Greenspan has written an unpublished book detailing his claims. Zuckerberg has said that he would not sell his company for less than $10 billion.

Recently, three former Harvard acquaintances claimed that Zuckerberg stole the idea for Facebook from them when, they claim, he worked on their college social networking idea, ConnectU.

Now Greenspan has made further claims that the idea was his in an unpublished book posted on the internet. Greenspan set up a Harvard-wide web system used by thousands of students called houseSYSTEM in 2003, six months before Facebook came into being.

He claims that he sent an email to Harvard students in September 2003 announcing a student-finder service within the system which he called the Face Book. The original domain name for Facebook was thefacebook.com.

Greenspan has said he does not want to take legal action against Zuckerberg, and that he refused to be a witness in the ConnectU trial as he did not want to become embroiled in the case.

In the introduction to ‘Authoritas: One Student’s Harvard Admissions’ he states, “In all, it is not a happy story. Those people who I have met who deserve to know shame will find their due portions here … This book is partly a search for justice. You don’t write an autobiography in your early 20s unless there’s something you need to get off your chest.”
“Since our judicial system can’t possibly know about all that surrounds us - and it would be overwhelmed if it did - it is my hope that the pages of this book will serve as an adequate, if less severe, substitute,” he says in the book, which is published online at aarongreenspan.com.

In the book he claims that Zuckerberg asked him for some advice while he was setting up a system which, at the time, he would not reveal. He asked Greenspan to join his project, the book claims. Greenspan declined.

He says he suggested integrating Zuckerberg’s application into his own houseSYSTEM.

He claims that Zuckerberg penned a response stating, “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.”