Zuckerberg, Facebook.com CEO

MARK ELLIOT ZUCKERBURG

FACEBOOK.COM CEO

He is still 23 but Yahoo! has offer his site for 1 billion USD

If you look at a glance, this young man is not so difference with the rest of the other people. He likes to play guitar, play video game, listens to music and sing. But, however his idea in his head makes him different from the others. In his early ages, he has made a quite achievement.

Not so long ago, Yahoo! has made an offer for Zuckerberg’s company, Yahoo! offered 1 billion USD for Facebook.com. This is the biggest offer Zuckerberg has ever encountered. Before this happened, Viacom also offered to buy Facebook.com for 750 million USD. But, Zuckerberg rejected both of these offers. He chose to stay being the CEO of Facebook.com and continues to help it expands.

In his interview with TIME magazine, Zuckerberg said that he wasn’t interested with those offers from the beginning. He stated that the main goal for Facebook.com is not money. That site, said him, is not only used to obtain money, but is also to help the people in the world to communicate freely via internet. “We don’t focus with the final result (money). More than that, we want to continue to expand. That’s why we rejected the offer. We want Facebook.com to advance according to our idealism. We are very sure that our decision is the right one,” Zuckerberg said.

Facebook.com is a site from an Information-Technology based company (www.facebook.com). Similar to Friendster or MySpace, Facebook.com has become no-boundaries communication medium for its user. Despite of the similarities, Facebook.com does have differences with the others. Facebook.com has several features that make it different from the other. This site has an internal network that allows its user to exchange photo, video, MP3, or other stuff with each other. Beside that, this site also allows its user to explore other user’s computer folder that is currently online, but of course this can only be done with the consent of the other user. Because of this, Facebook.com manages to get many customers. There are more than 30 millions people that have been using Facebook.com. That is why Yahoo! and Viacom tried to buy it from Zuckerberg.

Zuckerberg success in creating Facebook comes from his hobby to play with computer programs. Zuckerberg said that he started to know computer programs at eight. With the computer that his dad bought, this curly young man tried to make several programs, started from the simple one to the sophisticated one. When he was at his college, Harvard University, he was interested to make a site that can be used as a communication medium for the Harvard students. In the early 2003, with his friend, Adam D’Angelo, Zuckerberg made a site that was named Coursematch. With this site, every Harvard student can see the data about every people that were studying at Harvard.

At the beginning, Zuckerberg promote this site mouth to mouth. In order to make the visitors of this site interested, he included free download songs. This made more and more people visited this site. Over time, there were many requests that demand the site to have more features. In the end of 2003, Coursematch changed its name into Facemash.com. This site allowed Harvard students to get to know each other and communicate online. Not only that, with the aim of making it more interesting, Facemash.com came with the data of all the students and alumni of Harvard. Zuckerberg got those data by hacking into the University database. Of course this was illegal, Zuckerberg got into trouble because of this.

The incidence however, made Facebook.com a phenomenal hit. Almost every Harvard students and the alumni visited the site. This momentum is used by Zuckerberg to publish a new site, Facebook.com in 2004. With the help of his friends, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes, Zuckerberg managed to complete building the site with more complex and more features in it. So, Facebook then became one of the must visit site for US University students.

Facebook visitors becomes great in quantities, so many companies decided to cooperate and so millions of dollar get into Zuckerberg’s pocket. Slowly but sure, Zuckerberg turned into a young billionaire. Because wanting to focus to Facebook, he decided to resign from the university. Since then, he didn’t go to the college and decided to dedicate his life for Facebook. “I have found my way of life. I now have what I always wanted in my hands. I don’t want to have certificate and then works in a company. I think, working is only for weak people,” he said in his interview with Current Magazine.

Now, the site is currently in trouble. Some of Zuckerberg’s friends, Divya Narendra, Cameron Winklevoss and Tyler Winklevoss claim that Facebook is their idea. They said that Zuckerberg has stolen other people idea. Zuckerberg disagrees with this statement; he also claims that this was his own idea. This case is still being investigated by the Massachusetts law enforcements.

How does Zuckerberg handle business competition even though he is only 23? “We will have a lot of energy if we do the things we love. This makes me never bored and always be able to do the best,” He answered during his interview with TIME magazine in Facebook headquarter, Palo Alto, California.