Gawker: valleywag, authoritas

Where Facebook's features came from — not the mind of Mark Zuckerberg, says Harvard classmate

Nicholas Carlson — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 18:40:00 EDT

In this excerpt from Harvard alumnus Aaron Greenspan's book, Authoritas: One Student's Harvard Admissions and the Founding of the Facebook Era, Greenspan gives an example of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg copying a feature idea from Greenspan's own Harvard project, HouseSystem.

How Mark Zuckerberg allegedly nicked the idea of an online facebook

Nicholas Carlson — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 18:00:00 EDT

Aaron Greenspan's Authoritas, a self-published history of his time at Harvard with Mark Zuckerberg, is full of passages the Facebook founder would rather you not read. In this excerpt, Greenspan recounts the moment when, as a member of Harvard's Student Entrepreneurship Council and creator of the
HouseSystem Face Book, he met a supersecretive wantrepreneur named Mark Zuckerberg.

Harvard classmate claims Zuckerberg stole Facebook's name

Nicholas Carlson — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 17:20:00 EDT

Facebook lawyers want to bar Aaron Greenspan, a Harvard chum of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, from marketing his new book, Authoritas: One Student's Harvard Admissions and the Founding of the Facebook Era. Their rationale: It uses the company's trademarked name improperly in the title. But their real goal is surely quashing Greenspan's story. In this excerpt from Greenspan's tell-all, the author argues that Zuckerberg stole the name Facebook from Greenspan's creation, HouseSystem.