Mark Zuckerberg

             Mark Zuckerberg was born on May 14th, 1984 to Edward Zuckerberg, a dentist and Karen Kempner,a pshychiatrist. He was brought up in the state of New York, with his three sisters. He was raised Jewish, and even had his Bar Mitzvah as he turned 13.

 A rebellious yet relatively quiet student, he created a website called Facemash during his sophomore year – an instantly controversial website that encouraged students to rate each other based on appearance.
             
              Zuckerberg was soon forced to shut the site down, but its immense popularity and controversy had made him consider its future potential. He soon turned the simple site into a personal directory for Harvard students, encouraging them to create their own profiles and network with their peers at the college. It was then, together with his friends, Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris hughes that they launched 'The Facebook'.
           
             Facebook grew into a public service that anyone could access, whether to network with friends and family, to play games, or to meet past colleagues.Of course, given the immense size of the website and its incredible popularity – Facebook now has over seven-hundred million users and makes up a huge portion of overall web traffic – its attracted a reasonable amount of controversy. From privacy disputes to concerns about the companys earliest years and equity share, the company has been sued numerous times and criticized frequently.
           

  Nevertheless, Zuckerberg has remained true to his initial vision – to create a website that the entire world can use to communicate openly and easily with one another. He turned down opportunities to sell the site, often for multi-billion dollar sums.





He even turned down chances to increase the sites income from ad revenue, instead preferring to keep the user experience clean and pure.The end result is one of the worlds biggest online businesses, and an icon of the tech renaissance thats occurred recently.

Although its true value is debatable, its safe to say that Facebook, and its creator Mark Zuckerberg, are two of the twenty-first centurys most influential, controversial, and potentially powerful figures.

                                                                                                                        - KEERTHIGA