A formal education at a university will not suit everyone.
As we saw in the section on childhood and Education, Zuckerberg was accomplished at computer programming from an early age, and saw it as much as a means of entertainment as something which had commercial value. The programming skills he learned in his teenage years, honed at Harvard, and encouraged and inspired by the fellow students he met there, set him on the path to developing what is the financially most successful, and widely used, social media platform in the world: Facebook.
As a sophomore students, Zuckerberg created CourseMatch, a simple program which enabled users to select courses ( informed by the previous choices of other users ), and to form study groups. It was his first attempt at social networking and, though not terribly exciting, it laid the groundwork for Zuckerberg's next project, Facemash.
Spend time experimenting with your ideas so that you hone your skills.
A computerised variant of the Hot or Not? game, Zuckerberg built Facemash with three friends, Andrew McCollum, Chris Hughes and Dustin Moskovitz. He took images from the online facebook ( student profiles ) of nine Harvard Houses ( halls of residence ), and laid them side by side, two photos at a time. Users could then vote as to who was hot, and who was not. Zuckerberg launched the site on 28 October 2003, and wrote in his personal blog:
"I'm a little intoxicated, not gonna lie. So what if it's not even 10 pm and it's a tuesday night? what? The Kirkland dormitory facebook is open on my desktop and some of these people have pretty horrendous facebook pics. I almost want to put some of these faces next to picture of some farm animals and have people vote on which is more attractive."
"Yea, it's on. I'm not exactly sure how the farm animals are going to fit into this whole thing ( you can't really ever be sure with farm animals ), but Iike the idea of comparing two people together."
"Let the hacking begin."
You need to be excited about what you create. If an idea doesn't thrill you, it won't thrill anyone else either.
The hacking was a reference of the fact that Zuckerberg had no ownership of the facebooks' content: the image the book contained were intended for reference purposes only, to help students identify one another. He had to hack the Harvard server in order to extract the images for his own site.
"The Hacker Way is an approach to building that involves continuous improvement and iteration. Hacker believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete."-- Mark Zuckerberg
Facebook was an immediate hit. Zuckerberg forwarded the site to several Harvard University servers one weekend, and by Monday it had to be shut down because its popularity had overwhelmed one of the network switches. When it was discovered what he had done, Zuckerberg faced charges of violating copyright, breach of security, and violating individual privacy, and faced expulsion from the university for his actions, but these charges against him were later dropped.
Be aware of security and privacy laws.
Not one to let the site go entirely, however, he reformatted it for his art history final, uploading 500 Augustan images, and allowed classmates to share their notes in the comments section alongside each image. According to Zuckerberg's art history professor, the project had the best grades of any final he had ever given. This was Zuckerberg's first social hack. The facemash.com URL was auctioned off to an unknown buyer for $30, 201 in October 2010.