aaron greenspan

I’m getting a bit frustrated with the hundreds of posts that speak about individuals who claimed to invent Facebook before Mark Zuckerberg.

Here’s the real Facebook, long before I joined the social network myself:

Truthfully, it doesn’t matter who invented Facebook. Facebook is like Classmates.com. Facebook is like Friendster. Facebook is like MySpace. And these three social networks, which were based on very similar concepts, predated the Facebook that we know and love today.

As I commented on the VentureBeat blog post, I knew about the concept of a Facebook before it even caught on. It was not a surprise to me when I joined, and I joined not as a college student but as a college graduate. In a way, I did so because at that time, it was in private beta. Looking back on it now, it was an honor to be in the first few thousands of users on Facebook.