Happy Birthday, Mr. Zuckerberg

Yesterday, May 14, marked the birth of one of the dominant influences in social media and technology today: Mark Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg is one of the original founders of Facebook.com, where he still serves as chairman and chief executive. His position at the head of such a huge enterpriseFacebook's fiscal worth is estimated at more than $100 billion, and the website now has more than a billion usershas vaulted Zuckerberg to celebrity status. Whether or not you like Facebook, it's impossible to ignore how the website's existence over the past decade has changed social interaction on a global level.

Mark Elliot Zuckerberg was born in White Plains, New York in 1984 to a dentist father and pyschiatrist mother. The family is Jewish; Zuckerberg celebrated his bar mitzvah on his thirteenth birthday, but has since become an atheist. In junior high school, he began to fiddle with computers and became interested in programming and software. In high school, Zuckerberg was an outstanding student. He excelled in math and science and was able to understand several languages: French, ancient Greek, Hebrew, and Latin.

It was during Zuckerberg's time as an undergrad studying computer science at Harvard that Facebook was born. In Fall 2003, he and several of his roommates got a laugh out of a program he created called Facemash, which would show two student photographs side by side, allowing the user to choose who was more attractive. Zuckerberg built and launched the website in just a weekend, and the popularity of it exploded, literally overwhelming part of Harvard's network and impeding students' Internet access.

On February 4, 2004, Zuckerberg launched a new website, originally called The Facebook, an attempt at a social site to allow students at Harvard to find and get to know one another. the concept caught on like wildfire, and soon Facebook (the the would eventually be dropped from both the name and the website URL) appeared at other universities across the country, and then to the general public.

Facebook is a free online service that helps users connect with each other. Userscalled Facebook friends on the sitecreate individual profiles, announce activities, and post photographs. They can also comment on each other's profiles and activities. You can see Zuckerberg's own Facebook profile here.

Thanks to the immense popularity of Facebook, Zuckerberg, at the tender age of 30, has a net worth of approximately $25 billion, easily one of the wealthiest men in the world. His success has not come without controversy; there have been arguments about the rights and creation of Facebook since its inception, and disparaging remarks made about Zuckerberg himself.

Ben Mezrich's bestselling 2009 book The Accidental Billionaires was an attempt to tell the story of the creation of Facebook, though it's hard to say how completeor accurateit is. Established screenwriter Aaron Sorkin (The West Wing) adapted the book to film, scripting the exceptionally well made The Social Network and winning an Academy Award for the screenplay. The 2010 film received eight Oscar nominations in total, including nods for Best Actor (Jesse Eisenberg as Zuckerberg), Best Director (David Fincher), and Best Picture. While Zuckerberg has stated the the film and the book it's based on are more fiction than fact, both have helped cement him as a key figure in our current cultural consciousness. (Between you and me, the film is well worth seeing.)

Zuckerberg presently calls Palo Alto, California home. He and his longtime girlfriend Priscilla Chanthey met at Harvard in 2003will celebrate their second wedding anniversary next week. In addition to chairing Facebook, Zuckerberg's current projects include Internet.org, an effort to make Internet access affordable and available on a global level.