As boys, Zuckerberg and the Winklevosses were practically neighbors. Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, 26, are from Greenwich, Conn., less than 20 miles from Dobbs Ferry. Aside from being smart children from well-to-do families, however, they share few similarities. The twins, Olympic crew hopefuls, are the sons of a former Wharton School professor who now works as an investment consultant. The “craggy, Neanderthal-esque” twosome, as the Crimson described them, studied economics. Where Zuckerberg is pale and thin, the Winklevoss twins are tall and fit. Their style is more prepster than geek: They once rowed a crew race while wearing button-down shirts and ties. Since their graduation in 2004, the twins have raced all over the world, recently winning gold medals at the Pan American Games in Rio de Janeiro. Their father supports their training. When Zuckerberg moved to California in the summer of 2004, by contrast, his parents paid only for his cell phone bills and health insurance.

During their junior year, the twins began sketching out the social network that they hoped would unify Harvard students. The idea came from Narendra, an applied math major from Bayside, N.Y., whom Cameron had met in freshman Spanish class; Narendra and the Winklevosses later lived together in Pforzheimer House. “The three of us were the best of friends,” Tyler would say. “Whenever any of us acted, we all trusted in the other person to act for the betterment of everybody in the group.”

In December 2002, Narendra told the Winklevosses of his vision for an online social network for college students. The Winklevosses liked the idea, and the three decided to bring it to life, naming it Harvard Connection. “It was intended to be a collection of profiles of individuals who wanted to get to know other individuals … at Harvard or abroad or outside of Harvard,” Narenda would say.

They would have to build a website, but none of the budding entrepreneurs had enough coding experience to do so. They needed programmers—which meant that they would have to share their ideas with outsiders. By November 2003, Narendra and the Winklevosses were ready to get Harvard Connection off the ground. The three friends, now seniors, had mapped out much of the site’s design and discussed how to attract users and advertisers. Their programmers—Sanjay Mavinkurve, Joe Jackson, and Victor Gao—had already made progress on a large chunk of the coding: front-end pages, the registration system, a database, and back-end coding. “All three of us were fairly excited about … the idea,” Narendra said. “I [knew] it had potential to be something that was really big and something that we could down the road make money on.” Half the network would be a dating section, where Harvard students could upload profiles. The other half would help make connections, whether to look for jobs, swap information about classes, or just hang out online. There was even a way users could connect with each other; Victor Gao called it a “handshake.”

The group planned to establish the network at Harvard, then expand to other schools. But first they had to finish the “connect” portion of the site. Gao, a senior in Mather House, had opted not to become a full partner in the venture. Instead, he asked to be compensated for hours worked and was paid about $400. The team sought an ace replacement to finish the job.

“We needed a programmer who was as committed to the overall business as we were,” Narendra said in a court statement. “We decided that the next programmer brought in should be made an equal member of the development team … [and] would receive equal financial benefit from the eventual website … ”

Zuckerberg was an easy choice. Then a sophomore computer science concentrator, he had recently gained campus notoriety by creating a website called “facemash” that flashed photos of two Harvard students side-by-side and asked users to click on the one they considered more attractive. To get the photos, Zuckerberg had hacked into school servers and copied pictures from house directories, informally known as facebooks. He suspected from the start that his program would land him in trouble. “Perhaps Harvard will squelch it for legal reasons without realizing its value as a venture that could possibly be expanded to other schools (maybe even ones with good-looking people ... ),” Zuckerberg wrote in his online journal. “But one thing is certain, and it’s that I’m a jerk for making this site. Oh well. Someone had to do it eventually ... ”

Facemash’s questionable taste and Zuckerberg’s hacking caused a furor. The Harvard College Administration Board, the college’s disciplinary committee (known as the Ad Board), placed Zuckerberg on probation for “improper social behavior,” but his exploits caught Narendra’s eye. In early November, he e-mailed the programmer: “We’re very deep into developing a site which we would like you to be a part of and ... which we know will make some waves on campus.”

Within days, Zuckerberg was talking to the Harvard Connection team and preparing to take over programming duties from Gao. The plaintiffs say Zuckerberg was briefed on the confidential nature of the project and the plan to expand to other schools, using the site as an advertising base. According to the plaintiffs, Zuckerberg was intrigued by the idea. “We were very concerned the whole time about … letting the cat out of the bag,” Cameron Winklevoss said in a deposition. “We communicated this multiple times to Mr. Zuckerberg—that it’s very important to get this to market first.” Zuckerberg’s attorneys have denied those claims. The plaintiffs also say that Zuckerberg was given a choice about the terms of his partnership. Although his attorneys have denied that any formal discussion about compensation or ownership of Harvard Connection took place, Gao claims otherwise: “I told him that [Narendra and the Winklevosses] would either pay him on a rolling basis or take him on as a partner with the possibility of taking an equal stake,” Gao told the court. “He became visibly excited. He told me that he wanted the latter option … because he thought the Harvard Connection website had the potential to reach out to a very large user base.”

Gao relayed Zuckerberg’s alleged decision to the team and handed over the keys to the Harvard Connection code. On or about November 12, according to the plaintiffs, Zuckerberg began work. Ten days later, he e-mailed Gao and Narendra to tell them that the site was almost ready. “I have most of the coding done, and I think that once I get the graphics we’ll be able to launch this thing,” Zuckerberg e-mailed.

But for the next two months, the plaintiffs say, Zuckerberg made himself scarce. He postponed meetings, was slow to return calls and e-mails, and allegedly refused to let the team see his work. He offered a variety of explanations: His cell phone was muted, his computer science problem sets were taking up too much time, he forgot to bring his laptop charger home for Thanksgiving and his computer died. As the Harvard Connection launch date was pushed back week after week, the plaintiffs grew increasingly anxious. “We spent a lot of our time trying to get Mark to sort of follow up with us,” Narendra said. "Cameron sent him emails … We would, you know, call him and ask him, ‘Hey, what’s the latest on the website?’… He would say, ‘… I should have something done in the next couple weeks.’”

In mid-December, Narendra and the Winklevosses finally met with Zuckerberg in his dorm room. Though nothing was ever put down on paper—an oversight that would weaken their subsequent case— they claim that they again promised Zuckerberg a fair share of any future revenue. Zuckerberg allegedly confirmed his interest and assured them that the site was almost complete. On the whiteboard in his room, Cameron says, Zuckerberg had scrawled multiple lines of code under the heading “Harvard Connection.” This would be the only time the plaintiffs saw any of his work.

On January 14, 2004, the Harvard Connection team went to talk to Zuckerberg once more; Zuckerberg informed them that he was involved with another project. He did not elaborate, and the two sides did not substantively speak again.

On February 4, Zuckerberg unveiled Facebook.

“None of us knew about it until we picked up the [Crimson],” Tyler Winklevoss said in a deposition. “We read this article that says ‘thefacebook’”—Zuckerberg’s original name for the site— “‘launched by Mark Zuckerberg,’ and we sort of stepped back and were like, ‘Well, that sounds like our idea …’”

Within a few days, hundreds of students had signed up for Facebook. Within two weeks, that number had swelled to 4,000; after a month, 10,000; by June, 100,000. Zuckerberg and his early teammates—Eduardo Saverin, a frat brother who was the company’s first CEO; Dustin Moskovitz, who helped with the early programming and is now a VP of engineering at Facebook; Chris Hughes, who became a Facebook spokesman; and Andrew McCollum, who helped expand the site soon after it launched—were adding schools to Facebook as quickly as they could code.

Harvard Connection never had a chance.

Success in the tech world is usually about execution, not ideas—original ideas are rare in such a competitive field—and, when Facebook launched in February 2004, the notion of an online social network was hardly novel. Friendster was thriving. A handful of rudimentary college-specific networks already existed. “Innovation often happens collaboratively,” says John Palfrey, a Harvard law professor and executive director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at HLS. “It’s very rarely a single person coming up with a single idea who makes a breakthrough. It’s not surprising at all that some people had similar ideas.”

One of those people was Aaron Greenspan, another Harvard student, who, six months before Facebook, had created a Harvard social network called houseSYSTEM. It featured a “Universal Face Book” that allowed students to upload photos and personal information. Zuckerberg, whom Greenspan had told about the site early on, was a user, and Greenspan has since accused him of poaching ideas, in particular features that allowed members to create event reminders, access course schedules, and buy and sell textbooks.

“I don’t know if Mark copied things intentionally or it’s just the most amazing coincidence of all time, but I know he’s dishonest,” Greenspan says. “I’ve seen him lie.”

But Greenspan also points out that many elements of social networks aren’t new. “Some of these concepts are generic and existed as far back as 1997,” he says. “That’s when I first got an invitation to a social network. I was in eighth grade.” Even Zuckerberg’s high school had an online facebook. Kristopher Tillery, one of Zuckerberg’s Exeter classmates, created an application that allowed students to upload profile information and perform searches; it all but replaced the school’s printed student handbook. Zuckerberg, Tillery says now, is “a smart and capable programmer and businessman, and generally a good guy.” Even if the Exeter directory inspired Zuckerberg, says Tillery, that wouldn’t explain Facebook’s success.

What can, in large part, is Zuckerberg. Tales of Zuckerberg forgoing food to program through the night are near legendary. He coded facemash in a two-day, half-drunk frenzy, according to his online journal. “I haven’t really eaten all day,” he wrote. “My diet and sleeping patterns really go to shit when I have a coding project ... or when I don’t.”

Around the time that the Ad Board punished Zuckerberg for facemash, a Crimson editorial explored the possibility of an online directory with stronger privacy controls. “Much of the trouble surrounding the facemash could have been eliminated if only the site had limited itself to students who voluntarily uploaded their own photos,” the Crimson editors argued. “A site that allows us to succumb to the guilty pleasure of judging our friends and enemies in an e-Darwinist free-for-all would be acceptable—and hilarious—so long as its targets all choose to opt themselves into the spotlight.”

This, Zuckerberg has said, was the real inspiration for Facebook. “I basically took that article ... and made a site with those exact privacy controls and that was Facebook,” Zuckerberg said in a deposition. Yet the Crimson had only suggested a site that ranked relative attractiveness.

So why did Zuckerberg bail on Harvard Connection? In court documents and press interviews, he usually cites the unwieldy source code he inherited from the site’s previous programmers. Zuckerberg has also said that he lost interest in Harvard Connection because it lacked a cohesive vision and was never intended to be more than a dating and professional site. “I’m still a little skeptical that we have enough functionality in the site to really draw the attention and gain the critical mass necessary to get a site like this to run,” he e-mailed Cameron Winklevoss at one point.

But it’s hard to imagine that Zuckerberg didn’t know that the site he was designing for himself was very much like the site he was supposed to be creating for the Harvard Connection team. The similarities between Facebook and the concept for Harvard Connect are abundant and obvious, and the plaintiffs have accused Zuckerberg of stealing several ideas, including: the concept of an online social network for the college community; registration with .edu e-mail addresses to encourage users to enter accurate information into their profiles; grouping users by schools, starting with Harvard and then moving on to the rest of the Ivy League and beyond, and allowing them to connect to other groups; letting users adjust privacy settings within their groups; allowing users to request connections with other users; enabling people to upload, post, and share photos, videos, and information and exchange goods such as books or personal items.

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