As evidence has trickled to light over the last three years, Zuckerberg’s story has changed in ways that contradict previous explanations. Immediately after Facebook launched, the plaintiffs sent Zuckerberg a cease-and-desist letter and filed a complaint with the Ad Board. The plaintiffs argued that Zuckerberg had violated Harvard’s honor code. Zuckerberg e-mailed a letter to the Ad Board presenting his version of events. Although the Ad Board chose not to pursue the matter, Zuckerberg’s letter, presented by the plaintiffs as evidence, raises questions about his veracity.

In his letter, Zuckerberg admits—contrary to what his attorneys would later claim—that the Harvard Connection team discussed payment with him. “[The plaintiffs] told me that if I wanted to get involved, they needed about 10 hours of programming done and there could be some pay in it for me,” Zuckerberg wrote. (In the same letter, he also asserted that he was working for free.) Although a discussion about payment could help establish an oral contract between the parties and bolster the plaintiffs’s complaint, it’s unlikely to make much of a difference in the case. “Oral contracts are worth the paper they’re written on,” Palfrey says. “But it’s enough of a case that they’ve been able to get themselves in front of a judge … You can have just enough to kick open the doors of justice.”

Zuckerberg also substantiated much of what the plaintiffs have said with respect to the Harvard Connection concept. He confirmed that it was divided into dating and connecting sections, and that users could upload images and personal information and search for other people based on interests, then contact them for dates or non-romantic reasons. Most revealing is what Zuckerberg said about the connecting side of Harvard Connection: “Instead of the information being based around dating, it had a professional focus, and instead of requesting dates from people, users would request connections. I never really understand [sic] what requesting a connection would do for a user …” That admission suggests that forming platonic connections on a website—for Facebook users, perhaps the site’s most central function—was not actually Zuckerberg’s idea nor intent when he launched his site. Then again, it’s also possible that he was simply misrepresenting the ambition of the Harvard Connection site.

The plaintiffs allege that Zuckerberg stalled Harvard Connection while working on Facebook to gain a first-mover advantage; Zuckerberg has denied the accusation. In the Ad Board letter, he says he began work on Facebook only after his final meeting with the plaintiffs on January 14, 2004.

“I let them know that I probably wouldn’t be able to devote the kind of time I would have liked to the site, and that they should get another developer on board,” he wrote. “After that meeting I began making thefacebook … ” Zuckerberg subsequently claimed that he coded the original Facebook site in just over a week, during exam period.

But court documents suggest that the claims Zuckerberg made to the Harvard Ad Board may be false. Zuckerberg registered the original Facebook website on January 11, and his lawyers have told the court that it was “on or about” this date that he started coding. On January 12, however—two days before meeting with the Harvard Connect group—Zuckerberg e-mailed Eduardo Saverin, saying that the site was almost complete and that they should discuss marketing strategies.

A week earlier, Zuckerberg had e-mailed Greenspan for legal advice about a new “web app.” When Greenspan inquired further, Zuckerberg became cryptic: “For now I’m trying to keep the project on the dl, so I’d rather not discuss the details,” he wrote.

Zuckerberg’s letter to the Ad Board suggests his frustration with the whole episode. “I try not to get involved with other students’ ventures since they are generally too time-consuming and don’t provide me with enough room to be creative and do my own thing,” Zuckerberg told the Ad Board. “I do, however, make an effort to use my skills to help out those who are trying to develop their own ideas for websites … Perhaps there was some confusion, and I can see why they might be upset that I released a successful website while theirs was still unfinished, but I definitely didn’t promise them anything … Frankly, I’m kind of appalled that they’re threatening me after the work I’ve done for them free of charge, but after dealing with a bunch of other groups with deep pockets and good legal connections including companies like Microsoft, I can’t say I’m surprised. I try to shrug it off as a minor annoyance that whenever I do something successful, every capitalist out there wants a piece of the action.”

As Facebook’s membership soared, Zuckerberg showed a gift for making sound decisions without overreaching. When the time was right, he created a “Groups” application that let users join or create groups and connect with people with similar interests. Facebook would eventually expand to high-school networks and added a photo application that let users upload pictures. By the summer of 2004, Facebook was growing so fast that Zuckerberg, who had just finished his sophomore year, headed to Palo Alto to search for investment capital and further develop the site. He took one bag of clothes. “I had a couple friends that were going to be out there for the summer who had internships,” he explained later, “I wanted to hang out with them.”

Zuckerberg enlisted several Harvard roommates and friends to help with Facebook. They rented a group house, planted tiki torches, and ran a zip-line from the roof. They also coded day and night. By the end of the summer, 250,000 people had signed up for Facebook. Zuckerberg decided to stay in California.

That summer, he also befriended Sean Parker, one of the founders of Napster. Parker advised Zuckerberg on how to set up a company and opened donor doors for him in Silicon Valley. In return, Zuckerberg made him company president. Zuckerberg would later force his friend to step down after Parker was arrested for cocaine possession, according to a deposition by Zuckerberg. (Parker has denied cocaine-related allegations.) But the more-seasoned tech entepreneur helped bring in millions of dollars of venture capital.

Harvard Connection, however, remained a Dickensian contrast in fortune. Since the launch of Facebook, the trio of seniors had been scrambling to make up lost ground. “Every second ticking was … a second lost,” Tyler Winklevoss said.

Zuckerberg had turned over none of the code he claimed to have finished for Harvard Connection, so the plaintiffs contracted two Web development firms to finish their site. In May 2004, they launched their new site, renamed ConnectU, and hoped for the best. The best wasn’t very good; by then, Facebook was steamrolling everything in its path, and today, ConnectU is all but moribund. Narendra turned his attention to Wall Street, landing a job at Credit Suisse. But the Winklevoss twins kept at it. Last year, the twins testified that they had pumped some $800,000 into ConnectU. Furious at Zuckerberg, the Winklevosses even OK’d programs to “scrape” user information off Facebook, then e-mail invites to those users to join ConnectU. When Zuckerberg discovered the alleged subterfuge, he filed a lawsuit accusing ConnectU of hacking into Facebook and spamming his customer base. That litigation is ongoing.

Zuckerberg was already embroiled in still another lawsuit, filed five months earlier, this one against Eduardo Saverin. Zuckerberg claims that Saverin tried to hijack the company by freezing its bank account when Facebook desperately needed cash in its formative months. Zuckerberg used money his parents had saved for his college tuition to keep the company afloat. Saverin, who originally owned a third of Facebook, has counter-sued. He claims that the approximately $20,000 involved was his money—Facebook seed capital that Zuckerberg promised to match and never did. Instead, Saverin says, Zuckerberg used the money to cover personal expenses. Then, when Zuckerberg incorporated Facebook and became sole director, he cut Saverin out of the power structure of the company and watered down his shares.

By chance, Saverin ran into Cameron Winklevoss in a Manhattan bar in the summer of 2004. Over the din of music and loud voices, Saverin apologized for Zuckerberg’s behavior, according to a deposition by Winklevoss.

“Sorry that he screwed you … Mark screwed [me] too,” Winklevoss recalled Saverin saying.

In September 2004, only a few weeks after that encounter, the ConnectU team filed a federal lawsuit against Zuckerberg and his early teammates, including Saverin.

Lawyers for ConnectU have successfully pushed to recover Zuckerberg’s original source code for Facebook, arguing that it will show him guilty of copyright infringement. Zuckerberg says that the code will absolve him of wrongdoing. “We know that we didn’t take anything from them,” he told the New Yorker last year. “There is really good documentation of this: our code base versus theirs. At some point, that will come out in court.”

But it has not come out in court. Zuckerberg has been on notice since September 2004 to preserve information relevant to the case, but for some time Facebook claimed they couldn’t produce a shred of source code from when Zuckerberg first began working for Harvard Connection, the original Facebook code, or even the Facebook code in October 2004, one month after the original suit was filed. Zuckerberg’s lawyers have held that nearly all the early Facebook code has disappeared, wiped from outside servers long ago or lost on missing or corrupted hard drives.

“Mr. Zuckerberg should have known better than to fail to back up the work that he allegedly performed on the Harvard Connection code,” ConnectU attorneys have argued. “It is fishy indeed, if not impossible, that the Harvard Connection code, the pre-launch thefacebook.com code, and the facemash code supposedly do not exist from launch until October 2004 …”

What evidence Facebook has turned over to ConnectU—and some memory devices once thought lost have recently surfaced—may be all that exists. The court has ruled that outside consultants can image and analyze the devices for code or other intellectual property. Their findings could be decisive.

“Computer forensics is an extraordinary science,” Palfrey says. “If they go through a legitimate ... process, you’ll get an answer.”

Whatever the legal outcome, we will probably never know what really happened in the Harvard dorms four years ago. And as Facebook mushrooms into one of the biggest databases of personal information in the world, the controversy over the site’s origins will almost certainly be overshadowed by a battle over how it protects users’ privacy. Until a better social network comes along, however, people are logging on to Facebook by the millions. It’s safe to say that Zuckerberg capitalized on the right idea at the right time. The question remains: Whose idea was it?

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