Now Available: Innovators Under 35 2013 See The 2013 List »
Mark Zuckerberg, 23
Circle of friends
![]() | ![]() ![]() Three and a half years ago, Mark Zuckerberg (then a Harvard sophomore) and a couple of friends built a website to let them share photos and personal profiles with other Harvardians. Zuckerberg became CEO of the new enterprise, called Facebook. The social-networking site gradually opened its doors to students at other colleges and then high schools. Now that anyone with an e-mail address can register, the site has more than 30 million members, who use it to blog, share pictures, connect with old friends, and expand their networks. In May, the company announced the Facebook Platform, which lets users build and share tools for personalizing their profile pages and adding, say, videos or music from other websites. The idea, says Zuckerberg, is that the personal connections people have made within Facebook will lead them to content that's interesting to them. The company is embroiled in a long-standing legal dispute with ConnectU, another networking site that originated at Harvard, over ownership of the initial source code and even the basic business idea. Still, Bloomberg reported in December that the privately held company's value may be more than $1 billion, thanks largely to the site's appeal to advertisers. As Facebook grows, so does its potential to become a major content distributor. Not a bad prospect for a programming project hatched in a dorm room. --Kate Greene |
2007 TR35 Winners
J. Christopher Anderson
Creating tumor-killing bacteria
Erik Bakkers
Combining semiconductors
David Berry
Renewable petroleum from microbes
Sanjit Biswas
Cheap, easy Internet access
Josh Bongard
Adaptive robots
Garrett Camp
Discovering more of the Web
Mung Chiang
Optimizing networks
Adam Cohen
Making molecules motionless
Javier García-Martínez
New zeolites for cracking petroleum
Kristala Jones Prather
Reverse-engineering biology
Ali Khademhosseini
Living Legos
Tadayoshi Kohno
Securing systems cryptographically
Tariq Krim
Building a personal, dynamic Web page
Ivan Krstic´
Making antivirus software obsolete
Jeff LaPorte
Internet-based calling from mobile phones
Ju Li
Modeling designer materials
Karen Liu
Bringing body language to computer-animated characters
Christopher Loose
Beating up bacteria
Anna Lysyanskaya
Securing online privacy
Tapan Parikh
Simple, powerful mobile tools for developing economies
Babak Parviz
Self-assembling micromachines
Partha Ranganathan
Power-aware computing systems
Neil Renninger
Hacking microbes for energy
Kevin Rose
Online social bookmarking
Marc Sciamanna
Controlling chaos in telecom lasers
Rachel Segalman
Cheap electricity from heat
Shetal Shah
Cushioning preemies
Abraham Stroock
Microfluidic biomaterials
Desney Tan
Teaching computers to read minds
Doris Tsao
Shedding light on how our brains recognize faces
Luis von Ahn
Using “captchas” to digitize books
Xudong Wang
Powering the nanoworld
Lili Yang
Engineering immunity
Mehmet Yanik
Stopping light on microchips
Mark Zuckerberg
Circle of friends