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Facebook, now valued somewhere around $ 1 billion, was initially considered the brainchild of Mark Zuckerberg. For over three years Zuckerberg and a couple of early Facebook employees are being sued by ConnectU, a similar platform Zuckerberg performed programming work for before launching Facebook. Now a third party has risen with a claim of being the actual Facebook inventor, and with the emails to prove it.

This third party is Aaron Greenspan, and like the ConnectU guys also a Harvard classmate. He claims it was actually he who developed the original social networking system which was used inside the college. This system was called houseSYSTEM, and was used by several thousand Harvard students. HouseSYSTEM predates Facebook by six months, and ConnectU by eight. One of the early participants of the system was Mark Zuckerberg.

In an e-mail sent to Harvard students on September 19, 2003, Greenspan describes the newest feature of houseSYSTEM : "the Face Book”. Four months later Zuckerberg started the original thefacebook.com. Greenspan even exchanged mails with Zuckerberg about their separate projects and about the possibility of merging the two, which Zuckerberg declined. He described some now standard features on Facebook of houseSYSTEM as being “too useful”.

In the meantime Zuckerberg declines to be interviewed. However, he does not dispute the chronology of events nor the authenticity of Greenspan's e-mails. Greenspan in the meantime isn’t really expecting to receive any compensation. He tries to sooth the bitterness he felt when the first multi-million bid on Facebook fell, by writing down the story of the creation of houseSYSTEM, ConnectU and Facebook in "Authoritas: One Student's Harvard Admissions"

"This book is partly a search for justice," he wrote in the introduction. "You don't write an autobiography in your early 20s unless there's something you need to get off your chest."

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