Wondering what teenage Zuck was up to before he became The Hoodied One and CEO of the world’s largest social networking site? Well, it seems he was interested in animated typography and a slightly creepy blinking yellow eye.
No ad to show here.
A HackerNews user seems to have tracked down what seems to be the Facebook founder’s site on free hosting provider Angelfire. While it’s not certain that it is definitely Zuckerberg’s site, his full name is included in the website’s source code and Angelfire’s archive page suggests it was around as far back as 1999.
So, what is on the site? It seems to have been created mostly to promote ‘The Vader Fader’ and later the ‘Zuck Fader’, a download which was designed to let users fade chat text, instant messages and emails, but it also features a random assortment of Java apps and text. For example, on the about page, the writer claims to be Eminem. Specifically, it reads “Hi, my name is…Slim Shady. No, really, my name is Slim Shady. Just kidding, my name is Mark (for those of you that don’t know me) and I live in a small town near the massive city of New York. I am currently 15 years old and I just finished freshman year in high school.”
The site’s owner (who says you can email him on ‘Themarke51@aol.com’) also offers up some thoughts on the internet, saying it “has some effect on almost every person in the world. However, it is fairly uncommon for a person to have an effect on the internet without going through the long and tedious process of creating a website.”
Interestingly, he also built a small network map linking people online. However, it wasn’t a case of just friending someone — according to the instructions, if you saw “someone who you know and would like to be linked with but your name is not already on The Web, then you can contact me and I will link that person to you and put you on The Web.”
Mark also used the site to list the best things in the world (he apparently has “the best web presence” and is the third best pianist), host a GPA calculator and a ping pong game.
