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Steve Rubel at Micro Persuasion passes along this article from Fast Company profiling Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. The ostensible point of the story is that Zuckerberg and co. have passed on some huge buyout opportunities—Yahoo apparently offered them $1 billion for the site—a move that is considered to be pretty risky. I, however, found the recitation of Facebook-founding lore to be the most interesting part of the piece.

by: Jonathan Sprauge These men are rich: Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg along with Dustin Moskovitz and Matt Cohler

I thought it was particularly interesting that the article lists two precursors to the site: Facemash, a site that Zuckerberg set up on Harvard’s student database that compared pictures of students and asked people to vote for the hottest one, and a site he set up to allow fellow students in his art history course to add their notes as comments to a set of images from the Augustan period. One of the biggest social networking sites (which, you remember, is now worth about $1 billion), then, was founded on the desire to rank people by their looks and annotate images. Based on my limited usage of the site, it seems like these are still the primary uses of the site—uploading pictures (the article also mentions that ComScore ranks Facebook as the number one site on the Internet for photo-sharing, with 6 million uploads a day) and talking about them.

The apparent value of these images is in their ability to be discussed, to be placed in a context (an individual took them, that individual goes to a particular school, likes certain TV shows, and so on) which gives them meaning. Since people have been sharing photos for years, it is a little surprising to note that many of the latest web successes—MySpace, YouTube, flickr—have been, essentially, technologies for contextualizing and discussing images.