GENERATION WHY?: The day I met Mark Zuckerberg

POSTED: Tuesday, July 12, 2011, 11:00 AM

Filed Under: Critical Mass

I can balance a spoon on my honker (Guillaume Paumier/Wikimedia commons, CC-by-3.0)

Matt Cantor puts Generation Y-ers on blast. And that includes you, Zuckerberg!

First it was the Winklevoss twins, then it was this guy: Seems like everyone’s claiming they invented Facebook. Well, it’s time for the truth: I invented it. Or at least inspired it. How, you ask, did I prompt the creation of the giant social network without knowing how to write a line of code? I’ll tell you.

It all started when I went to camp the summer after 10th grade. That’s where I met a kid — we’ll call him Bill, to protect his privacy — from West Chester, N.Y.. A few months after camp ended, we had a reunion in New York City. Bill brought a buddy of his, a curly-haired kid from his hometown. This guy showed us how he could balance a spoon on his nose. For the next few years, that’s all I remembered about him. I spent many months practicing the spoon trick, and am now able to do it myself.

Then, in my sophomore year of college, I was walking across campus and spotted the curly-haired spoon-trick guy. I’d noticed him around campus and had thought I recognized him, but wasn’t totally sure. I boldly approached him.

“Hey, man, I think we have a friend in common. His name’s Bill — didn’t we all eat together in New York once?”

The kid paused, unsmiling. “Um, yeah. Okay.” Then he walked off to start making Facebook.

Okay, I don’t actually know if that was the moment that inspired Mark Zuckerberg to invent the website. But I like to pretend it was. See, I did point out to him that we had a friend in common — the basis of social networking. He didn’t seem to care at the time. But if I learned anything from The Social Network, it’s that Zuckerberg is an unusual fellow, and maybe, just maybe, he was so blasé because he didn’t believe me about our previous meeting. He thought to himself, I need some way to check the validity of this statement. Do we really have a friend in common? The only way to find out was to invent Facebook. So he did.

(matt.cantor@citypaper.net)

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