The Winklevoss twins are at it again. The first time they infamously took on Mark Zuckerberg for stealing their idea for an exclusive collegiate social network, they walked away with a $65 million settlement in exchange for dropping all charges against Facebook. The settlement, three years later, is now valued at $200 million. But why stop at $200 million when you can get $650 million? The Winklevii are back, claiming that Facebook overvalued their stock when they made the first deal, which, had it been valued correctly, would be worth $650 million today.
But in order for the Winklevoss twins’ argument to hold that they are entitled to $200 million from Facebook, let alone $650 million, one must assume that their brain child, Harvard Connection.com, would have been anywhere close to as successful as Facebook eventually was.
Over the course of the investigation, Zuckerberg’s personal instant messages between himself and a high school friend have been released, revealing that Zuckerberg intentionally planned on delaying the release of the Winklevoss project in order to make sure that it did not compete with the release of Facebook. They also reveal an insight on Zuckerberg’s part that very well may have been the key differentiator between Harvard Connection and Facebook.
Harvard Connection was conceptualized to be an exclusive collegiate dating website. The Winklevosses’s site would be modeled on two main strategies. First, it would start as being exclusively available for students with a harvard.edu e-mail address, and then it would eventually expand to schools around the country. While the structure and strategy that Facebook initially adopted are identical to the one proposed to Zuckerberg by the Winklevoss twins, there was a huge difference between the site that the Winklevosses imagined and the one that Zuckerberg built: Facebook is not a dating site.
Zuckerberg’s instant messages reveal that right from the outset he was skeptical of the idea of a dating site. In the conversation, he said “I don’t think people would sign up for the facebook thing if they thought it was a for dating.” In deciding to make a social network that did not depend on dating, Zuckerberg gave Facebook potential and marketability that Harvard Connection could never have had. And despite the fact that the Winklevosses’ dating site concept has been floating around for about four years, there has, by no means, been a significant presence of a college-oriented online dating site until now.
Earlier this year, a site called Date My School launched, modeled exactly on the original Winklevoss idea for Harvard Connection. It is limited to people with active .edu email addresses, it started at a few select universities, and it is now expanding to schools across the country. And despite Mark Zuckerberg’s belief that college students would be hesitant to join a dating site, Date My School has been successful. It is not successful on the level that Facebook is, but with over 16,000 members registered in its first year, it’s nothing to scoff at. It has all the potential to become an extremely successful dating site, but the next Facebook? Probably not.
A saying exists that there’s no such thing as an original idea. Zuckerberg’s Facebook was not an original idea, but it was a better one than what the Winklevosses came up with. The Winklevii inspired Facebook, but they did not create it. And now with the rise of Date My School, someone else has now capitalized on a Winklevoss idea. They came out with a good idea that someone else turned into a great idea, and ended up getting the second place prize of $200 million. That’s not such a bad deal.
