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Would the real inventor please stand up?

Aaron Greenspan, who claims to be the actual inventor of Facebook, works in a venture capital office in Palo Alto, California, last month. PHOTO: NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE

Mark Zuckerberg is considered the founder of Facebook, the popular social networking Web site estimated to be worth upward of US$1 billion.

Three Harvard classmates, the founders of ConnectU, have long claimed that Zuckerberg stole the idea from them, and they are suing him in federal district court in Boston.

Both parties seem to have forgotten Aaron Greenspan, yet another Harvard classmate. He says he was actually the one who created the original college social networking system, before either side in the legal dispute. And he has the e-mails to prove it.

As a Harvard student in 2003 -- six months before Facebook was started and eight months before ConnectU went online -- Greenspan established a simple Web service that he dubbed houseSYSTEM. It was used by several thousand Harvard students for a variety of online college-related tasks. Zuckerberg was briefly an early participant.

An e-mail message, circulated widely by Greenspan to Harvard students on Sept. 19, 2003, de-scribes the newest feature of houseSYSTEM, as "the Face Book," an online system for quickly locating other students. The date was four months before Zuckerberg started his own site, originally "thefacebook.com." (Greenspan retained his college e-mail messages and provided The New York Times with copies of his communications with Zuckerberg.)

Later the two students, both of whom graduated in 2004, exchanged e-mail about their separate projects. When Greenspan asked what Zuckerberg was planning and suggested the two integrate their systems, Zuckerberg responded, a month before launching his own service: "I actually did think about integrating it into houseSYSTEM before you even suggested it, but I decided that it's probably best to keep them separated at least for now."

Despite Greenspan's entre-preneurial ambitions, Zuckerberg was the first to move to Silicon Valley, raising venture capital and eventually transforming Facebook from a social networking site for the nation's college students into one of the fastest growing Internet sites for both social and business contacts.

Indeed, Greenspan, who is now 24 and moved to Silicon Valley last year to start a company, appears to be a clear example of a truism in this high-technology region: Establishing who is first with an idea is often murky at best, and it is frequently not the inventor of an idea who is the ultimate winner.

Zuckerberg declined to be interviewed, saying through a spokeswoman that he was not sure how to respond. He did not dispute the chronology of events or the authenticity of Greenspan's e-mail messages. Zuckerberg is seeking to dismiss the ConnectU suit.

Greenspan said that Zuckerberg's lawyer had contacted him earlier this year in connection with the ConnectU lawsuit but that he had declined a request to serve as a witness, fearing that he would become embroiled in the legal battle.

In an interview at a cafe this week, Greenspan said he had mostly made peace with the fact that Zuckerberg would be the first of the Harvard '04 graduates to become a billionaire.

If Zuckerberg did borrow some of Greenspan's concepts, he may have simply been working in a grand Harvard tradition. After all, it was a young Harvard dropout, William Gates, and his classmate, Paul G. Allen, who almost three decades earlier copied a version of the BASIC programming language, designed by two Dartmouth college professors, to jump-start the company that would grow into the world's most powerful software firm.

"I've had a long time to think about this, and I'm not as bitter as I was a year ago," Greenspan said. "Things like this aren't surprising to me anymore."

He has described the original creation of houseSYSTEM, ConnectU and Facebook in Authoritas: One Student's Harvard Admissions, a 306-page unpublished autobiography about his adventures as a college student.

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

Although he has yet to find a publisher, he has deployed his system as a commercial Web service for other potential authors as part of CommonRoom, a social networking and business Web site that he established last year.

Greenspan says that he has learned some important lessons since leaving school, although he is not so keen on becoming one of the serial entrepreneurs for which Silicon Valley is known.

"I've written a lot about Harvard's motto being `veritas,'" he wrote recently, "[it's] possibly the best [motto] there is, because if you wait long enough, the truth will come out."
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