9781422270417

users based on the music they’d already picked. The popular website Pandora.com chooses music for users in a similar way, based on what they already like. At the time, however, Zuckerberg’s Synapse Media Player was a brand-new idea. What started as a senior project from a high school student quickly spread on the Internet. Blogs and websites wrote about Synapse, and Internet users began downloading the project for themselves. To put Synapse into the world, Zuckerberg started a company he called Intelligent Media Group. Big technology companies started to take notice of Zuckerberg’s program and the buzz it was getting on the Internet. Soon, Microsoft and AOL were both trying to buy Synapse from Zuckerberg and offered him jobs creating software at their companies. Zuckerberg turned them both down and decided instead to attend college at prestigious Harvard University after graduating from Exeter in 2002. Zuckerberg wasn’t even eighteen yet, but he had already shown great promise.

Zuckerberg’s Synapse Media Player was helping users find new music based on their favorite songs long before Pandora, Spotify, and other modern music services existed.

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