Real Creator of Facebook? It's Mark Zuckerberg

Sorry, Winklevoss twins. And you, too, Paul Ceglia. The person who deserves the credit and the riches for inventing Facebook is Mark Zuckerberg, writes Farhad Manjoo in Slate. Zuckerberg didn't so much invent social networking as perfect the concept by building upon already existing ideas. "The real value of Facebook wasn't that it did something new, but that it did something old better—faster, prettier, more useful, and more addictive," writes Manjoo. "Ideas are overrated. In technology, what really matters is execution."

Sure, the Winklevoss twins wanted to create a social network for Harvard, an idea they undoubtedly borrowed from other campus sites. Zuckerberg alone realized the enormous potential of thinking bigger with a Facebook-like site. It's now "worth billions only because the company has doggedly outmaneuvered all rivals by building products that everyone wants to use," writes Manjoo. "And it did so only because Mark Zuckerberg was there to make that happen." (More Mark Zuckerberg stories.)