Now that Facebook is all grown up, it’s nice to take a stroll down memory lane every now and then. Thanks to a tweet from Matthew Keys, we’re reminded of just how far Zuckerberg’s company has come since its early days.

In an article on The Harvard Crimson, dated February 9th, 2004, the publication discussed the new site launched by the young student Mark E. Zuckerberg:

After about a week of coding, Zuckerberg launched thefacebook.com last Wednesday afternoon. The website combines elements of a standard House face book with extensive profile features that allow students to search for others in their courses, social organizations and Houses.

Just in case you’ve never read this article before, it’s chock full of interesting quotes from Zuckberg on the launch of Facebook’s original incarnation. Especially this one:

I’m pretty happy with the amount of people that have been to it so far. The nature of the site is that each user’s experience improves if they can get their friends to join it.

The amount of people at the time of the article? According to The Harvard Crimson it surely wasn’t anywhere close to a billion:

As of yesterday afternoon, Zuckerberg said over 650 students had registered use thefacebook.com. He said that he anticipated that 900 students would have joined the site by this morning.

Zuckerberg anticipated 900 users by the morning the article was published, but did he anticipate the 900M that the company boasts in 2012, as well as going public? Who knows, but one thing we do know is that in 2004, he was just focused on keeping the site fun:

I’m not going to sell anybody’s e-mail address. At one point I thought about making the website so that you could upload a resume too, and for a fee companies could search for Harvard job applicants. But I don’t want to touch that. It would make everything more serious and less fun.

Keeping the fun intact will be hard to do with public investors watching your every move, but somehow I think Zuck can handle it.

During a College Class Day speech at Harvard yesterday, Samberg did his popular impersonations of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and actors Mark Wahlberg and Nicolas Cage. The other speaker was Barney Frank, so the students definitely lucked out by getting Samberg.

If you remember Facebook’s f8 conference last year, Samberg opened up the event with his spot-on impersonation of Zuck.

Here’s the piece with the impersonations:

If you’d like to watch the entire 20 minute speech, check it out here:

In case you’re also following the kerfuffle in the aftermath of Facebook’s big IPO, here’s the latest update from Reuters:

In a lawsuit seeking class action status, filed in the U.S. District Court in Manhattan, Facebook shareholders are suing the company, co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and several banks including lead underwriter Morgan Stanley.

The lawsuit claims shareholders were duped by the hiding of Facebook’s weakened growth forecasts.

Write Reuters’ Dan Levine and Jonathan Stempel:

The defendants were accused of concealing from investors during the IPO marketing process “a severe and pronounced reduction” in Facebook revenue growth forecasts, resulting from increased use of its app or website through mobile devices.

The report follows an exclusive Business Insider report of what happened prior to Facebook’s IPO during said marketing process.

The publication’s Henry Blodget said Facebook executive(s) had provided information about a second-quarter earnings estimates cut to underwriter analysts, but not to smaller investors. Quite explosive stuff if true.

Earlier, NASDAQ was sued by an investor who claimed the exchange operator was negligent in handling orders for FB shares.

(Via Reuters reporter Saqib I Ahmed on Twitter)

Facebook accused of concealing analysts’ lowered growth forecasts for the company while the IPO was being marketed. via @Reuters $FB

— Saqib I Ahmed (@SaqibReports) May 23, 2012

Screenshots for posterity.

The ’4 others’, by the way, are fellow Facebook-ers Sheryl Sandberg, David Ebersman, Cipora Herman and Dave Kling.

Update: TechCrunch has more on how it was done.

By the way, since you’re here now: here’s how Facebook stacks up against other public tech companies at a $104 billion valuation.

If you’re as excited about Facebook’s IPO as we are, then you need to get ready for the event. We think that the bell will ring this Friday, but we’ll let you know if that changes.

Much has been said about Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s wardrobe during the IPO roadshow this past week, and that led a company to cash in on get creative with the trend. Betabrand has an “executive pinstripe hoodie” that is Zuckerberg approved. Well, Randi Zuckerberg anyways:

Inspired by Facebook’s IPO roadshow, Betabrand is now selling “executive pinstriped hoodies” Opening bell worthy? ;) betabrand.com/hoodies/execut…

— Randi Zuckerberg (@randizuckerberg) May 10, 2012

This baby will cost you a cool $148, but that’s nothing for someone who could cash in like Zuck will, right?

Take a look at this beauty:

The executive pinstripe hoodie ships in June, so go order yours now.

According to CNBC, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg won’t be making the trip to NYC for the grand celebration that is the IPO stock listing and bell ringing ceremony, set for next Friday, May 18th.

ALERT: Zuckerberg planning to stay at Facebook HQ when stock lists; Facebook considering dual-coast bell ringing for next Friday – sources

— CNBC (@CNBC) May 11, 2012

If this is true, it seems very appropriate that Zuckerberg would opt to stay back in Menlo Park with the rest of his company during the epic moment. Either way, I hope that he’s wearing a hoodie.

I also have a sneaking suspicion that this will be the moment when Facebook announces that it has reached the 1 billion user mark.

We’ve reached out to Facebook for comment, but have yet to hear back.

UPDATE: We’ve heard back from Facebook and a spokesperson told us:

We don’t have a comment at this time.

According to Reuters, it sounds like Facebook is changing its IPO roadshow on the fly. During its latest stop in Boston, Mark Zuckerberg apparently skipped the IPO pitch, leaving the question and answer phase of the meeting to COO Sheryl Sandberg.

Zuckerberg wasn’t the only thing missing from this leg of the roadshow, the thirty-minute video the company prepared was also missing.

Facebook is set to go public on May 18th, starting at around $30 per share.

Facebook’s CEO was surrounded by cameras during his entrance into the New York City portion of the roadshow, which may have something to do with his absence in Boston. Naturally, potential investors want to meet with the person who has the most power in the company face-to-face, but if the roadshow becomes a sideshow, the distractions could get out of hand.

Reuters cited a source regarding the CEO’s absence:

One analyst, who did not want to be named, said no reason was given for Zuckerberg’s absence. Facebook was not available to comment and reporters were not admitted to the presentation.

Previous reports stated that Facebook’s IPO could be delayed due to disinterest from Zuckerberg.

Regardless of all of the pre-IPO-hoopla, Facebook is set to be the largest technology IPO ever, with interest coming from all over the globe. For those looking at today’s actions as the “wheels falling off” for Facebook, think again.

We’re told that the original inventor of Facebook, Abraham Lincoln, was not in attendance either.

UPDATE: Many folks soon started to call out St. Pierre for fabricating this story, including Jason Kottke, and we now know for sure that this story was a fake.

You can’t make this stuff up, folks. Intrepid reporter (or just nosey historian) Nate St. Pierre did some digging in the grand old town of Springfield, IL where he took a tour of the Lincoln Museum and stumbled onto the “Springfield Gazette”, which was a paper entirely about Abraham Lincoln:

The whole Springfield Gazette was one sheet of paper, and it was all about Lincoln. Only him. Other people only came into the document in conjunction with how he experienced life at that moment. If you look at the Gazette picture above, you can see his portrait in the upper left-hand corner. See how the column of text under him is cut off on the left side? Stupid scanned picture, I know, ugh. But just to the left of his picture, and above that column of text, is a little box. And in that box you see three things: his name, his address, and his profession (attorney).

The first column underneath his picture contains a bunch of short blurbs about what’s going on in his life at the moment – work he recently did, some books the family bought, and the new games his boys made up. In the next three columns he shares a quote he likes, two poems, and a short story about the Pilgrim Fathers. I don’t know where he got them, but they’re obviously copied from somewhere. In the last three columns he tells the story of his day at the circus and tiny little story about his current life on the prairie.

Yep, this sounds familiar. A profile picture? Sounds kind of like Facebook, eh?

Lincoln tried to patent this system for updating people, but was rejected:

Lincoln was requesting a patent for “The Gazette,” a system to “keep People aware of Others in the Town.” He laid out a plan where every town would have its own Gazette, named after the town itself. He listed the Springfield Gazette as his Visual Appendix, an example of the system he was talking about. Lincoln was proposing that each town build a centrally located collection of documents where “every Man may have his own page, where he might discuss his Family, his Work, and his Various Endeavors.”

He went on to propose that “each Man may decide if he shall make his page Available to the entire Town, or only to those with whom he has established Family or Friendship.” Evidently there was to be someone overseeing this collection of documents, and he would somehow know which pages anyone could look at, and which ones only certain people could see (it wasn’t quite clear in the application). Lincoln stated that these documents could be updated “at any time deemed Fit or Necessary,” so that anyone in town could know what was going on in their friends’ lives “without being Present in Body.”

Could you imagine every single person in your town having their own newspaper? That would have been a lot of dead trees. But there you have it, Abraham Lincoln out-Zucked Mark Zuckerberg…167 years ago.

Today, Facebook filed its S-1 paperwork to take the company public, and along with the filing came a letter from its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg.

In the letter, Zuckerberg discusses how important the connections that his company is making are. Along with social connections, Facebook’s CEO points out that connecting consumers to businesses can have a big impact on the global economy:

We think a more open and connected world will help create a stronger economy with more authentic businesses that build better products and services.

Of course most people won’t put down a lot of money to invest in a company that lets you poke your friends, so the company mission will start to become clearer as we get closer to May, when the company will start being publicly traded. It’s no accident that Facebook is starting to sound more like a grown-up company than ever before. Connecting the world is no small task, and Facebook hopes that its $5B IPO will help them get there.

Here’s Mark Zuckerberg’s letter in its entirety:

LETTER FROM MARK ZUCKERBERG

Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected.

We think it’s important that everyone who invests in Facebook understands what this mission means to us, how we make decisions and why we do the things we do. I will try to outline our approach in this letter.

At Facebook, we’re inspired by technologies that have revolutionized how people spread and consume information. We often talk about inventions like the printing press and the television — by simply making communication more efficient, they led to a complete transformation of many important parts of society. They gave more people a voice. They encouraged progress. They changed the way society was organized. They brought us closer together.

Today, our society has reached another tipping point. We live at a moment when the majority of people in the world have access to the internet or mobile phones — the raw tools necessary to start sharing what they’re thinking, feeling and doing with whomever they want. Facebook aspires to build the services that give people the power to share and help them once again transform many of our core institutions and industries.

There is a huge need and a huge opportunity to get everyone in the world connected, to give everyone a voice and to help transform society for the future. The scale of the technology and infrastructure that must be built is unprecedented, and we believe this is the most important problem we can focus on.

We hope to strengthen how people relate to each other.

Even if our mission sounds big, it starts small — with the relationship between two people.

Personal relationships are the fundamental unit of our society. Relationships are how we discover new ideas, understand our world and ultimately derive long-term happiness.

At Facebook, we build tools to help people connect with the people they want and share what they want, and by doing this we are extending people’s capacity to build and maintain relationships.

People sharing more — even if just with their close friends or families — creates a more open culture and leads to a better understanding of the lives and perspectives of others. We believe that this creates a greater number of stronger relationships between people, and that it helps people get exposed to a greater number of diverse perspectives.

By helping people form these connections, we hope to rewire the way people spread and consume information. We think the world’s information infrastructure should resemble the social graph — a network built from the bottom up or peer-to-peer, rather than the monolithic, top-down structure that has existed to date. We also believe that giving people control over what they share is a fundamental principle of this rewiring.

We have already helped more than 800 million people map out more than 100 billion connections so far, and our goal is to help this rewiring accelerate.

We hope to improve how people connect to businesses and the economy.

We think a more open and connected world will help create a stronger economy with more authentic businesses that build better products and services.

As people share more, they have access to more opinions from the people they trust about the products and services they use. This makes it easier to discover the best products and improve the quality and efficiency of their lives.

You’ve got to start them young, right? With kids picking up on how to use a computer faster than ever before, why not teach them how to program too?

Kids Ruby is a piece of software and set of tutorials that teaches kids the art of development, with Ruby as its programming language of choice. Forget science fairs, your son or daughter could be the next Mark Zuckerberg.

The software is available for Mac or PC, or if you’re feeling really adventurous, you can install the KidsRuby OS, which is built on Ubuntu. Now that’s a cool weekend project, especially if you’ve purchased a new household computer for Christmas.

Teach your kids how to program

The KidsRuby site speaks about programming in a way that kids can understand. It often suggests that children “hack” their homework:

When we say “hack your homework” we mean “learn how to write a computer program to help you with your homework”. For example, writing code to solve a particular math problem. By showing kids that programming can apply to the real world, like any subject, it becomes a lot more interesting to learn about.

The term “hack” in the computer world, means to be able to do something with hardware or software that the original designers did not realize could be done, usually in a good way. This term is often confused with the term “crack” which means to bypass security of some kind, usually considered something bad that you do not wish to do.

How adorable is that? Soon, your kids will be running around the house looking for things to automate. They might even come up with the next big thing, you never know.

With the KidsRuby editor and curriculum, children can jump right in and start creating simple programs in Ruby:

With all of the code for KidRuby sitting on GitHub, people are starting to collaborate on it and make more curriculums for your budding rock star developer. The site even announced a new learning game for programming called “RubyWarrior”, which is also available on GitHub. By learning commands in Ruby, you have to navigate your warrior up a set of stairs to beat the game.

Even though this is a text-based game, think of it as two-dimensional where you are viewing from overhead. Each level is always rectangular in shape and is made up of a number of squares. Only one unit can be on a given square at a time, and your objective is to find the square with the stairs. Here is an example level map and key.

If you unleash your children on KidsRuby, be sure to share your experiences with us in the comments.

➤ KidsRuby