The Twins on FB

Fast Company: Let's consider a world where this controversy with Mark Zuckerberg never happened, and where Facebook never existed. What would your site, HarvardConnection or ConnectU, look like today?

Cameron Winklevoss: The core aspect of the site would not be any different than what Facebook is today. Obviously there's a lot of bells and whistles that have come about because of the evolution of the site. People get caught up in the idea that there were other social networks at the time. There was MySpace and Friendster. The only difference is that it was predicated on this idea of localized networks based on real networks: You only got one .edu email address. There was quality control. There was a level of authenticity that was not seen anywhere else.

I'm saying, specifically, if Facebook had never started, do you assume ConnectU would have millions or hundreds of millions of users instead?

I think it definitely had the potential for as many users as Facebook has today. We always planned to start on the college level and farm it out to other schools. We felt if this works at Harvard, then that was the logical next step. Even if you didn't expand outside college students, just by virtue of people getting older, you're growing the amount of users, because every year, the people that graduate would still be members.

But of course it's a very logical progression to extend upwards and downwards, so I really don't see how it would be any different.

In this parallel universe, where, say, Mark joined as a partner while at Harvard, do you just assume ConnectU would be valued in the billions of dollars now instead, and have 500 million users? Would it just be Facebook, but with a different name?

I don't want to make too much of a conjecture. I do believe the potential for ConnectU was as big as Facebook's, absolutely. I think you would have had to go out of your way and limit yourself for it not to extend to a large audience.

People have this incorrect notion--and it might come from the way The Social Networkdescribes our interaction with Mark initially--it could appear that we really only intended it to be at Harvard. But that's simply not the case. There's a slew of evidence that we intended to expand outward, aside from me just simply saying it.

So, I believe they were identical, and that they would reach the same amount of users.