When Zuckerberg starts a programming project, all else takes a backseat. He doesn’t eat, doesn’t sleep, doesn’t talk to friends.

When he buried himself in his room to work on thefacebook.com late last January, his roommates almost forgot he was there.

But all the work was nearly for naught.

“If I hadn’t launched it that day, I was about to just can it and go on to the next thing I was about to do,” he says.

Such was the uncertain nature of the facebook’s birth.

Zuckerberg admits that the site “almost didn’t happen.” But to trace back to its beginnings, one has to look to an earlier, quickly aborted Zuckerberg undertaking: Facemash.

Aping the style of hotornot.com, Facemash pitted Harvard students against one another, asking readers to view House facebook photos of two randomly selected undergraduates and choose which one was “hotter.”

The site was visited by 450 people within its first four hours online, after which Zuckerberg took the site down.

The site’s popularity with students, however, was not quite equaled by success among administrators.

“I put Facemash up on a Sunday night and within four hours my internet connection had been yanked,” he says.

Zuckerberg found himself brought before the Administrative Board for breaching security, violating copyrights and violating individuals’ privacy by using students’ online facebook photos without permission.

Controversy aside, Facemash was typical of Zuckerberg’s undertakings.

“I’m going on the theory that like, I’m in college just like everyone else, so stuff that’s applicable to me is probably applicable and useful to everyone else, as well,” he says.

Unreleased Zuckerberg programs include a screensaver that displays the user’s AOL Instant Messenger away messages and an application that synchronizes MP3 players on multiple computers.

“The original plan here, which I actually got too lazy and never ended up executing,” Zuckerberg says, “was to get everyone at Harvard to play the same song at the same time. I thought that would be really funny.”