How did Mark get such success from Facebook?

You don't remember, or maybe you didn't live, the trendiness of facebook when it first came out. That's the real genius behind it: its exclusivity.

First, you had to be a hardvard student, and only other harvard student with your permission could see what you posted on your profile; then you had to be an ivy league student, then it expanded to every other universities in USA. At that point the buzz was huge, and every student wanted to be on it because you could connect to other students through a CLEAN interface without meeting the mass of idiots and little kids that were on myspace.

Once its access expanded once more to everybody outside of colleges, high schools and pretty much everybody globally, everybody already knew what facebook was as the good social network for grownups and hipsters and anybody that just wanted a safe and easy way to get in touch with their old schoolmates.

The rest is history. A pretty sad history if you ask me, I'm not on that crap, never has been, never will be, but I'm special;-)

I think he had CIA (or whatever you want to call the leadership members of the ruling class) help, who were looking for a way to create a surveillance network on Americans that was not through the government so it would not be able to be regulated.

It has a pervy side too, which probably helped it become popular. If you try you can often find out stuff about people without them realizing it because the privacy controls are not well explained or presented. People generally seem to have no idea that they're sharing all kinds of personal information.