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PALO ALTO, California: Mark Zuckerberg is considered the founder of Facebook, the popular social networking Web site estimated to be worth upwards of $1 billion.

Two Harvard classmates have long claimed that Zuckerberg stole the idea from them, the founders of ConnectU, and are suing him in U.S. district court in Boston.

But then there is Aaron Greenspan, yet another Harvard classmate. Lost in the glare of Zuckerbergs meteoric rise after founding the Web site, and the more recent acrimonious lawsuit over whether he stole the idea, is the apparent fact that Greenspan actually created the original college social networking system, before either side in the legal dispute. And he has the e-mails to prove it.

As a Harvard student in 2003 - six months before Facebook was started and eight months before ConnectU went online - Greenspan established a simple Web service that he dubbed houseSYSTEM. It was ultimately used by several thousand Harvard students for a variety of online college-related tasks. They included Zuckerberg, who was briefly an early participant.

An e-mail message, circulated widely from Greenspan to Harvard students on Sept. 19, 2003, describes the newest feature of houseSYSTEM as “the Face Book,” an online system for quickly locating other students. The date was four months before Zuckerberg started his own site, originally “thefacebook.com.” Greenspan retained his college e-mails and provided The New York Times with copies of his communications with Zuckerberg.

Later the two students, both of whom graduated in 2004, exchanged e-mail messages about their separate projects. When Greenspan asked what Zuckerberg was planning and suggested that the two integrate their systems, Zuckerberg responded, a month before his own service went online: “I actually did think about integrating it into houseSYSTEM before you even suggested it, but I decided that its probably best to keep them separated at least for now.”

Despite Greenspans entrepreneurial ambitions, it was Zuckerberg who was the first to move to Silicon Valley, raising venture capital and eventually transforming Facebook from a social networking site for U.S. college students into one of the fastest-growing Internet sites for both social and business contacts.

Indeed, Greenspan, who is now 24 and last year also moved to Silicon Valley, appears to be an example of what is a high-tech truism: establishing who was first with an idea is often murky at best, and it is frequently not the inventor who is the ultimate winner.

Zuckerberg declined to be interviewed, saying through a spokeswoman that he was not sure how to respond. He did not dispute the chronology of events or the authenticity of Greenspans e-mails. Zuckerberg is seeking to dismiss the UConnect suit.

Greenspan said that Zuckerbergs lawyer contacted him this year in connection with the ConnectU lawsuit but that he had declined to serve as a witness, fearing that he would become embroiled in the legal battle.

During an interview at a Bay Area caf? this week, Greenspan said he was now mostly at peace with the apparent fact that Zuckerberg would probably be the first Harvard 04 graduate to make a billion dollars.

If Zuckerberg did borrow some of Greenspans concepts, he may simply have been working in a grand Harvard tradition. After all, it was a young Harvard dropout, William Gates, and his classmate Paul Allen, who almost three decades earlier copied a version of the Basic programming language, designed by two Dartmouth college professors, to jump-start the company that would become Microsoft.

“Ive had a long time to think about this and Im not as bitter as I was a year ago,” Greenspan said. “Things like this arent surprising to me anymore.”

Still, he wants to have the last word.

He has described the events that preceded the original creation of houseSYSTEM, ConnectU and Facebook in “Authoritas,” a 306-page unpublished manuscript about his adventures and misadventures as a college student.

“This book is partly a search for justice,” he wrote in the introduction. “You dont write an autobiography in your early twenties unless theres something you need to get off your chest.”