Facemash.com, Home of Zuckerberg's Facebook Predecessor, For Sale

As if you needed any more indication of The Social Network’s popularity, the domain Facemash.com just went up for sale on Flippa auctions which was also responsible for the auction of Retweet.com. Facemash, for those who haven’t seen the film, was the “Hot or Not” type website that crashed the Harvard servers and got Mark Zuckerberg in trouble with the Admin Board (see Harvard Crimson clip, above).

From the sale document:

This is a piece of Internet history – history of a website that perhaps is second only to Google in Global influence!

This website was prominently referenced in the first scene of the recently released move “The Social Network”. Traffic has syrocketed since to over 1000 hits a day past 2 days. but is approx. 600/mo on a normalized basis.

Apparently Zuckerberg let the domain expire in 2007, and it was bought by Rahul Jahn who is now selling it for a minimum bid of $8,000. TheĀ Whois page looks legit and reveals Zuckerberg’s Harvard email, address and phone number (which I called to verify, belongs to his Dad’s dentistry office).

As the article on Facemash is currently the top viewed on its site, it’s safe to assume that Harvard Crimson, like Facemash, is currently receivingĀ much The Social Network-related traffic. We’ve seen this ourselves here at TechCrunch, as CrunchBase traffic to both Sean Parker and Eduardo Saverin’s pages on Friday (the day of its premiere was about six times normal.

The auction is capped at a $35,000 “Buy It Now” price and whoever ends up buying the domain will be able to capitalize on its new found popularity, at least in terms of generating interest among social networking fans. An upstart tech blog perhaps? Or Sony Pictures even, who currently owns Facemash.net.