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Anja Tabatabai
This IM suggests that, within a week of meeting with the Winklevosses for the first time, Mark had already decided to start his own, similar project--"the facebook thing." It also suggests that he had developed a strategy for dealing with his would-be competition: Delay developing it.
A few weeks after the initial meeting with the HarvardConnection team, after Mark sent the IM to Eduardo Saverin talking about developing "the facebook thing" and delaying his development of HarvardConnection, Mark met with the HarvardConnection folks, Cameron, Tyler, and Divya, for a second time.
Through the Harvard Connection-Facebook saga and its aftermath, Mark kept Adam apprised of his plans and thoughts.
One purported IM exchange seems particularly relevant on the question of how Mark distinguished between the two projects--the "facebook thing" and "the dating site"--as well as how he was considering handling the latter:
By this point, Mark's site, thefacebook.com, wasn't complete, but he was working hard on it. He'd arranged for Eduardo Saverin to pay for his servers. He had already told Adam that "the right thing to do" was to not complete Harvard Connection and build TheFacebook.com instead. He had registered the domain name.