Social Networking Watch

Facebook Clear To Control ConnectU

CALGARY HERALD -- Aug 12 -- Facebook won a judge's approval to take over rival ConnectU as part of a lawsuit settlement before an appeal of the court-approved deal is heard. Under the deal, stemming from ConnectU's 2004 allegations that Facebook stole its computer code, control of ConnectU will be transferred to Facebook. ConnectU's founders will get stock in Facebook and "millions" of dollars in cash, according to court papers. FULL ARTICLE @ CALGARY HERALD

Mark Brooks: That’s a great way to make this story go away.  Sounds fair.

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Facebook's Foreign Clones

FORBES -- June 12 -- If users aren't satisfied to merely create a Facebook profile, Agriya Infospace, based in Chennai, India, offers another option: Create your own Facebook. Agriya sells what it calls "Kootali," a $400 software package that lets developers replicate Facebook's design and features, complete with friend networks, photos and "mini-feeds"--even Facebook's font. Their customers, mostly unknown sites like Faceclub.com and Umicity.com, don't pose much of a competitive threat to Facebook. But, according to Forrester Research analyst Jeremiah Owyang, Agriya's cloning software represents a more general problem for Facebook: that any skilled developer can recreate the site's basic social networking functions.

Facebook Copycats Abroad
StudiVerzeichnis, German for "Student Index", have gathered around 6m registered users.
VKontakte, is with 4.5m unique visitors a day and 13.3m registered users, the most popular site in Russia
Chinnese Xiaonei claims to have received around 15m unique visitors in April

The copycats' explosive growth comes at a time when Facebook seems to be exploring its own international offshoots but the clones may have already saturated some international markets. In China, Xiaonei has already registered more than 90% of college students. Wang Xing, who created Xiaonei in 2005, admits that the site's design was originally "borrowed" from Facebook. Asked if he feels any compunction about taking features wholesale from Facebook, Wang points to Mark Zuckerberg's own copycat problems. Since 2004, the owners of rival site ConnectU have claimed that Zuckerberg stole intellectual property from their social network while working as a software developer for the site.
FULL ARTICLE @ FORBES

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ConnectU Settlement With Facebook May Fold

MERCURY NEWS -- June 5 -- ConnectU's founders, brothers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, originally hired Zuckerberg to help build a dating Web site for Harvard students. They now accuse him of delaying the ConnectU project while secretly building Facebook. The claims include copyright infringement and theft of trade secrets. ConnectU's lawyers said yesterday that the company wants out of the (prior) deal, citing what they called new "smoking-gun" evidence allegedly found by a forensic expert on Facebook's computers. The new evidence stems from electronic instant messages found on Facebook's computers. FULL ARTICLE @ MERCURY NEWS

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Ex-classmate Challenges Claim To Facebook Name

ASSOCIATED PRESS -- Apr 16 -- The hard feelings between Mark Zuckerberg and a former college classmate have boiled over into another legal dispute, this time over the trademark. Greenspan argues Zuckerberg had no right to trademark the Facebook name in 2005 because the term had been used generically for decades at Harvard University. What's more, Greenspan maintains he used the term "Face Book" as part of an online service called houseSYSTEM a few months before Zuckerberg unveiled his Web site in 2004. A trio of former Harvard students have been fighting over Facebook's origin since 2004, alleging in a federal lawsuit that Zuckerberg stole the social networking concept after they hired him to work on a Web site that eventually became ConnectU. FULL ARTICLE @ MERCURY NEWS

Facebook To Settle Thorny Lawsuit Over Its Origins

NY TIMES -- Apr 7 -- Facebook was finalizing a settlement with the founders of ConnectU — brothers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and their colleague, Divya Narendra. Terms of the settlement were not disclosed. The ConnectU founders claimed that they hired Mr. Zuckerberg in 2003 to help create a campus-wide dating site called Harvard Connection. They say that he stalled on the project for months while nurturing his own idea and ultimately starting TheFacebook.com. FULL ARTICLE @ NY TIMES

Who Really Founded Facebook?

THE NEW YORK TIMES -- Aug 29 -- Three Harvard classmates, the founders of ConnectU, have long claimed that Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, stole the idea from them. But in 2003, just months before Facebook and ConnectU went online, another Harvard classmate named Aaron Greenspan launched houseSYSTEM and its newest feature, "the Face Book", an online system for quickly locating other students. FULL ARTICLE @ THE NEW YORK TIMES

ConnectU Sues To Shut Down Facebook

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS -- July 25 -- A rival social networking site wants to shut down Facebook.com, charging in a lawsuit Facebook's founder stole their ideas while students at Harvard. The three founders of ConnectU say Mark Zuckerberg agreed to finish computer code for their site, but stalled and created Facebook using their ideas. It asks a court to give control of Facebook and its assets to ConnectU's founders. FULL ARTICLE @ INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE