ConnectU To Fight Facebook In Federal Court This Afternoon

Today in court, two Internet-based companies – one incredibly popular and which continues to expand at a rapid rate; the other less so – will clash. Again.

Let’s synopsize a bit.

Facebook, a website created by Mark Zuckerberg with support from Andrew McCollum and Eduardo Saverin, who were later joined by Dustin Moskovitz to aid with promotion, was officially founded in February of 2004. Two years prior, a trio by the names of Divya Narendra and Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss conceived of HarvardConnection.com (now ConnectU), and “casually recruited fellow Harvard student Zuckerberg…after hearing about his Web development skills.” After a good amount of time had passed, they noticed Zuckerberg had “stalled his work” and said that he proceeded to develop “his own, similar project.” You can likely already guess where the story goes from here.

In an official complaint filed with Harvard’s administration in 2004, ConnectU’s founders claim “Zuckerberg had stolen their business plan and structure.” The school’s administration laid the complaint aside after citing that Harvard’s honor code “did not have jurisdiction over a matter that was not academic in nature.” So, in September 2004, ConnectU’s founders brought their case to a court judge. Who proceeded to dismiss their argument just as swiftly.

In what appeared to be a final attempt in March of this year, ConnectU filed a federal complaint against Zuckerberg. This afternoon, a Boston court hears their case.

Where, in front of plenty of national and international press folk, ConnectU won’t get anywhere. Again.

Even if Zuckerberg did take the idea of HarvardConnect/ConnectU and run with it himself, Narendra and the Winklevoss twins won’t walk out the victors, whether the judge presiding is appointed by the state or by the federal system.

The first telltale sign of a weak case is ConnectU’s attempt to bat Facebook down through the citing of Harvard University’s honor code. As prestigious as Harvard is, and as seriously as I’m sure the school’s administration handle disputes among students, the fact that ConnectU looked to the institution to right any wrongs about the business matter is ridiculous.

Also, consider the breadth of space between lawsuits filed by ConnectU’s founders September 2004 to March 2007. The latter timeframe of the two is clearly the point at which Facebook’s most firmly established itself as an Internet business intent on sticking around for the long haul. So one could thus easily presume ConnectU’s motive to be merely financial in nature. It likely won’t reach the heights Facebook has attained. Perhaps they simply hope to get a sizable settlement out of the social networking giant.

Any which way you look at it, the argument ConnectU has against Facebook is but a grudge. A grudge that may be warranted, but a grudge nonetheless. Therefore I don’t see this suit, like the one to come before it, as having much weight at all. It’ll fizzle out soon enough.