Facebook under fire

The creators of the hugely successful social networking site have been in the news recently not because of their explosive growth, but because of claims that they stole the idea from fellow students whilst at college.

The Facebook phenomenon has swept the world, if you’re not a member you certainly know some one who is, and with membership currently standing at approximately 30 million and only looking to grow, it seems this social networking site has changed the face of human interaction forever. Now however this outstanding creation has been called in to question by claims from the creators of rival networking site ConnectU. The creators, twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, maintain they were the ones who came up with the idea whilst they were all at Harvard, and that Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, stole the concept from them. Moreover the claim that they asked Zuckerberg to work on the coding for the site with them but that he did not upheld the agreement and instead exploited the access he had to the website’s model for his own purposes. Now the judge in the case is asking the claimants’ lawyers to come up with a firmer model of evidence regarding the agreement entered in to with Zuckerberg in order to establish whether any code of conduct was broken.

If the Winklevosses’ claim is upheld they stand to profit enormously from one of the most prosperous websites of all time. This has led the defendants to argue that the suit is only being brought because the brothers want to make money on the back of Facebook’s success. This may well be upheld, for along with the fact that ConnectU only has 70 000 members in contrast to Facebook’s millions, the judge in the case also looks set to dismiss the case because of lack of evidence. Time will tell if the sun has finally set on the Facebook dream, but something says we’ve not seen the last of this site, whose exponential growth has rocked the world.

Sources:

BBC News