Facebook faces the music

Today's the day, in US District Court in Boston, for a hearing in the legal dispute between ConnectU, a social networking site with 70,000 users, and Facebook, a Palo Alto company with about 31 million users. Both sites were founded at Harvard, by undergrads. The issue in dispute is whether Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg stole ideas from ConnectU's founders, for whom he was writing software code, and then created Facebook.

Valleywag has a chronology of the charges and the legal wrangling, and the Cape Cod Times has an AP story.

The social networking site is experiencing hyper-growth ever since it opened up registration to anyone -- not just high school or college students. Zuckerberg moved Facebook from Boston to Silicon Valley in June 2004. This lawsuit was initially filed in September of that year.

Update: Judge seemed unimpressed by ConnectU's argument, according to News.com, and case won't see much more action until the fall.