If this has anything to do with the fact that connectU is crap.

I know a few people that do better than me in my choosen self-employed field, I think I will take them to court.

ConnectU is nothing like Facebook!! jealousy if you ask me!

... that a company has hired in outside help to complete something, only for the outside help to think "Good idea, but I know I can do it better without you lot".

I'm sure most developers have watched a damn good idea being ruined by red tape and management who couldn't find their own arse (ass to you merkins) with two hands and a map. Unfortunately we don't end up creating facebook at the end of it!

ConnectU is still only a US focused university networking site, so I can quite easily see Zuckerberg thinking "You guys are so short sighted, why just focus on the USA universities, there's a whole planet out there, networks of people from there work, town of residence, not just their place of education".

They say people have short memories, and you just have to wait a few years after the last bubble for everyone to forget, then you can do it all over again.

Facebook may have 30m users but revenues are negligble and profits invisible. How do you monetise those eyeballs?

$10bn is nuts but then there were those who thought they could get that kind of value out of eyeballs in the crazy days of the dot-com boom, and there will be more fools queueing up to buy Facebook stock to get their asses spanked once again on the 'next big thing'.

Meanwhile Zuckenberg will be laughing all the way to his own space station or small African nation (perhaps he could buy Zimbabwe?).

With an American Expert saying (roughly) It started with open source and that open source has NO copyright.

That's not correct, is it?

I just love the experts that get rolled out. ;)

If only it was so easy to claim ownership and protect an idea! I wrote the first ever social networking site - http://www.everyonesconnected.com - so I'm not sure what ideas they're claiming were theirs.

Yes - it was online and out to the public before Friendster, MySpace, Facebook and the all rest. We were amazed nobody had done something similar before and looked at whether you can protect an idea. Not possible though.

It is usually the case that open source software is copyright, though it *could* be public domain. If the software is covered by the GNU Public Licence then it is explicitly copyright, and it is enforcement of that copyright (by withdrawing it if the terms of the licence are breached) that keeps the software Free (as in freedom). So many experts and even lawyers fail to "get" the GPL, it's extraordinary.

If theres anything actually innovative in Facebook - or any of the other networking sites then we're all doomed I tell you!

I smell settlement. With either "no admission of wrong doing" or totally sealed.

If this is Web 2.0, I eagerly await the specs for 3.0. It can only be an improvement. I hope.

Harvard students bickering in court over something you could knock up in a few days with a teach yourself PHP and MySQL book.

I think 5.0 should be just about the time that it becomes popular to impliment an entire TCP/IP stack over XML over HTTP over TCP/IP. Then the browser will have all the access that it needs to have to data, and some sort of scripting language (super javascript++ ?) will actually boot a BSD kernel inside each browser window, then start a feature-laiden version of X11, so that each web page gets it's own composited, 3D accelerated, direct rendered display. That should really allow the authors to express themselves in all sorts of rotating and bending shapes and text.

I'm just afraid of what Adobe will have done with Flash by then. Gods know that doesn't need access to my video hardware.

Front page media coverage = more users; they like to do everything big, ya know?