Featuring fields whittled down from ConnectU’s original registration queries and a noticeably similar layout, Cameron Winklevoss said, thefacebook.com’s presentation smacked of cloning—a point which all three claim became even more clear as Zuckerberg’s site expanded.
“We specifically told him of our plan to open it up to universities and then he realized he could try and cut us out,” Cameron Winklevoss said. “And he left us with code that was essentially useless.”
But according to Zuckerberg, the overlap between the two sites’ information requests is not the product of deception, but a lack of salient questions that would be of value in a profile.
“There aren’t very many new ideas floating around,” Zuckerberg said. “At the base, saying that anything that anyone does at this level is new. The facebook isn’t even a very novel idea. It’s taken from all these others. It’s basically the same thing on a different level. And ours was that we’re gong to do it on the level of schools.”
But that, according to Gao, is precisely the fundamental idea pioneered by Narendra that sets apart both ConnectU and theface book.com from other connection websites and programs, like classmates.com and Friendster.
“The main idea that Mark took away was the idea of bringing something down to a specific domain,” Gao said. “It was [Narendra’s] idea and he drew upon a lot of things like Friendster and online dating services and decided that wold be cool to have for Harvard, taking it down to the specified domain of being at Harvard, for this set of people to connect.”
After Zuckerberg rejected an e-mailed request to remove his site on account of what they argued was the theft of their intellectual property, Narendra and the Winklevosses petitioned the Administrative Board and then University President Lawrence H. Summers, seeking a ruling that Zuckerberg had violated College regulations.
On both occasions, the situation was described as falling outside the scope of the College’s rules and jurisdiction.
“A whole host of issues are related to the academic community, but not directly,” Cameron Winklevoss said. “We’re supposed to hold students to a higher standard. We wouldn’t have approached anyone on the street to complete this website. As a Harvard student, you ought to be held to a higher standard, and the Ad Board wasn’t prepared to do that.”
The release of ConnectU—which like FaceNet, another online facebook—has thus far failed to generate the buzz surrounding Zuckerberg’s production, with 420 members to date, but its advertisement over House open lists has triggered a wave of accusations by both sides.
“[The facebook] has a lot less functionality,” Cameron Winklevoss said. “The facebook in its current form is as much of our ideas and creativity as he had access to. Our site is what he had access to and a month-and-a-half improvement.”
Zuckerberg disagreed.
“Not only was there no notion of connections, there was no course matching, there was no wink feature, some of the fields were much different, the style was much different,” he said.
But not everyone was taking sides in the dispute.
On the e-mail lists, some students expressed ambivalence, and at least one other simply likened both sites to imitations of Friendster.
—Staff writer Timothy J. McGinn can be reached at mcginn@fas.harvard.edu.