Turns out that Facebook might be the biggest piece of homework copying in history.  Turns out there is an allegation that Mark Zuckerberg stole the code for Facebook from Harvard:

A long-standing dispute over the origin of Facebook looks set to haunt the growingly popular social networking service as it heads towards an IPO.

A lawsuit due to come before the US Federal Court later this month alleges that Facebook CEO and Founder Mark Zuckerberg stole the original code for Facebook

Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra, accuse Zuckerberg of stealing the source code, design, and business plan for Facebook in 2003 when he worked in the Harvard dorms as a programmer for their own tertiary education focused social-networking site HarvardConnect.com, now known as ConnectU. Source: The Ghost Of Zuckerberg?s Past May Haunt Facebook IPO

This reminds me of the Italian Job where one of the characters alleges that he invented Napster and it was stolen by his roommate while he was napping.  Regardless of art and life in spiral imitations, this is a big problem for Facebook.  And since this has been dragging on for three years, this isn’t a fly-by-night, get-rich-quick lawsuit.  You have to think that after the big investors have smacked Mark around for a while for not finding a way to resolve this sooner, it will be resolved in short order.  I’m guessing within three months.

If not, Facebook is going to die the most spectacular death the online world has ever seen.

Update: I was this on Valleywag as well.  Man this is going to be messy.  In discussing this with a friend tonight we agreed this isn’t about winning or losing, it’s how much it will cost to be made to go away.

Now I know why my daughter has been bugging me to join BarbieGirls.com:

It would be easy to dismiss an offering like Barbie Girls (feminists are probably going to roll their eyes at the whole concept) and yet 3 million registered users in 60 days does say one very, very clear thing: virtual worlds are going mainstream and the user base is dramatically shifting from being predominantly male to majority female. That shift isn?t quite as important now as it will be in the next 5-10 years as those playing Barbie Girls grow into adults; simply the next generation of online gaming and virtual world users will not be dominated by men. Source: Could Barbie Girls Become The Largest Virtual World?

She already uses a couple social networking sites for kids and while I don’t like the fact that she’s on the computer more than being outside playing, I can’t say that I’m a great role model for that either.

Regardless, Barbie Girls, Club Penguin, Web kinz,  and other kids’ social media sites show how the Internet, built to maintain communications nuclear war, has become a focal point for kids to connect and interact.  Not to mention the Internet is getting both younger and older at the edges.  These kids’ networks are active, immersive, colorful and rich.  Lots of rich media (games and videos specifically) in there.  Kids play games to get points or “dollars” to “buy” things within the network.  How much longer before will it be that a “game” is designed to solve a real-world problem?  How much longer for before that game earns you real dollars?

Not much longer if these kids have their way.  I bet the successors to Club Penguin are coming, and I bet we adults will want to join as much as our kids.  of course we’ll have to accept the fact that they will probably kick our butts in the games.  Such is life.

The social network scene got a little hotter and a little more crowded today.  TechCrunch broke the story on Yahoo’s Mosh today:

Here?s a juicy tip - we?ve been hearing about a new Yahoo social network initiative called Mosh, which is at mosh.yahoo.com but can only be accessed from inside the Yahoo offices. If you happen to be using the guest wifi at Yahoo, you should be able to access the site, although this may be shut down soon.

It?s likely this would replace Yahoo?s 360 social network service, which has never really gotten traction. The existence of Yahoo Mosh also most likely puts a bullet in any further speculation that they are in acquisition talks with Bebo, a somewhat unsubstantiated rumor from May. Last year Yahoo made a serious effort at acquiring Facebook but the deal was never closed.

Followed soon afterward with Yahoo Mash screenshots:

As I was reading my feeds and doing my obligatory check of Techmeme, I saw that John Battelle connected the dots by pointing to the announcement of Google’s Socialstream.

Nifty, two more big players trying to get into social networking after their own SocNet properties flopped.  The question will be is this too little too late.  Yahoo missed the chance to get Facebook, so it’s working on something to replace Yahoo!360 (remember when we were all begging for invites to that?).

Google is, wisely, taking a different approach.  They want to be the SocNet  connector, something sorely needed, IMHO.  Will it work?  Can there be The One Ring to Rule Them All (remember whose ring that was, BTW, the Dark Lord himself)?

I think Yahoo is going to have very hard time gaining traction, Google, on the other hand, just has to build excellent applications of the various SocNet APIs out there.  Which do you think you’ll use?

No this isn’t stating just the obvious, it’s stating something very important and perhaps profound in terms of how we perceive the Internet as an egalitarian place of knowledge and information.  Yesterday Jim, in an uncanny bit of foreshadowing, was comparing Digg users versus MyBlogLog users and mused about Facebook and MySpace:

This makes me wonder if people go with one social network and stay with that network, not also belonging to other groups.  Do people go with Facebook and not also go with MySpace?  If you use one tool do you not always use a competitor tool?  One thing for sure, with all of those visitors, if they had been My Blog Log members, that widget would have been smoking. Source: One By One Media ? The Digg Nation Not My Blog Log Community

Today, of course, Danah Boyd released her paper on Facebook and MySpace as societal analogues to much fanfare.  I’ve skimmed over a lot of the reviews and analysis of the report, one of the benefits of writing late in the evening, and Mathew Ingram, Joey deVilla, and Tony Hung have some of the best discussion I’ve seen.  Joey had the amazing benefit of hearing Danah discuss the report in person and the report is probably the best summation of Danah’s work.  Tony Hung, however, points out the factor that will make many folks lose sleep…did this report just tank MySpace’s value?

Personally I’ve never liked MySpace, mainly because it’s UI and user interactive sucked.  I couldn’t figure out if my profile was public or private.  Facebook, reminds me of the social version of LinkedIn.  Like LinkedIn is the corporate cocktail party and Facebook is like a geek meet-up at a pub.  Business and networking is still going on, but the ties are loosened and some folks are wearing jeans.  Having the benefit, for maybe the first time in my Web 2.0 career, of an anthropology degree, Danah’s report is fascinating and almost defers to Marshall McLuhan’s “The Medium is the Message” statement.  MySpace is a nearly clean slate.  You can do just about anything.  Copy bits of code, trick out your space make it your own.  Facebook is controlled.  Sure you can “personalize” it, but within parameters.

Digg vs MyBlogLog … a similar comparison, but MyBlogLog is based more on connected spheres of influence compared to Digg which is a more insular community focused on a particular thing.

And none of this should be of any surprise to any of us.  This is how society is.  Don’t you think you will gravitate to the tools and online communities that both reflect your own personality and  have your friends or people of similar tastes?  The question is then, will these groups (de)evolve into online “tribes” that will wield their own influence and power?  Something analogous to the worlds of William Gibson.

We’ll see won’t we.  And I bet part of the fun of Blog World Expo will be watching some of these groups mingle a bit.

 Yahoo abandons search:

Yahoo!, one of the two names most synonymous with search on the internet, has surprised Silicon Valley by suggesting that the future of the web is not about search.

The comments, interpreted as an admission that Yahoo! cannot keep pace with Google, came during a conference at which many participants said that the traditional model for getting information from the internet ? using a browser to visit web pages ? was outdated.

Although Yahoo!, like Google, has talked before about developing a more personalised web, with relevant information delivered directly to readers, this was the first time that the company has said publicly that search will become less important.

“Search is no longer the dominant paradigm,” Tapan Bhat, vice president of Front Doors, Yahoo!’s personalised home page, told the Next Web conference in Amsterdam.

“The future of the web is about personalisation. Where search was dominant, now the web is about ‘me.’ It’s about weaving the web together in a way that is smart and personalised for the user,” Mr Bhat said. Source: Search is history, says Yahoo!-News-Tech & Web-The Web-TimesOnline

Believe it our not Yahoo has figured it out, the future isn’t search, it’s personalization.  The irony here is that MyYahoo was one of the first sites of its kind, when the Net was young, and it’s only been recently that personalization has been fun and easy.  The undercurrent is, of course, that personalization really means eyeballs for advertising.  The battle for our homepage has begun, yet again.

MT hits the big four-oh and goes open source

On the blogging front, Six Apart has finally released an update to Moveable Type and has announced that it will be released as open source.  Word is that MT4 has a bevy of improvements and fixes.  Lots and lots of discussion on this announcement, of course (Wired, Read/WriteWeb, Tom Foremski, Mark Evans, Scott Karp, Aaron Brazell–very funny), the question on everyone’s mind is: “Can MT regain it’s blog crown from WP?”.  I say no.  WP is still supremely easy to install, update, and tweak.  MT might be better, but still running on Perl and using the CGI architecture is going to make it harder to deal with.  And frankly, once you’re set up your blog or even switched from MT to WP, the chances of switching back are slim.  Sorry SixApart, too little too late.

And in the late-breaking-check-back-on-Friday department is a rumour circulating that Amazon is looking to by Netflix for about $2.1 billion.  Could be cool.  Stay tuned, no confirmation right now.

There is also a bit of a tempest in a teacup with Scoble saying Techmeme is trying to become Google News and Valley Wag chiming in, as only Valley Wag can, and Gabe Rivera setting things straight in the comments.  Funny, the discussion didn’t make Techmeme.

Now given that I don’t have the secret source of tips, yet, I’m not sure if I’m going to continue the Monday prognostication plan, but on Friday I’ll look back on the week and see what seems to have bubbled to the surface.

Just when you thought you were rid of me, here I come with some more news from the Web 2.0 Expo.

This might not be news per se, but it is a nice summary of the virtual worlds panel at W2E.  Club Penguin is one that I am actually familiar with.  My 9 year old daughter is in that community and she loves it.  From a parent’s perspective the focus on safety and security is very reassuring.

The virtual world phenomena is going to become more interesting and more compelling as emmersive technologies are developed.  Imagine working with colleagues in something like Second Life, but you don’t experience it through a monitor and keyboard but through something more akin to total VR.  Believe me it isn’t that far off.  Think about how crazy we thought affordable touchscreen laptops were a few years ago.  Heck even laptops that are thin and light.

I’m telling you, it’s just around the corner.

Looking for a job? Then read this post by Nadine Turner. Sure you can read the classifieds, check Monster.com and all the other usual suspects, but if you really want to give yourself every opportunity to land the job you really want you would be wise to follow her example and put some effort into building your LinkedIn network, and check out Emurse.com.

Here is a brief excerpt from Nadine’s post:

In my experience, yeah networking works but not in the way I originally thought. It seems to work more unexpectedly. I don’t pretend to know the secrets of success, but what I found is that if you trust a few people, more end up putting trust in you. And if you help a few people, some will help you. And if you blatantly offer help to those that need it, NONE will accept it. Crazy isn’t it?

/Congrats on the new gig Nadine.

Check out Greg Hartnett’s post (A great blog btw) citing anecdotal evidence that top Digg users aren’t submitting stories at their normal pace.

the number of stories submitted by my “friends” typically hovered between the 400-500 mark. Which meant that the 170 people I had befriended had submitted approximately 500 stories or so over the last 48 hours. Now these are top Diggers we’re talking about here - people I chose as friends based solely upon their high user ranking.

Fast forward to this morning, and my account shows a total of 156 stories submitted by these same users. For the mathematically challenged amongst you, that represents a decline of almost 70%. 70 freaking percent! That’s not a minor decline - I’d even go so far as to call it a landslide. These top users have abandoned their accounts, and are now probably wasting their time online with some other web 2.0 time-suck.

Greg admits this is far from Scientific. It could be his Digg buds are just slacking or maybe they really are bailing on Digg and headed to some other social networking site.