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It could be described as a poke, but not a friendly one. For those who have not yet succumbed to Facebook, the latest craze on the internet, a "poke" is an electronic greeting sent, for example, to an old friend from university.
In the case of Mark Zuckerberg, who stands to make a fortune from the website if and when he sells it, the contact made by three of his former student colleagues was more like an aggressive jab to the ribs.
Facebook has been described as the most powerful socialising device on the internet, growing so rapidly - with 150,000 new members every day - that Rupert Murdoch, owner of the rival MySpace, is said to be worried.
MySpace was bought by News Corp in 2005 for US$580 million ($725 million), now regarded as a bargain.
Facebook is expected to sell for more than double that, turning Zuckerberg, its 23-year-old creator, into the latest dotcom millionaire.
But there is a glitch.
This week, at a federal court in Boston, Zuckerberg will be accused of snatching the idea for Facebook from three fellow students.
Cameron Winklevoss, his twin brother Tyler and Divya Narendra, recruited Zuckerberg to their social networking site when they were all students at Harvard University.
They now claim that he deliberately slowed its progress, stole the source code, design and business plan, then set up his own rival.
Facebook sped away while their site, now called ConnectU, stalled.
"It's sort of a land grab," Tyler Winklevoss has said. "You feel robbed. The kids down the hall are using it, and you're thinking, 'That's supposed to be us'."
At the first court hearing they will ask that Facebook be shut down and its assets be transfered to them, plus damages.
At stake is one of the most coveted prizes of the Web 2.0 goldrush and potentially millions, or even billions, of dollars.
Last week Facebook signalled its ambitions by making its first acquisition, a web-based operating system called Parakey, and fuelling suspicions that it could threaten the web's diversity by sucking the best of it into one place.
Web 2.0 is the ambiguously defined revolution that has changed the way millions use the internet, as fast broadband connections enable them to upload their own content and share it with friends and millions of strangers.
Facebook, a word barely known in most countries a year ago, refers to printed class directories at a US universities containing photographs of each student along with their name, hometown and other personal details.
It was such a facebook at Harvard that inspired the website that for many has become more addictive than YouTube or their own email inbox.
Users enter their name, and details about their career, education and interests. They are provided with a home page, or "profile", where they can store photographs and a "wall" - an online message board.
They can seek out friends and share content and are updated with their friends' comments.
Common interest groups can form around everything from people who share the same name to people who want to "throw a [virtual] sheep" at someone they like. Such is internet humour.
The Facebook story began when Zuckerberg, the son of a dentist, enrolled at Harvard in 2002 to study psychology and quickly gained a reputation as a web wunderkind.
One of his first projects was Facemash, on to which he uploaded pictures of students from their ID cards and invited fellow students to vote who was the most attractive.
According to a profile in the New Yorker magazine, three older students learned of Zuckerberg's prowess and invited him to write a computer code for a new site they were planning.
The Winklevoss brothers and Narendra based their idea on existing social networking websites that allowed members to post personal details and link to other members.
By late 2003 they had designed a prototype, known as HarvardConnection, and approached Zuckerberg to help to complete it.
Tyler Winklevoss told the New Yorker: "We met Mark, and we talked to him and we thought, 'This guy seems like a winner'."
Zuckerberg began working on HarvardConnection in November 2003. But it was not his only assignment.
Harvard had been planning to put its facebook online. Zuckerberg decided to take on that task as well.
With immaculate self-assurance, he said at the time: "I think it's kind of silly that it would take the university a couple of years to get around to it. I can do it better than they can, and I can do it in a week."
Thefacebook.com went live on February 4, 2004, and within 24 hours more than 1200 students had registered. By the end of February, about three-quarters of undergraduates had created a profile.
There was a search box to look up others' profiles and a "poking" button to make contact - now one of the most famous features on Facebook.
By the end of the month it had launched at Columbia, Yale and Stanford universities, again taking each campus by storm. With two colleagues, Zuckerberg worked over the summer to build up a 250,000 users.
He decided to drop out of Harvard and moved to Palo Alto in Silicon Valley, met local venture capitalists and attracted millions of dollars of investment.
Then a cloud appeared on the horizon.
In September 2004 the Winklevoss brothers and Narendra filed allegations with a federal court that Zuckerberg stole their idea and worked to drag out their site's launch so that he could complete Facebook first.
He was not paid, they said, but was a full member of their team and would have reaped any future rewards.
In total they made nine claims, including copyright infringement, misappropriation of trade secrets and breach of contract.
That November, Facebook filed a countersuit, charging ConnectU with defamation.
ConnectU eventually launched in May 2004 and shares many of Facebook's features, such as profiles, messaging and groups. But today ConnectU is only a fraction of the size of its rival.
Zuckerberg has received half a dozen offers to buy Facebook, including one from Yahoo! for nearly US$1 billion, all of which he has refused.
This year Business Week reported that Zuckerberg was looking for US$2 billion, a story he denied.
Tyler Winklevoss denies that such figures make him envious. "This asset is now incredibly valuable, and I'm not going to pretend that's not very exciting," he has said. "I don't want more than I deserve, but I want what I deserve."
Zuckerberg is thought to be taking it seriously but has said: "I don't really spend much time worrying about this. There is really good documentation of this: our code base versus theirs."
While the legal case rumbled on, Facebook, in an apparent attempt to take on MySpace, lifted restrictions on membership and allowed people to sign up using work email addresses, thereby creating workplace networks similar to those that thrive on university campuses.
It is this that has allowed Facebook to spread virally and grow exponentially.
More than 30 million people have now decided to reveal something of themselves to Facebook.
In the Web 2.0 era, where everyone is an author, each of them can claim a share of the story.
But it is a judge sitting in a courthouse in Boston, Massachusetts, who will determine whether Mark Zuckerberg can claim exclusive ownership of its soul.
The web at war:
Money Supermarket
In 1999 Simon Nixon and Duncan Cameron co-founded what is now the biggest financial services price comparison site in the UK, with a 46 per cent market share. But the pair fell out and now communicate only through lawyers. Nixon controls 85 per cent of the company after paying £162 million ($417 million) for his former partner's stake. With the company planning to float on the stockmarket, and analysts predicting a price tag of £1 billion, Nixon's buyout now looks remarkably astute.
Netbenefit
The company was threatened by a lawsuit the day before its £7 million flotation in June 1999. Larry Bloch, who helped found the firm, which registers internet addresses for companies and other users, was claiming a share of the enterprise. The threatened litigation was dismissed by the company's lawyers as having "no basis". The flotation went ahead as planned.
Wikipedia
Jimmy Wales is the recognised founder of Wikipedia, but Larry Sanger, an early contributor on the project, claims that he deserves the title of co-founder of the mammoth online encyclopaedia. Wales says Sanger was merely an employee and that if the logic continued, 20 others could claim to be co-founders. While the dispute lingers, Sanger has launched his own rival encyclopaedia site, Citizendium.
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