Would The Real Facebook *cough ConnectU.com cough* Please Stand Up!

I believe all great ideas are not new or original, they are merely stolen from someone or somewhere and reworked, reshaped, and made better and usually take over the market. Its called evolution baby!

Think about that for a moment… Apple stole the GUI (graphical user interface) idea from Xerox….Microsoft stole the idea from Apple but profited from licensing and distribution agreements which made Microsoft what it is today. Sure, there were improvement along the way — but originally Xerox had created the idea… the others merely stole it, reworked it, and made it their own.

I know the article is old (July 2007) but Facebook is being sued by ConnectU.com saying that Mark stole source code and staled the release of ConnectU.com to work on his own project Facebook (originally called thefacebook.com) — launching it before ConnectU.com — thus having first movers advantage. Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO and founder of Facebook, denies ever stealing any source code, but it does seem all too fishy. He says he didn’t know it was for a social networking website, he thought it was for a personal website (c’mon Mark… you can do better than that, geesh)

I recently set-up an account at ConnectU.com — the outside looks pretty aweful (nothing a little graphic design geek couldn’t fix in seconds) but once inside you can see some similarities — the clean, easy to navigate feel is prevelant throughout.

Let this be a lesson for all — you might have a great idea and good intention, but if you don’t act on that idea, someone else will and it just might leave you hanging with only 70k members rather than 30 million and a $1 billion dollar buyout offer from Yahoo!.

On a side note, I like ConnectU.com’s layout and design inside its site — it should perhaps take its code and rework it for another domain, perhaps start a social networking site in a niche — like multiply.com is doing (they cater to the 30-somethings crowd).