Campaign To Save Facebook From Closure

A group of Facebook users is going on a global campaign to help save the social networking website from possible closure.

“Facebook Will Be Forced to Shut down in 7 Days! Join and Save it! All in favour of keeping Facebook as it is join this group and invite all of your friends”, says the group.

Facebook CEO and founder, Mark Zuckerberg has been taken to a federal court in the US by owners of ConnectU, a rival website after alleging that Zuckerberg stole their ideas. Owners of ConnectU are seeking to shut down Facebook.

Launched in February 2004, Facebook currently has 71 million users. ConnectU launched three months after Facebook only has approximately 70,000 users. Latest figures show that there are 380,280 Facebook users in Malaysia.

The founders of ConnectU said Zuckerberg agreed to help finish a computer code for their website but stalled and eventually launched Facebook.

The lawsuit against him includes fraud, copyright infringement and misappropriation of trade secrets. ConnectU’s founders are asking the court to shut down Facebook and give control of the company and its assets to them.

ConnectU originally filed a suit in 2004, but it was dismissed on a technicality and immediately re-filed. The owners of ConnectU, brothers Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss and Divya Narenda, claim that in 2002 they began working on a social networking site for the Harvard community called the Harvard Connection.

In 2003, the founders of ConnectU asked Zuckerberg to complete software and database work on the site. After being asked repeatedly to finish, Zuckerberg assured them he was working hard to complete it, the lawsuit said.

According to court filings, Facebook’s attorneys said ConnectU has no evidence against Zuckerberg and deny he stole the ideas from his fellow classmates.

“Each of them had different interests and activities,” Zuckerberg’s attorneys wrote. “Only one of them had an idea significant enough to build a great company. That one person was Mark Zuckerberg.”

But despite the controversy, Facebook is now the world’s social networking king, according to an AFP report from San Francisco, citing industry tracker comScore.

Industry figures show that that Facebook has dethroned News Corp-owned MySpace to become the world’s most popular social networking website, with slightly more than 132 million people visiting Facebook in June compared to approximately 117.5 million that went to MySpace that month.