ConnectU files lawsuit against Facebook

Still talking about Facebook and it’s huge popularity gain over all other social networking sites, a rival company called ConnectU out of Connecticut has filed a law suit to shut down Facebook alleging that it’s founder Mark Zuckerberg stole ConnectU’s ideas.

The lawsuit’s allegations against Zuckerberg include fraud, copyright infringement and misappropriation of trade secrets. Facebook was launched in February of 2004 and ConnectU went online on May of the same year, now ConnectU claims that the three month head start gave Facebook a tremendous advantage and so now has 31 million users compared to 70,000 users of ConnectU.

Now could a three month lead make all that difference in sheer number of users. I doubt it, Facebook is obviously doing something right to get the lion’s share of the market.

The original lawsuit was filed in 2004 and while the matter is still under litigation, Facebook has focused on growing so large and becoming the number one social networking site in the world, to the extent that Yahoo offered to buy it for 1 billion dollars and now after Facebook turned down that offer Yahoo is developing it’s own social networking site called Yahoo Mosh and Google is doing the same called Socialstream. Now we hope these new social networking sites turn out to be different and unique from the existing ones.

Red light camera and the law

I went to the traffic court the other day since I had received a citation for not stopping at a red light signal while making a right turn. It was one of those automatic red light camera tickets, and I had received two of them in a month at the red light signal just outside my neighborhood ( apart from these I have no tickets since the last ten years or so), and I promptly went ahead and paid $400.00 plus for the first ticket including the traffic school fees.

For the second ticket I decided to go to court (no self respecting lawyer should pay more than once), now the judge was a good natured person who started off saying that, all right turn red light camera tickets will be automatically reduced to $100.00 (hurrah!) and the second thing I wanted to share was that he humorously suggested that there were too many of these red light camera’s in Alameda county and so please when you drive around and plan to drive through a red light wear a “baseball cap and sun glasses” so that if you are ticketed I will have to dismiss the ticket stating that the person driving the vehicle was not identifiable and he did dismiss quite a few people’s citations.

Now, that is a way to get around law and technology! Thanks for the tip judge, I will try it next time.