The Social

Warning: Mild spoilers ahead about the plot and structure of "The Social Network."

I have my hands on a copy of "The Social Network," the screenplay that "West Wing" creator Aaron Sorkin has adapted from "The Accidental Billionaires"--author Ben Mezrich's tawdry tale of Facebook's origins that was released last week. Though I'm not gushing over it the way script blogger Carson Reeves did when he read it, I think it's a decent screenplay. With a good cast and production team, this movie might be quite enjoyable.

This could be a concern for Facebook. I'm guessing the company is already far enough along so that it doesn't have to worry about negative onscreen portrayals of its founder hurting its chances of a successful IPO, but the screenplay is smart and nasty enough--more so than the book it's based on--that it could raise PR issues regardless.

"The Social Network" follows the plot of "Accidental Billionaires" pretty precisely, with the most notable deviation being that there is an increased focus on Zuckerberg himself--Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, who was Mezrich's main source for the book (he didn't talk to Zuckerberg), takes a bit of a back burner. But it's still the same narrative about Mark Zuckerberg founding Facebook as an undergraduate at Harvard, and then facing opposition both internally (from Saverin) and externally (from Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the twin co-founders of would-be Facebook rival ConnectU).

The dialogue--remember, Mezrich's book is dialogue-light--is snappy and witty, with a fast-paced, back-and-forth feel to it that "West Wing" fans will recognize as very Sorkin-esque. On paper, though, it comes across as much more slick and polished than real-life dialogue would have been (and it's up to the skills of the actors to ensure that this doesn't translate to onscreen cheesiness). And it treats the founding of Facebook with more gravitas than "Accidental Billionaires" does: scenes of the social network's early days at Harvard are interspersed with snippets from later court depositions between Zuckerberg and Saverin, as well as Zuckerberg and the ConnectU founders.

But the most notable difference is that, perhaps because of the infusion of dialogue, Zuckerberg is a significantly more dislikeable character than he is in the book, where he's painted as simply enigmatic and a little detached. In the screenplay, he's far more class-conscious and his lines are typically weighted with snarky arrogance. The question of whether Zuckerberg was duping the ConnectU founders by working on Facebook while ostensibly in their employ is addressed much more decisively than in the book--and it's not favorable to Zuckerberg.

At the end, he's allowed a little bit of a denouement, and who knows what will happen in script revisions. But for now, I can see why an entertainment industry source said that the producers have been hoping to cast an audience-friendly young actor. The onscreen version of Zuckerberg could easily come across as utterly obnoxious.

Actually, to put it bluntly, none of the main characters are all that sympathetic. The Winklevoss twins come across as aggressive and vindictive; Saverin is neurotic and money-obsessed; onetime Facebook exec Sean Parker is a scheming lush; and then-Harvard president Larry Summers, who has a small role, is pretty much just a blowhard. That probably doesn't bode well for the producers' attempt to actually film parts of the movie on Harvard's campus, since I'm fairly sure that a prestigious university doesn't want to be depicted onscreen as a hub for serious douchebaggery.

When I read "The Accidental Billionaires," I predicted that it was safely fluffy enough that Facebook (and Zuckerberg) probably wouldn't have much of a problem with it. But the screenplay for "The Social Network" is edgier and meaner. At one point, during a fired-up moment for the ConnectU guys, Cameron Winklevoss says of Zuckerberg, "Let's f***ing gut that little nerd!" And when Zuckerberg is told by the Winklevosses' lawyer that the twins come from a family worth hundreds of millions of dollars, Zuckerberg retorts with, "Or roughly the amount I paid in income tax last year."

Oh, snap.

On a totally different note: Does "The Social Network" botch it when it comes to discussions of technology, venture capital, and Web development? Not really. I sent a few lines of dialogue depicting a Harvard computer science class to an engineer friend who said that it was fairly spot-on. Of course, the dialogue in the court deposition scenes is a little more exciting than it probably was in real life. But let's face it: this is Hollywood.

And the awesomest-slash-cheesiest line? In my opinion, the award goes to Tyler Winklevoss in yet another scene where he and Cameron are talking about how to get back at Zuckerberg: "I'm six-five, 220 pounds, and there are two of me."

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--Ben Mezrich's new book "The Accidental Billionaires," a dramatic and contested account of the early days of social network Facebook, is on the fast track to Hollywood.

But Thursday night's inaugural public event for the book, which first hit stores on Tuesday, was a humble affair well suited to this relatively quiet university town. Held in the Brattle Theatre, a basement-level space in a 120-year-old brick building just off Harvard Square, Mezrich was interviewed on a small stage by Scott Stossel, managing editor of The Atlantic Monthly, his onetime roommate, and a fellow Harvard alumnus.

"It's kind of cool, because the book is about two geeky, gawky kids who couldn't meet girls at Harvard, and we were two geeky, gawky kids who couldn't meet girls at Harvard," Mezrich joked to the audience. But the two writers have a crucial difference: Mezrich, whose last book "Bringing Down The House" was adapted into the movie "21," is inspired more by Hollywood thrillers than by the tactics of investigative journalism. Stossel's brethren in the media world, meanwhile, have been some of Mezrich's harshest critics.

"I believe clearly (that) what I do is nonfiction," Mezrich asserted onstage. "I interview sources, I get thousands of pages of court documents, I learn everything about the scene I'm going to write...it infuriates certain types of old-school journalists. They don't understand my style. My readers understand my style."

Criticism of Mezrich runs the gamut from disapproval over his penchant for scandal to outright accusations of fabricating the truth. "I think they're angry people," Mezrich said of his critics on Thursday. "Of course the industry's tough right now."

If you ask him, he says he's never had to "admit" to the use of composite characters and reconstructed dialogue and scenes because he's always disclosed them in the forewords of his books. "Accidental Billionaires" was under particular scrutiny long before its publication, largely because it's a book about Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg told from the perspective of the people who have some of the most public beef with him.

"I knew Eduardo had an axe to grind," he says of Eduardo Saverin, the Facebook co-founder who had a legal falling-out with Zuckerberg and then served as one of the primary sources for "Accidental Billionaires" (and the only one whom Mezrich will confirm as a source). "It was easy to see right away that Eduardo was very angry with Mark, but I was fascinated."

One thing's for sure: it's all perfect fodder for the film industry. The book was optioned into a movie before Mezrich had written any more than a proposal, and he says he was literally handing chapters to screenwriter Aaron Sorkin as they were completed.

"I won't write a book that I don't think has movie potential," Mezrich said on Thursday evening. "If a book can't be a movie, it's very hard to make a living out of it."

Now, with director David Fincher ("Fight Club") reportedly at the helm, and production slated to begin later this year, it's all about the movie, which has the working title of "The Social Network." Mezrich says he believes the movie will be shot on location in Boston--tax laws passed recently in Massachusetts make it very friendly to filmmakers--but said he's not sure if Harvard will consent to let the film crew on campus. The 2007 Denzel Washington film "The Great Debaters" was the first movie in nearly two decades for which Harvard permitted on-campus filming; the previous one, 1979's "A Small Circle of Friends," was kicked off in mid-filming because it caused a commotion.

Walking around Harvard Square on Thursday, Cambridge wasn't visibly captivated by either the book or the movie. Harvard, after all, is an elite institution with countless notable alumni and dozens of movies set on its campus. And it's not clear just how much of a hit "Accidental Billionaires" has been in its first few days, since publisher Doubleday is not yet disclosing sales data. But the book briefly rocketed into Amazon's top 100, and on Friday morning "Accidental Billionaires" was hovering somewhere between 125 and 175 on the charts.

And bookstores near Harvard Square say it's been a fast local success. "It's selling well. Very well," chirped the woman who was staffing the information desk at "the Coop," the Harvard and MIT bookstore cooperative, when asked on Thursday afternoon. "There's local interest. Facebook is big, and it was two Harvard guys right here." She speculated that other local bookstores would have similar results to report.

A few blocks away, at the independent Harvard Book Store, an attendant behind the information desk stressed that "Accidental Billionaires" had only been in stores for a few days, but said "it's definitely selling." The Harvard Book Store was the host for Mezrich's event later that evening at Brattle Theatre, and the bookstore employee surmised, "I expect we'll sell a lot tonight."

Next to him, a second Harvard Book Store employee was on the phone, fielding one phone call after another from people who were interested in purchasing last-minute tickets for Mezrich's reading that night.

Things were quite different on Thursday afternoon at the Cambridge, 1 pizzeria on Church Street, a high-ceilinged, wood-paneled space that overlooks a cemetery and was playing songs by the Clash and Phoenix over its speakers. The restaurant features prominently in "Accidental Billionaires" as the restaurant where Zuckerberg originally tells Saverin about his idea for Facebook, but the staff wasn't yet aware of "Accidental Billionaires," let alone had they heard anything about movie location scouts poking their noses around.

"Accidental Billionaires" has caused less of a splash in Silicon Valley, too, than some expected, likely because most of the scandal and gossip concerning Facebook's origins was already common knowledge to anyone who followed the course of the ConnectU v. Facebook legal battle over the site's intellectual property.

"There were definitely things that were told to me that I decided not to put in there," Mezrich told CNET News by phone on Friday, mentioning specifically the scene that depicts the events leading to Facebook executive Sean Parker's arrest for alleged cocaine possession, which Parker has called a "misunderstanding." "There were a couple things, certainly the Sean Parker scene where he's at the party...you don't really know what's going on there, and you might get sources telling you what went on there, and you've got to be careful with a scene like that."

Mezrich isn't concerned that the content of the book and movie won't be new and juicy enough for audiences. "Of the 250 million people who use Facebook, 249 million of them know nothing of its origins," he told CNET News. "Silicon Valley is a very small, insulated community."

And the real focus of "Accidental Billionaires" isn't Silicon Valley, it's the aspirational boy-genius narrative that has repeatedly captivated the author. Perhaps the most interesting part of Mezrich's onstage discussion with Stossel on Thursday night was how deep his interest in Facebook is ("I've been going on news programs and saying Facebook is the next step in human evolution," he told CNET News the next day). Mezrich speaks with passion and admiration for his protagonists because, as a self-professed "geeky, gawky kid who couldn't meet girls at Harvard," he sees their narratives as vicarious--a word he used multiple times in the event at Brattle Theatre--as the sort of dream he wished he could have lived at their age.

"If I see a young 22-year-old who has a Ferrari, I'm always wanting to hang out with him to find out why he has a Ferrari," Mezrich, who says he has wanted to be a writer since the age of 12 and used to display "hundreds" of publisher rejection letters on his wall, explained onstage at the interview.

But in his uber-meta quest to fulfill his professional dream by writing accounts of other nerdy outsiders achieving fortune and notoriety, Mezrich admits he has burned bridges--and not just with journalists who consider his tactics to be shady. While he has stayed very close with some of the subjects of his past books, he says that he is on shaky terms with others, and that contact with Eduardo Saverin was cut off a quarter of the way into the production of "Accidental Billionaires."

'"He was telling me the story, telling me the story, and then abruptly stopped telling me the story," Mezrich said, adding that it was right around when gossip blog Gawker posted leaked screenshots from his book proposal that effectively outed Saverin as one of his sources. "(Saverin and Facebook) were in the midst of a massive lawsuit, and I'm sure there were reasons he stopped talking to me...I got a letter from his lawyer (saying) that he's not talking to me anymore."

Then there's Mark Zuckerberg.

"I did not talk to Mark Zuckerberg," Mezrich told the audience at the Brattle Theatre on Thursday, reiterating the point that he makes in the introduction to "Accidental Billionaires." "I tried for a year. It was like 'Waiting for Godot,' almost talking to Mark and almost talking to Mark and in the end he was terrified of what I was going to write. He's very protective of himself, and he didn't have control of the story, and in a way I think the story is better this way."

He said that he has not heard from Zuckerberg, or from Facebook beyond its standard statements ("Every time I do a news event...they've already sent over their statement") but said very explicitly that neither Zuckerberg nor Facebook ever tried to pay him off to stop work on the book after an audience member at the Brattle Theatre reading asked if that had happened. He hasn't heard reactions from the ConnectU founders or Sean Parker, and he also told CNET News that he hasn't heard anything from Michael Moritz, the Sequoia Partners venture capitalist whom Parker, in Mezrich's narrative, likens to "a James Bond villain."

Meanwhile, he says he hasn't yet read Sorkin's screenplay or been privy to any details about casting. But with regard to the two young actors whose names have been whispered about as possible choices to play Zuckerberg, the author says he'd like to see them both cast.

"Personally, I think Michael Cera would make an awesome Mark Zuckerberg," Mezrich told CNET News on Friday, "and Shia LaBeouf would make an awesome Sean Parker."

Talk about spilling the beans: A marketing brochure for law firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart Oliver & Hedges, which represented would-be social network ConnectU in its much-publicized suit against Facebook, claimed that the final settlement netted the site's founders a handsome $65 million in Facebook stock and cash.

Oops.

A Law.com article dug up the brochure and its claim, and has posted a .pdf file on the Web. According to the same article, principals at the law firm now regret posting the results. Meanwhile, ConnectU remains in a fee dispute with Quinn Emanuel, a fact which came to light when the plaintiff changed its mind about the suit's eventual settlement last year.

ConnectU was founded by twins Cameron Winklevoss and Tyler Winklevoss, along with their classmate Divya Narendra, when all three were students at Harvard University. They hired Mark Zuckerberg, now the CEO of Facebook, as a programmer and eventually alleged that he swiped their code and business model to create the now-ubiquitous social network.

ConnectU vs. Facebook, which had dragged on since 2004, eventually settled in August right around when Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, who are identical twins, were finishing in sixth place in a rowing event at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.

It seems like a staggering amount, considering the casual terms of ConnectU's employment agreement with Zuckerberg had meant that it was very difficult for the Winklevosses and Narendra to prove that there had been a physical theft of code. So keep this in mind: Even if Facebook's valuation is nowhere near the $15 billion that it was valued at in the halcyon days of that $240 million Microsoft investment, $65 million is fairly small potatoes for Zuckerberg & Co. They were likely willing to make some concessions to get a longstanding legal tiff off the table. (CNET Networks, then-publisher of CNET News, had intervened in the lawsuit for the limited purpose of trying to unseal some court records.)

Facebook, unsurprisingly, has opted not to comment on this situation.

As Facebook hits its fifth birthday on Wednesday, it's nearly impossible to find a recent news story that doesn't refer to its growth with terms like "lightning-fast," "exponential," "skyrocketing," or some other expression that would be quite at home in a space-age comic book from the 1950s.

That might be true now. And with an executive lineup sourced from Bay Area elite (including a handful of former Google leaders), high-profile conferences and parties, not to mention developer "hackathons" all over the world, it has all the makings of a landmark Silicon Valley craze. But don't let that fool you: Facebook owes its early growth, and hence the foundations for its wildfire expansion of late, to its roots in a more buttoned-up tradition of the East Coast elite. The site's conservative, calculated debut and blueblood allure were what sowed the seeds for Valley success.

Facebook's origins at Harvard University, created over many dorm room all-nighters on the part of founder Mark Zuckerberg and his friends, are tech press canon by now. They have surfaced in dozens of magazine and newspaper articles, the occasional courtroom spat, and now apparently a book penned by Bringing Down The House author Ben Mezrich. What's not talked about as often is that when Facebook, then called TheFacebook, made its quiet debut early in February 2004, it was just another entrant in a pack.

That was the same academic year that some colleges and universities launched online "facebooks" of their own as supplements to the paper directories that were then a staple in dorm rooms across the country. Plus, entrepreneurially minded students at a number of colleges, including several at Harvard in addition to Zuckerberg, were trying to best their alma maters by doing the same thing.

"When Facebook launched, the first week at Harvard was incredible because the adoption was through the roof," said Sam Lessin, founder of start-up Dropio, who was a classmate of Zuckerberg at the time, "and this was in the context of a lot of stuff other people had been doing online, including quote-unquote social-networking sites. The beauty of the product was that it was super simple and super easy to use."

In keeping with its roots at one of the world's most selective universities, Facebook's initial allure was not that everyone had a profile, but that not everyone could have a profile.

When Zuckerberg and his team first launched the site, it was restricted to their fellow students at Harvard University. Then it began to roll out to the rest of the Ivy League and other prestigious universities: Stanford, Yale, and Columbia were the first three, in March 2004. A valid e-mail address from a participating school was required to sign up.

From a technical standpoint, this was smart because it allowed Facebook to manage its growth, avoiding overloaded servers and skyrocketing bandwidth bills. On the PR side, however, exclusivity fueled Facebook's early buzz. MySpace, at the top of the social-networking heap at the time, was the massive nightclub where you might spot celebrities from afar. Facebook was the quiet cocktail lounge a few blocks away that required a password, but where you could be sure to see all your closest friends.

"There was a cachet to it. Everyone wanted in, and wanted to see what it was and how it worked," Lessin said. When the site launched at a new school, he added, "you'd have this incredible initial bump of people who had heard about it and seen clippings or articles about it, and were excited to jump on board."

With the exception of a short-lived file-sharing side project called Wirehog, Facebook's team kept the site a purely networking-focused tool at the start. Although you've been able to "poke" your friends from day 1, the original Facebook had none of its current media- and information-sharing features; initially, you couldn't even add friends from other participating schools, just your own.

But Facebook grew, both in accessibility and in flashiness. Members could start registering with e-mail addresses from corporations rather than just universities. It launched a photo album application that now hosts more than 10 billion pictures.

The "news feed" feature launched in September 2006, shortly before Facebook announced that it would let anyone join the site, setting off a brief wave of privacy-conscious member panic before becoming one of the site's defining functions.

Then there was the developer platform, which hit the scene in May 2007 with the first of Facebook's now-ubiquitous "hackathons." Even after relocating from Boston to Palo Alto, Calif., and in spite of a billion-dollar buyout offer from Yahoo, Facebook hadn't enjoyed much real "tech cred." The platform changed that.

Creating a Facebook application soared to the top of Web companies' priority lists, and even though Facebook's traffic had started to take off when open registration launched the previous fall, this was when it really escalated.

With Facebook now five years old and reaching more than 150 million members worldwide, it comes into question whether it has abandoned those austere New England roots and that strategy of calculated growth in favor of Silicon Valley's get-big-now attitude.

The Facebook Connect product lets third-party sites use Facebook's log-in credentials for the first time, something that's put it back at the forefront of the developer community. It's also caught on in many countries outside the United States, with a big majority of its new registrants now overseas. That brings both technological implications--server power outside the States can be especially expensive--as well as political ones.

And no regular reader of tech blogs can avoid the constant coverage of Facebook's ongoing search for a solid revenue model, the ultimate Valley narrative of struggle and all-too-frequent failure. But in a post on the company blog late on Tuesday, founder Zuckerberg hailed Facebook's iterative nature and go-forth attitude, something that has become increasingly prominent since its westward journey into the Valley's upper echelon.

"Building and moving quickly for five years hasn't been easy, and we aren't finished," Zuckerberg wrote. "The challenge motivates us to keep innovating and pushing technical boundaries to produce better ways to share information."

What Zuckerberg and his hundreds of employees ought to keep in mind is that even though Facebook's willingness to change and evolve has been key to its success, so has its awareness that change should be steady and pragmatic. When Facebook moved too fast, as with the launches of the News Feed and the Beacon advertising program, members freaked out.

"They've built this incredible, incredible product that's just incredibly successful and valuable and useful, but really, its roots were just super simple and super local," Lessin reflected on Facebook's early days. "Because they were able to do that, and grow in a very controlled way, by the time they really wanted to turn things on, they were able to."

It's like they always say: never forget where you came from.

Ben Mezrich, the author whose book Bringing Down The House inspired this summer's gambling flick 21, has confirmed to the Boston Herald that he's writing a book about Facebook's origins and that West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin is going to turn it into a movie.

As you may recall, part of a proposal for the book, tentatively titled Face Off, was leaked to gossip blog Gawker and launched a mini-firestorm because of some supposed inaccuracies--not to mention the fact that it doesn't look like the book will portray Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in the most positive light. It implied that the book, reportedly worth a seven-figure advance, would depict Zuckerberg as a hard-partying social climber who founded Facebook in his undergraduate days at Harvard University so that he could hook up with more girls.

In the Herald interview, Mezrich obliquely skirted the question of the leaked proposal, neither confirming nor denying its accuracy. "What was in Gawker--that was not all truth. That's not what the book is about...What is Gawker even doing writing something about me?"

What's funny is that rumors had been swirling that the book, and possibly the movie, were in limbo. As the Herald points out, Zuckerberg has not been speaking with Mezrich about the book. From what we've heard, Facebook isn't particularly thrilled about it (company representatives were not immediately available for comment) and that they aren't planning to deal with Mezrich at all. The author has come under occasional fire for stretching the truth, after all; and as scandal-fueled Ivy League rags-to-riches stories are his specialty, one can imagine some of the plotlines (even if the alleged proposal turns out to be a red herring). Facebook's legal department can be aggressive, too.

But if Mezrich is talking to the press about the as-yet untitled book (we're guessing it's not going to be called Face Off), it's on--which means that actor Michael Cera might want to start brushing up on his knowledge of the "social graph." Really, this could be quite the breakthrough for the former Arrested Development and Juno star.

Fortune editor David Kirkpatrick is also working on a book about Facebook, not to be confused with Mezrich's. That one, titled The Facebook Effect, promises to be a much more buttoned-up, businesslike affair.

Facebook has hired the former chief of staff to onetime U.S. Attorney Alberto Gonzales as its general counsel, according to the Los Angeles Times. Ted Ullyot, currently a Washington, D.C.-based partner for the law firm Kirkland & Ellis, will relocate to the Bay Area and join the Palo Alto social network next month.

He appears to have been hand-picked by Elliot Schrage, the former Google executive who joined Facebook as vice president of communications and public policy this spring, and Sheryl Sandberg, another Google alum who now serves as the company's chief operating officer.

Ullyot "has an extraordinary combination of private legal practice and public sector experience," Schrage told the Los Angeles Times. "So many of the legal issues we face touch on both of those arenas. He is equally comfortable helping us expand internationally as he is in helping us navigate complicated legal issues we may face in Washington. Ted's arrival really demonstrates we're a little more grown-up."

"Grown up" is a necessity for Facebook's image these days; founder Mark Zuckerberg is only 24, and after the public relations clusterbomb that was the "Beacon" advertising program, it was clear that some more seasoned executives had to be brought on board.

Ted Ullyot

(Credit: Kirkland & Ellis)

Ullyot joins Facebook fewer than six months into his stint at Kirkland & Ellis, though he had been at the law firm from 1996 to 2002 before serving as general counsel for AOL Time Warner Europe out of the company's London office and then general counsel for the Greenwich, Conn.-based ESL Investments, the billion-dollar hedge fund founded by Edward Lampert.

Between 2003 and 2005, Ullyot occupied a number of positions in the federal government, including chief of staff of the Department of Justice and associate counsel to President George W. Bush. Most famously, he handled the federal government's response to the headline-grabbing Valerie Plame CIA leak.

"Ted has extremely strong connections with the Republican party, and we think that's a good thing," Schrage told the Times. COO Sandberg, on the other hand, has political experience from the other side of the aisle: she served as chief of staff to former President Bill Clinton's Department of the Treasury.

Like many of Facebook's top executives, Ullyot attended Harvard University, where the social network was birthed in Zuckerberg's dorm room in 2004. Ullyot obtained his undergraduate degree from the elite college in 1989, two years ahead of Sandberg; an old Harvard Crimson article hints that he competed on the cross-country team. In addition to Sandberg and Zuckerberg (who dropped out to work on Facebook full-time), Schrage is also a Harvard graduate--he obtained his law degree there.

Some of Facebook's most famous legal problems have their roots at Harvard, too. The founders of ConnectU, the would-be social network that only recently settled a years-old intellectual property suit against Zuckerberg, were members of the class of 2004.

As twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss power toward Wednesday's semifinal in the rowing events of the Olympics in Beijing, their longstanding court case against Facebook is winding down.

A San Jose, Calif., judge ruled late last week that ConnectU, the start-up that the brothers founded with Harvard classmate Divya Narendra, must transfer its stock to Facebook as part of the settlement acquisition by Tuesday, despite the claims on behalf of ConnectU that Facebook failed to disclose its true valuation when negotiating the terms of the settlement. The start-up's founders alleged fraud on Facebook's part, and claimed that irreparable harm would ensue from the settlement going through in its present form.

Facebook had been valued on paper at $15 billion when Microsoft took a $240 million stake last November. But that valuation was specific to Microsoft's preferred stock and the business deal surrounding it, Facebook said. Its real valuation is between $3 billion and $4 billion--reports place it at $3.75 billion.

Judge James Ware ruled last Friday that while ConnectU's appeal can be heard, the settlement has to go through first. "The longer the court delays in enforcing the settlement between the parties, the more likely the value of the consideration subject of the settlement (i.e. the value of the stock of each company) will change," Ware wrote in his ruling. "This means that the status quo cannot be preserved with a stay."

Ware originally rejected claims of fraud in June, prompting the appeal.

ConnectU's founders are slated to receive a mixture of cash and Facebook stock as part of the settlement. They originally sued Facebook in 2004, claiming that founder Mark Zuckerberg had swiped their code and business plan after being employed as a ConnectU software developer.

Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss might not have gotten their way with Mark Zuckerberg, but they've got a different prize in mind now: Olympic glory.

Tyler Winklevoss, one-third of ConnectU's founding and one-half of the U.S. men's straight pair.

(Credit: usrowing.org)

The identical twins, who founded one-time Facebook rival ConnectU with their Harvard classmate Divya Narendra, have earned spots on the U.S. Olympic rowing team that will compete later this summer in Beijing. The team's roster was announced Friday and is currently pending approval by the United States Olympic Committee.

Recently, the Winklevoss twins have been in the news because of their long-running lawsuit against Facebook founder Zuckerberg, whom they had once hired as a programmer for ConnectU.

Since 2004, they have alleged that he stole their business plan and source code. The legal fight dragged on until a settlement was reached earlier this year. Then, however, ConnectU's lawyers challenged the agreement and claimed that Facebook had committed fraud. Earlier this week, a judge decided to enforce the settlement, which provided ConnectU with a mixture of cash and stock (effectively, an acquisition by Facebook).

It was no secret that the Winklevoss twins (or "Winklevii," as they are reportedly nicknamed) were in the running for the Beijing squad, but their spots on the roster were not guaranteed until Friday's announcement.

Fittingly, the two will be rowing together. They'll be in the men's straight pair event, which pits heats of two-person boats (each rower has one oar) against one another for the standard distance of 2000 meters.

Click here for more stories on tech and the Beijing Olympics.

A U.S. District Court judge has decided to enforce the settlement that Facebook and would-be rival ConnectU signed in February, rejecting the ConnectU founders' claims of fraud.

The legal battle between the two social-networking sites has gone on since 2004, when ConnectU founders Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra initially sued Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and several other early employees for allegedly stealing ConnectU's code and business plan while they were all students at Harvard. Facebook countersued in 2005, claiming that ConnectU had hacked into its user database to mine e-mail addresses.

Both parties must still show up in court on July 2--a "speak now, or forever hold your peace" sort of occasion. But it appears that the public will remain shut out. Earlier this week, the same judge, James Ware of U.S. District Court in San Jose, Calif., opted to make the proceedings of the case private and keep court documents under seal. CNET News.com is evaluating a possible legal challenge to Ware's decision, which keeps matters out of public view.

ConnectU's legal team had alleged fraud on Facebook's part for a number of reasons: one, because a forensic expert it hired had unearthed instant messaging logs that were relevant to the case and which had not been used as evidence prior to the settlement, and two, because they alleged that Facebook altered the value of its common stock between an October press release that pegged it at $15 billion, and February's signing of the settlement term sheet.

Facebook, which is not publicly traded, did not deny that it had altered its valuation, but Ware deemed that the failure to disclose the change in valuation could not be considered fraudulent.

"We are happy that Judge Ware enforced the agreement settling our dispute with the ConnectU founders," according to a statement from Facebook late Wednesday night. "ConnectU's founders were represented by six lawyers and a professor at Wharton Business School when they signed the Settlement Agreement. The ConnectU founders understood the deal they made, and we are gratified that the Court rejected their false allegations of fraud. Their challenge was simply a case of 'buyers remorse,' as described by the Boston Court earlier this month."

The Facebook statement continued: "We were disappointed that we had to litigate the settlement, as we believed we were caught in the middle of a fee dispute between ConnectU's founders and its former counsel. Nevertheless, we can now consider this chapter closed and wish the Winklevoss brothers the best of luck in their future endeavors."

Cameron Winklevoss and Tyler Winklevoss remain contenders for the U.S. rowing team that will compete in the Olympics in Beijing this summer.