Now in addition to many of Facebook's 400 million users grousing about privacy, we have allegations that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is involved in securities fraud.
VentureBeat reports that Zuckerberg's former Harvard schoolmates Divya Narendra and brothers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss claim that they hired Zuckerberg to work on their social network, ConnectU, when they were all students at Harvard, only to have him delay the project and use ConnectU's code to launch his own project, then called TheFacebook.
They say that Zuckerberg tricked them into a tentative $65 million settlement that they say was actually worth far less. The matter is now before the courts again.
All of this seems to echo the sentiments of Internet entrepreneur Jason Calacanis who gets stuck into Zuckerberg in his blog , calling the Zuck "an amoral, Asperger's-like entrepreneur".
"The biggest mistake most new players make at poker is overplaying their hand. They spend so much time thinking of the ways they can win that they forget all the ways they can lose. Overplaying hands can affect even the most seasoned players, especially after they've won a couple of hands in a row,'' Calcanis writes. "Over the past month, Mark Zuckerberg, the hottest new card player in town, has overplayed his hand. Facebook is officially "out," as in uncool, amongst partners, parents and pundits all coming to the realization that Zuckerberg and his company are-simply put-not trustworthy … You can only screw people for so long before it catches up to you. The entire industry went from rooting for Zuckerberg to hating him and Facebook-in under 18 months… Zuckerberg represents the best and worst aspects of entrepreneurship. His drive, skill and fearlessness are only matched by his long record-recorded in lawsuit after lawsuit-of backstabbing, stealing and cheating."
If Calcanis is right, and if the ConnectU lawsuit is anything to go by, the uproar over Facebook's abuse of people's privacy might be part of a pattern of behavior. Whether you are stealing provacy or people's ideas, it's all part of the same story.
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