We really look for reliable sources — we’ll say, for example, that just because someone wrote something in a blog somewhere, that doesn’t mean it’s a reliable source. We need to get sources, you know, that are quite old-fashioned about it.

– Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, to Foreign Policy’s Blake Hounshell

The arena for news readers on tablets and smartphones is competitive, with high-profile efforts such as Flipboard, Livestand from Yahoo, AOL’s Editions and start-ups such as Pulse and Zite.

The reason for CNN’s acquisition interest — as well as look-sees from several other publishers — is not a surprise: As readers turn more toward using these mobile devices to consume content, big media companies are trying to acquire the technology to serve up their fare to them.

It is a dicey arena, though, where content aggregation meets (and crashes into) content lifting. Vancouver-based Zite, for example, was sent a cease-and-desist letter in March, by a panoply of media companies (not CNN!) alleging various copyright violations.

That happened right after it was launched, with $4 million in funding from angel investors and Canadian grants and an innovative personalized article-picking algorithm.

As Liz Gannes wrote then:

[Then] Zite CEO Ali Davar describes the iPad as a way to “emancipate the technology” his team originated at research at the University of British Columbia.

It had previously been put to work in a browser plug-in called Worio. And, as you might have guessed, browser plug-ins are a tough business.

The free Zite app imports a user’s Twitter tweets, follows and Google Reader subscriptions, offers lists of pre-made categories, and then solicits feedback and refines over time a list of topics and sources the user is interested in. It features articles based on their popularity, number of shares from a user’s network and topic relevance. (Davar said he thinks a person’s Facebook network data is too heterogeneous to reliably recommend articles, so it’s not included as an option.)

Last week, a Canadian site called Techvibes first wrote about the possibility of the sale of Zite to CNN, which is based in Atlanta and owned by Time Warner.

In a press release, CNN said Zite would remain a standalone unit, as a wholly-owned subsidiary of CNN, and that CEO Mark Johnson will continue to run Zite’s operations, but now in San Francisco. CNN also said that Davar will remain an executive director and Mike Klass will continue as CTO.

In a statement, Johnson said: “Zite is thrilled about combining forces with CNN to create a world-class news discovery platform. In CNN, we have found a partner who shares our vision and passion. Being part of the CNN family gives us the capital to grow Zite’s business and continue to innovate in the space.”

AllThingsD has undergone a lot of changes in the past year that Walt and I are truly proud of, and today we are posting together about changes to social media on the site.

Social media, especially Twitter, has been a major part of the AllThingsD operation since our earliest days. We have always encouraged our writers to be active on the medium — something we continue to do.

That’s why we are launching 15 new Twitter accounts that break out our coverage into categories, as on our site, and also around specialized topics we know our audience follows closely.

Now, in addition to following the main @AllThingsD Twitter account for up-to-the-second updates, our readers can follow accounts that feature only our stories about Apple, venture capital, personnel changes or mobile, to name a few. We hope readers will customize their experience so that AllThingsD can be as useful a resource as possible.

In addition to the Twitter accounts, we also have newly refreshed Facebook pages, and we’ve enabled LinkedIn sharing of our articles as part of becoming one of its recommended news sources.

You can have a look at all the new social features at our brand-new social subscribe page.

We’re adding all of these features while maintaining respect for the personal privacy and data of our readers. Therefore, all social media implementations on AllThingsD require the reader to take an explicit action to share.

You might think this level of disclosure is overboard, but we think it’s the right thing to do.

We’ve also brought on Drake Martinet to be our social media editor.

As social as Walt and I can be, Drake will be your point of contact for questions, concerns and comments about social media and its use on AllThingsD.

If you want more specifics about what we are up to, I encourage you to read Drake’s post on the social media changes. He covers some of the tools and services we are using, as well as explaining a little more about the thinking that went into our new social strategy.

If you have any questions, we encourage you to tweet Drake (he’s @withDrake on Twitter) or reach him at his email here.

Please also see our new features here by clicking this button:

See the new features

Thanks,

Kara and Walt

A panoply of big media giants sent a cease-and-desist letter today to Zite, the Apple iPad news reader app.

The Washington Post, AP, Gannett, Getty Images, Time, Dow Jones and many other media organizations were part of the action, which you can read all about below.

Zite bills itself as a “personalized iPad magazine that gets smarter as you use it.”

Not smart enough, it seems, to avoid copyright complaints from the content creators the app sucks in.

“The Zite application is plainly unlawful,” said the letter to Zite CEO Ali Davar, noting all kinds of copyright violations.

In a phone interview with BoomTown this afternoon, Davar said Zite would comply with the letter by shifting the content from its “reading” mode to a Web one, which points to publisher sites.

“It’s a bummer that they did this, but we expected it,” he said.

In a comment he posted below, Davar also wrote:

“Zite’s goal is to work with publishers, not to be antagonistic. The few publishers that have contacted us regarding the reading mode view we have complied with their requests and simply switched over to web view. We’re talking to publishers right now to find a win-win for them monetarily and to at the same time preserve the great user experience.”

For now, it’s lose-lose, and the letter is a dramatic shot across the bow of all the many news readers now hitting the market in the wake of the popularity of the Apple iPad tablet.

The social media-focused Flipboard and the news-oriented Pulse are two others, both of which have claimed they are working with publishers.

But Pulse wrangled with the New York Times over misuse of its RSS feeds and copyright issues, which has since been settled.

Zite showed up earlier this month, a product of a machine-learning technology start-up called Worio, which is based in Vancouver, Canada.

The aggregator of personalized content, which has $4 million in angel funding, gets its cues from a user’s interests.

Zite’s technology originated at research at the University of British Columbia several years ago.

In an interview with NetworkEffect’s Liz Gannes a few weeks ago, Davar seemed sanguine about publishers.

Wrote Gannes:

The free Zite app imports a user’s Twitter tweets, follows and Google Reader subscriptions, offers lists of pre-made categories, and then solicits feedback and refines over time a list of topics and sources the user is interested in. It features articles based on their popularity, number of shares from a user’s network and topic relevance. (Davar said he thinks a person’s Facebook network data is too heterogeneous to reliably recommend articles, so it’s not included as an option.)

Flipboard itself is likely to add more personalization features; the company bought real-time social discovery technology from Ellerdale and has yet to implement much of it.

Vancouver-based Zite is well-funded, with $4 million from angels and Canadian grants, but it doesn’t have business relationships with publishers. The app lays out pictures and articles, stripping out everything else, including ads. Davar said he doubted this would be a problem. “It would be shortsighted for publishers to think of Zite as us versus them,” he said.

Short-sighted maybe, but legally lethal definitely, as you can see by this cease-and-desist letter, as well as a video from Zite on how its app works:

Letter to Zite _03 30 11_ –

Zite: Personalized Magazine for iPad from zite.com on Vimeo.

(Full disclosure: New Corp. owns Dow Jones, which owns this site.)

One of the more interesting movies at the 11th Sundance Film Festival, which opens today in Park City, Utah, will be “Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times.”

The documentary is by Andrew Rossi, who spent a year following reporters and editors at the famed newspaper, even as the media landscape shifted dramatically due to the impact of digital technologies.

Here’s the program description from Sundance:

With the Internet surpassing print as our main news source, newspapers going bankrupt, and outlets focusing on content they claim audiences (or is it advertisers?) want, PAGE ONE chronicles the media industry’s transformation and assesses the high stakes for democracy if in-depth investigative reporting becomes extinct.

The film deftly makes a beeline for the eye of the storm or, depending on how you look at it, the inner sanctum of the media, gaining unprecedented access to the New York Times newsroom for a year. At the media desk, a dialectical play-within-a-play transpires as writers like salty David Carr track print journalism’s metamorphosis even as their own paper struggles to stay vital and solvent. Meanwhile, rigorous journalism–including vibrant cross-cubicle debate and collaboration, tenacious jockeying for on-record quotes, and skillful page-one pitching–is alive and well. The resources, intellectual capital, stamina, and self-awareness mobilized when it counts attest there are no shortcuts when analyzing and reporting complex truths.

What is probably most interesting is that many of the stories covered by the Times in the film are about the technological forces that have put it and other traditional media organizations through the digital ringer in recent years.

And, as someone who made the move away from a big mainstream newspaper to an online-only publication, I experienced some significant déjà vu watching clips in this interview with Rossi below, especially of the editor-centric tone of the newsroom and the franticness of reporters to get a story on the front page.

Which these days feels like such an odd and ancient way to think of journalism and which I also don’t miss for a second. (By the way, you can do “rigorous” journalism online too and without all the endless meetings.)

Check out Rossi (and that’s the very funny NYT media columnist David Carr in the photo below):

I can’t remember a year during which computer security stories jumped so readily from the tech and business pages to the front page.

The year 2010 was bookended by two such cases. It opened with Google’s disclosure that it had come under attack in China, an apparent attempt to penetrate the Gmail accounts of certain activists and journalists.

It ended with the WikiLeaks affair, which stemmed from the alleged theft by an Army private of classified documents stored on a government network.

And let’s not forget in mid-year came the story, as fascinating as it was sobering, of Stuxnet, a computer worm developed by parties unknown–although the smart money is on Israel–that penetrated and ultimately damaged equipment used in the Iranian nuclear program.

Computer hacking–which has for too long evoked images in the public mind-set of teenagers in basements taking digital joyrides–has finally revealed itself to everyone for what it has long been for those in the know: The domain of espionage, sabotage and possibly warfare.

In Google’s case, the attacks upon its systems raised questions about where it draws the line with authorities in Beijing about such matters as freedom of speech. When the attack was first disclosed, Google publicly mulled shutting down its operations in China.

Then in protest, it stopped censoring its search results, giving mainland Chinese access to the same search results available to residents of Hong Kong. Beijing responded by blocking access to Google’s site.

Finally, Google and China came to a new agreement, and Google appeared the loser in the battle of wills.

Computer security is one of those things that companies and governments say they take seriously, but never really seem to get a grip on, judging by the results.

In any case, there is no firewall or software in existence that could have prevented Bradley Manning from stealing the documents that he is alleged to have given to WikiLeaks. As a low-level Army intelligence analyst, he was a trusted insider who had access to this material in the course of his day-to-day job.

So, it was not technology that failed. The failure was one of internal policies that allowed him access to data not relevant to his position.

Any employee of a midsize company can see how wrong that is. Human-resources documents are limited only to those who work in that department. The same is true of people who work in the legal office, business development department and so on.

But it apparently didn’t occur to anyone in government to limit the access to what became the WikiLeaks cache to people who worked only for or closely with the State Department.

If it turns out that thousands of companies are better at protecting their business secrets than the U.S. government is, then it’s not for nothing that the Central Intelligence Agency task force investigating the WikiLeaks affair bears the initials “WTF.”

Something similar was true of Stuxnet. One of the reasons the attackers, whoever they are, succeeded was that they used several so-called “zero day” vulnerabilities in Windows.

These are undocumented weaknesses that hackers save up for special occasions as a way to open a back door into a computer and then insert a troublemaking payload, like a worm. Zero day exploits are a fact of life, and once spotted in the world, they’re usually patched.

The Stuxnet attackers used as many as four zero day exploits as a way to get their worm into targeted computers. Microsoft, to its credit, made short work of fixing them once they came to light.

Even so, the Stuxnet worm burrowed its way from Windows machines into industrial control computers known as SCADA systems, which are widely used to run factories, power plants, pipelines and all sorts of other infrastructure essential to modern life.

The worm was designed to find a specific target: The systems controlling a set of as many as 1,000 centrifuges at the uranium enrichment facility in Natanz, and make them spin faster than they were supposed to.

The ability to attack industrial computers and cause them to do things they’re not supposed to do has been a lingering fear among security experts for years. Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy in 2007 looked at the potential for attacks on SCADA systems and proved that it was possible to seize control of an electrical generator and then make it destroy itself.

They also found that many of these systems are connected to the Internet for what seem like good reasons: Convenience and cost savings. But these connections have also opened them up to the same kind of attacks that rattled the Iranian facility in Natanz.

Another Stuxnet-like worm, the thinking goes, could be used to bring down a power grid, or poison drinking water, or shut down an oil or gas pipeline. The good news is that such an attack is expensive–Stuxnet, by one estimate, cost $10 million to create–and requires a lot of specialized insider knowledge.

The bad news is that the Stuxnet source code is circulating in the wild for anyone to study. And as the WikiLeaks case shows, there are often insiders willing to take part in criminal schemes.

The other bad news? Securing these systems won’t come cheap.

If history is any judge, there will likely be a barrage of computer security companies that try to spin these incidents into opportunities to make a sales pitch. That’s what security companies do, after all.

But they usually miss the point. How can you plan for a vulnerability you’ve never seen? How can you stop an otherwise trusted insider from abusing their access to sensitive information? Both are fundamentally difficult problems for which there are no easy answers.

Spending money on last year’s security vulnerabilities is like preparing to fight the last war: Circumstances inevitably change, and they certainly will in 2011. New kinds of attacks will arise, and they will catch their targets by surprise.

And the public, like the CIA, will reasonably ask, “WTF?”

The unvarnished fact is that the networked society to which we’ve become accustomed in the last several years has a soft, vulnerable underbelly.

And the more we rely upon it, the more people with a combination of advanced technical skills and repugnant motivations are going to look for ways to turn it against us.

Some will do so as a means of making a personal profit. Others may see it as a way of advancing a political or ideological agenda.

But others will want to use theirs skills to do serious harm to innocent people on a large scale.

And the events of 2010 point the way to a world where that’s a more realistic scenario than it ever was before.

Things have certainly quieted down in the swirl of mostly vapor plots about the future of Yahoo, although the pondering, machinating and such on the parts of a variety of players have most certainly continued.

And that includes the introduction of a new character into the drama: Former News Corp. President Peter Chernin.

Let’s be very clear–there is no active plan for Chernin to join Yahoo or its board, nor is he currently part of any possible takeover plan related to the Silicon Valley Internet giant.

But multiple sources from a variety of sides said that Chernin, a well-liked and deeply experienced media and entertainment exec, has been contacted by a number of private equity firms and other investors about his interest in becoming involved should any of the various and sundry scenarios around the Internet giant pan out.

And Chernin, many sources said, has expressed a definite interest in the situation, perhaps because he was deeply involved in a previous deal when running News Corp.

At the time, it involved combining the media giant’s Myspace social networking site with Yahoo and also Microsoft’s portal MSN and creating a new company, code-named “TrafficCo.”

“He is asking a lot of questions and is nosing around, but there is not a plan,” said one source. “Yahoo has always been an interesting opportunity to him.”

Indeed, especially since Chernin has had a longtime interest in being more involved in digital business after a long career in traditional media.

He currently has a Santa Monica, Calif.-based media company, called Chernin Entertainment, which has a lucrative first-look production film and television deal with News Corp.–as well as the Chernin Group, which “pursues strategic opportunities in media, technology, and entertainment.”

And, in recent weeks, Chernin (pictured here) has also unveiled a new media venture in Asia called CA Media, which will “focus on a broad range of opportunities in content creation (specifically, film and TV production), television networks, sports, education, advertising, and digital media.”

But so far, since he left News Corp. in early 2009, Chernin has done very little in the digital arena.

In contrast, at News Corp., he was a key exec behind its co-founding of the Hulu premium video site, for example, among other digital initiatives.

And when Microsoft was vying to acquire Yahoo several years ago, Chernin and News Corp. CEO and Chairman Rupert Murdoch were actively trying to forge some solution that involved the company.

One possibility floated by numerous sources was that Chernin could once again work with Microsoft on settling all the turmoil around Yahoo of late.

In a related matter, sources said he had been in very early talks with the company about doing a subscription original-content channel on its Xbox–a kind of digital-only HBO–aimed at young men. Those discussions have not resulted in any project.

And, in fact, Chernin was a guest speaker at a Microsoft board retreat just yesterday in the Seattle area, where the theme was “Three Screens.”

He reportedly addressed television, the other two screen being the computer and the mobile phone.

A tighter relationship between Chernin and Microsoft would be interesting and possibly helpful to both.

“Microsoft is very worried about making sure there is a stable Yahoo,” said a source close to the situation, who noted the software giant has been quietly eyeing the situation and considering options. “Involving a well-regarded executive like Chernin makes a lot of sense.”

That makes sense given the key online search and advertising partnership Microsoft and Yahoo are now in, which tightly ties their fates together.

Of course, much about the Yahoo situation and any scenario being thought of–from spinning off its Asian assets in China’s Alibaba Group and Yahoo Japan, to taking it private, to replacing its management and board–is, as BoomTown has frequently noted, a lot of shadows and dust at this point.

But–as a longtime admirer of Chernin’s curiosity about the digital realm, refreshingly minus the requisite horror over its growth that is so characteristic of much of Hollywood–his interest is a welcome one into the debate over what Yahoo needs to do to reinvigorate itself going forward.

Asking his thoughts might be a good question at the Web 2.0 Summit conference, where Chernin is being interviewed later today on the topic of content.

Works just fine, too. If Google knows the term–“emotional intelligence”–you’ll get a quick definition, though it’s not clear what Google is using as a source here. If it doesn’t know the term–say, “feature creep”–it immediately kicks out some Web definitions.

Google (GOOG) isn’t crowing about this one, which is wise given its continuing back and forth with the world’s publishers. And for now, the company isn’t really pushing it, either. Anyone who has already been using Google’s search box as a crude dictionary/spell-checker, as I frequently do, won’t see a change, except you may see AdWords ads for the new feature alongside your results, as I did here.

[Image credit: Muffet]

For all the noisy hubbub over should-we-or-shouldn’t-we-publish confidential documents hacked from password-protected accounts of Twitter employees, as well as a Twitter spouse, it is actually pretty simple.

Stolen equals stolen.

But, because this is a “hot” issue and it concerns an even hotter Web 2.0 company–Holy traffic-gooser, Batman!–the debate will surely go on and on, even as the stolen information inevitably leaks its way out.

Still, let’s not pretend what it is and is not.

It is most definitely not, for example, one of those great dramatic moments in journalism.

Thus, comparing the ruminations over whether to publish egregiously obtained information–however true–to the debate over a major event like the New York Times publishing the Pentagon Papers is pathetic.

It is, though, a tempest in a Silicon Valley teapot.

In point of fact, my colleague Peter Kafka, who works from New York, wrote me tonight:

“Was at a fancy schmooze tonight packed with digital media bigwigs: Viacom, NBC, News Corp, plus lots of start-up guys. TwitterGate was on *no one’s* lips. I talked to one guy who has a stake in the company and he pretty much shrugged about it–several people had no idea about it at all. Total non-news.”

It is not, however self-righteously (and pompously) put forth, much of a dilemma.

As the very clever John Gruber of Daring Fireball put it: “What you may ask, is the dilemma, since it is clear that any decent human being would simply refuse to have anything to do with something so lurid?”

Indeed, it is unequivocally wrong to publish documents you know or think were stolen or hacked, because it is aiding and abetting that theft.

In this regard, then, there should be no difference between “Web” journalism and the old-fashioned journalism–acting as if the former gets a “process journalism” (what a crock!) pass at standards and ethics that should be eternal and unwavering, no matter the medium.

And it is a little like pitting “gay” marriage against marriage, in order to create a false dichotomy, designed only to obfuscate the issues.

So, it also isn’t kosher to try to take focus of your own wrongdoing by pointing to other practices, which is almost always an obnoxious reach by the willfully immature.

While comparisons to leaked company documents have been made–and BoomTown knows from leaked corporate memos–this is a lazy-man’s argument, since it simply does not track.

The Twitter docs were stolen from personal accounts, an obvious pilfer, which immediately changes the equation completely.

While you certainly can have a lively debate about whether Yahoos should pass along some widely distributed memo that CEO Carol Bartz penned to the company, it is not even close to the same thing.

And, more to the point, if someone sent me emails jacked from Bartz’s own email account, I would not need even a second to know I would never use such information.

As I tweeted earlier today: A credible source a reporter knows giving accurate info is clearly different from a thief rifling through someone’s sock drawer.

That is especially true when you use material from a person you do not know. For the record: When I post a company memo, for example, I know and check out exactly who’s giving it to me and I don’t publish stuff just because it happens to land in my email box.

And, a minor beef, blaming victims for the theft by saying they have weak or inadequate passwords is also pathetic. It’s kind of like blaming people for being robbed because they had crappy locks.

I suppose there is a point in there, but the real finger of blame should always be firmly pointed at the burglar and those who fence his nicked goods.

That brings me to my final point–thinking you can handle dirty material and then act as if your hands are clean.

How hands get dirty is a concept even my children understand.

And if my kids ever said: “Hey, this stolen stuff is going to get out anyway, so let me be the one to ladle it out as I see fit”–I’d ground them for life.

Look, a Yahoo-Microsoft deal could happen anytime. Just not yesterday, as it turns out.

It’s easy to be taken in by so-called “sources,” chatting up a new series of talks between Microsoft (MSFT) and Yahoo (YHOO), either to do a deal to revisit the partial search-outsourcing partnership or to try to one-up that by claiming rather grandly that there is yet another effort to buy the company whole.

But with Yahoo’s stock dropping like a knife and hovering near the dangerous $20-a-share mark yesterday, anyone reporting on the situation should have been deeply cautious about floating rumors about renewed deal-making between the star-crossed pair.

As it is often said, there’s one born every minute, and like clockwork, Yahoo’s stock got an undeserved boost due to those unconfirmed stories.

You did not hear it here first, because BoomTown suddenly got the exact same calls too yesterday–coincidence? I think not!–from “sources” touting Microsoft-Yahoo as “back on.”

But I simply could not confirm it to our site’s standards of reporting. Which is to say, aiming for trying to report with full accuracy versus repeating errant chatter that is so typical now in this deal.

Thus, I declined to crunch on that tasty, but non-nutritious, morsel and opted instead to try to get confirmation from sources who actually knew what is going on.

And those sources at both Yahoo and Microsoft, who certainly can spin like dervishes when need be, emphatically went out of their way yesterday–which is not so typical–to deny any talks were going on or that anything had changed since Microsoft had walked away from a bid for the whole of Yahoo in May or since it had lost out on another effort to do a partial deal.

While both sides did emphasize that nothing was different as of “today” (meaning yesterday, as no company ever wants to close the door, do they?), they did so since talks could obviously resume anytime.

That’s especially true, as Yahoo’s shares inevitably decline even further today when the market opens and investors take in the fact no deal is happening yet again.

That’s not to say that smart analysts should not opine about the should-haves, would-haves and could-haves of this takeover that was clearly botched by both sides.

It’s perplexing to me, for example, why Yahoo’s highly ineffectual board is not breaking land and speed records to try to revive a buyout from Microsoft or why Microsoft isn’t itching to do a deal now that the price is so low that Yahoo is practically giving itself away.

At the very least, Microsoft should have and should still try to win the partial search deal, as it needs that market share badly to compete with Google (GOOG).

In fact, right before all the noise started up, I noted rather emphatically yesterday that such talks should resume, given the cheap price and obvious need of Microsoft to acquire Yahoo’s still-attractive assets.

As I wrote:

But if Yahoo shares decline further, it should think twice. And then it should slap itself silly, until it realizes the opportunity it might be missing…

Why? Because, for all its management problems, Yahoo remains Microsoft’s single most important path to winning in the online display business and at least keeping itself in the game with Google in search and the search-ad business.

Yahoo is a much tarnished jewel, to be sure, but a jewel nonetheless.

And, if you really think hard about it, it is still Microsoft’s best chance to shine.”

That’s because, as I also wrote yesterday, also right before the heedless hubbub:

Microsoft does not have a secret plot to buy Yahoo.

Maybe Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer should be hovering in the wings, like a digital Simon Legree ready to pounce again on poor Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang.

But he’s not.

And still the hopeful, the suspicious and, most of all, the beaten-down Yahoo shareholders continue to jump on any utterance from the software giant, even woefully mistranslating interviews with its top execs, to make it so.”

As the old cliche goes, if wishes were horses, all beggars would ride.

And, for now at least, investors in Yahoo might soon learn all about the beggar part, but none will be getting a free ride. In fact and incredibly, the road ahead looks bumpier than ever.

“Today we’re releasing a new feature to find your local news by simply typing in a city name or zip code,” Google software engineers Andre Rohe and Rohit Ananthakrishna wrote in a post to the official company blog. “While we’re not the first news site to aggregate local news, we’re doing it a bit differently–we’re able to create a local section for any city, state or country in the world and include thousands of sources. We’re not simply looking at the byline or the source, but instead we analyze every word in every story to understand what location the news is about and where the source is located.”

Location-based news targeting. Pretty slick. Or it will be, once they get the 90210 bug worked out. Still, as Topix co-founder Rich Skrenta notes, Google’s a little late to this particular game. “This was pretty neat stuff when Topix launched in January 2004,” Skrenta quips. “Now if Google just added 50,000 vetted local blogs to the mix, and a community with 100K posts/day, they’ll have something.”

In a motion hearing, ConnectU disputed Facebook’s allegations and asked U.S. Magistrate Judge Richard Seeborg to dismiss the countersuit. “Facebook makes untrue assertions,” said ConnectU attorney Scott Mosko, presumably in an attempt to frame the suit as a dissembling one, filed in retaliation over ConnectU’s lawsuit, which accuses Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg of lifting ConnectU’s source code and business plan when he worked for the company as a programmer.

For his part, Zuckerberg has maintained that Facebook’s code was developed independently. And it may well have been. Although perhaps not by Zuckerberg. According to Aaron J. Greenspan, one of Zuckerberg’s Harvard classmates, he (not Zuckerberg) created the college social network that inspired Facebook.

Months before anyone had even heard of Facebook, Greenspan established a similar service that he called houseSYSTEM. Among its features: “Face Book,” an online system for quickly locating other students.

Simple coincidence? Not by a long shot. “Remember the Web site you signed up for at Harvard two days before we met in January 2004 called houseSYSTEM–the one I made with the Universal Face Book that predated your site by four months?” Greenspan wrote in an open letter to Zuckerberg last year. “Well, I’ve relaunched it as CommonRoom, and just like its predecessor, it has all sorts of features that might seem familiar: birthday reminders, an event calendar, RSVPs, how you know someone, photo albums, courses posters. After all, when you saw all of those features in houseSYSTEM three years ago, you called them ‘too useful,’ but I stood by them as valuable. Fortunately, even though I shut down houseSYSTEM, I can still use those same features on Facebook– and I didn’t even have to write any more code!”