[5] As a result, the three conceived of a social network for Harvard students named HarvardConnection,[2] which was to expand to other schools around the country.

[6][7][8] In January 2003, they enlisted the help of fellow Harvard student, programmer and friend Sanjay Mavinkurve to begin building HarvardConnection.

[4] Gao, a senior in Mather House, had opted not to become a full partner in the venture, instead agreeing to be paid in a work for hire capacity on a rolling basis.

[7] In November 2003, upon the referral of Victor Gao, the Winklevosses and Narendra approached Mark Zuckerberg about joining the HarvardConnection team.

In early November, Narendra emailed Zuckerberg saying, "We're very deep into developing a site which we would like you to be a part of and ... which we know will make some waves on campus."

[1] He was given the private server location and password for the unfinished HarvardConnection website and code,[7] with the understanding that he would finish the programming necessary for launch.

Zuckerberg wrote: "I read over all the stuff you sent and it seems like it shouldn't take too long to implement, so we can talk about that after I get all the basic functionality up tomorrow night.

On December 10, 2003: "The week has been pretty busy thus far, so I haven't gotten a chance to do much work on the site or even think about it really, so I think it's probably best to postpone meeting until we have more to discuss.

"[6] On December 17, 2003,[11] Zuckerberg met with the Winklevosses and Narendra in his dorm room, allegedly confirming his interest and assuring them that the site was almost complete.

On the whiteboard in his room, Zuckerberg allegedly had scrawled multiple lines of code under the heading "Harvard Connection," and this would be the only time they saw any of his work.

[15] They also asked the Harvard administration to act on what they viewed as a violation of the university's honor code and student handbook.

[14] The About section of the ConnectU website included this sentence, which was live on December 4, 2004: "We've cycled through several programmers, even one who stole our ideas to create a competing site, without informing us of his intentions.

[22] The suit alleged that Zuckerberg had copied their idea[23][24] and illegally used source code intended for the website he was hired to create.

[36] In a new filing, the Winklevoss brothers and their business partner Divya Narendra asked the judge to investigate whether Facebook "intentionally or inadvertently suppressed evidence.

Chang alleges that he has received nothing in return for the substantial benefits he provided to ConnectU, including the value of his work, as well as i2hub's users and goodwill."

The court concludes that Chang has pled sufficient facts to confer standing with respect to his claims against the Winklevoss defendants.

[49] The story of the relationship between ConnectU and Facebook is depicted in The Social Network, a film directed by David Fincher and written by Aaron Sorkin, based on the book The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich.