Facebook is preparing to settle with ConnectU founders Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss and Divya Narendra. The three allegedthat in 2003, Facebook founder and then-fellow Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg turned code he wrote for ConnectU into Facebook. All motions in the case have been terminated, the New York Times reports — a usual prelude to a settlement. In July 2007, a judge characterized the ConnectU founder's case as tissue-thin, remarking that dormroom chatter does not equate to a contract. Still, the case didn't seem to be going away. Already, inadvertently released court filings proved embarrassing to Zuckerberg, and a trial would likely have revealed worse. What the Times didn't get: the terms of the settlement.

If you were looking to spend some alone time browsing Facebook today, be careful — all your "friends" can now see when you're logged into the popular social network. That's because Facebook chat launched yesterday, and as usual with new features, all users are signed up automatically.

Health-conscious Googlers aren't sad to see new Facebook chef Josef Desimone go. "Josef Desimone was not Google's top chef," a Googler tells us. "Everyone hated his cafes. He had the worst heavy, everything-fried menus." Let's see who's slow and heavy on the ultimate field now.

Is it "poaching" when a company steals a rival's chef? At Google, executive chef Josef Desimone scrambled cruelty-free eggs by the truckload. Now Facebook has hired him to replace steam-heated trays of takeout with the kind of free food Googlers are used to. For engineers, Facebook is the new dreamland, and a company cafeteria is the kind of perk they've come to expect. But foodwise, Facebook's simply not as interesting a challenge as Google, with its thousands of employees and campuses dotted around the globe.

A man from Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, beat and then fatally shot his daughter after catching her using Facebook to conduct a conversation with a man, according to reports. More than 30,000 Saudi Arabians use Facebook, but religious figures such as Saudi preacher Sheikh Ali al-Maliki condemn the site as a hotbed of lustful activity. "Facebook is a door to lust and young women and men are spending more on their mobile phones and the Internet than they are spending on food," al-Maliki said in a recent TV interview. Thank goodness we live in a country where social networks don't get people killed.

[Twitter]

Israeli president Shimon Peres has invited a number of luminaries to celebrate the country's 60th year of independence, including Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, Yahoo president Sue Decker and Google cofounder Sergey Brin. They'll be discussing technology as part of the Facing Tomorrow conference in May. Zuckerberg's Facebook has been drawn into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict already, and is also banned in nearby Syria, so at least he has some relevant geopolitical experience.

SuperPoke is worth $13 million according to Facebook application tracker Adonomics. The site awards applications like Slide's Top Friends and RockYou's SuperWall values in the tens of millions of dollars — which provides some of the basis for the 9-digit figures that Slide has commanded, and RockYou hopes to get, in venture capitalists' estimates of their worth. Adonomics' numbers are as sketchy as those valuations, however. Facebook's homegrown Video application only has 807 active users, according to Adonomics stats. Something's off here, and I don't think it's just Facebook's $15 billion value.

People use Facebook for social networking. Everything else is a joke. Oh, Marty. You want to be my "friend" on MySpace now? This is more embarrassing than New York, New York. [via AdRants]

Chris Leach, the CEO of Pwned.com, describes his company as "the worlds first social networking website dedicated to videogamers that launched in December," distinguishing it from the first social networking websites dedicated to videogramers which launched in November or January. With credentials established, Leach informed us that he loved our post about finding a CEO gig for departed Facebook executive Owen Van Natta and would we please tell Mr. Van Natta that his company needs a new CEO, too? Leach promises Van Natta "salary/stock," and that he "would demote myself to COO, and out COO would switch to CTO." Then in all caps, Leach explained how he'd like us to convince Van Natta to join up.

A distraught reader wrote in last night with a tale of woe. He'd just broken up with his girlfriend. "We had a conversation where I told her I would not announce it and just tell if people ask," he said. Still, we all have needs, and in a moment of weakness he changed his relationship status on Facebook to "single," and then clicked the button to delete the status change in his mini-feed. The dialog box promised "Hiding will remove the story from your Mini-Feed and prevent anyone from seeing it."

The Marc Jacobs and Jason Preston break-up has been très tragic for the two of them, but quite amusing for those interested in another form of meta-reality after this week's très boring Parisian Hills. The two of them are sort of famous, so we can delight in their misery, but since they're only sort of famous, they use Facebook just like the plebs. And their respective relationship mini-feeds are the stuff of pure Web 2.0 tragedy. (Click to enlarge the image)

Li Ka-shing, the Hong Kong telecom billionaire, has upped his stake in Facebook, investing another $60 million in the social network. His new total: $120 million, or half of Microsoft's stake. The valuation: Still $15 billion. All the cash flowing into Facebook has gotten some Facebookers thinking about selling. CEO Mark Zuckerberg remains too cash-poor to buy his own house, but a handful of employees are cashing out.

Thanks to Facebook's flimsy security, we've all gotten a good look at Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg's girlfriend, Priscilla Chan. But what's the story on how she landed her man?

Google director of business development Ethan Beard has resigned from the company and will begin work at Facebook. Why Facebook over Google? Beard answered:

"'Facebook!' is the new 'Cheese!'" — 19-year-old Dean White, who will now be unfairly blamed for this slang "trend" when it gets mentioned in a Times trend piece. [Aaron White]

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg hasn't updated his profile picture in quite some time. Hey, he's been busy. Let's help him by choosing a new one. Since Facebook's privacy is so flimsy, we have plenty of options from photos Zuckerberg has already uploaded. To follow our advice, Mark, all you have to do is click on "Make Profile Picture."

Canadian Byron Ng found a way around Facebook privacy safeguards and forwarded pictures of Paris Hilton's brother drinking beer to the Associated Press. How'd he do it? As we reported in January, Facebook doesn't provide much security for its users' photos. With the right URL, anyone can see any photo, whether its marked private or not. Take, for example, the photos from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's own private album, embedded below. In it, Zuck shows that he drinks beer and even sometimes wears a tux.

Yahoo, Google and MySpace plan to further compound their OpenSocial initiative with another initiative, the OpenSocial Foundation. OpenSocial is a widget platform Google first announced last fall when Facebook seemed poised to "take over the world" with its own platform. After the announcement, Google rushed OpenSocial into development and completed — sort of — a beta version earlier this year. The foundation proposal calls for 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status and protection against patent challenges. Ah, so this is really about getting donors to pay Google's legal bills!

In January a pair of money managers, Fidelity and T. Rowe Price, bought 9.1 percent of Slide for $50 million. Fortune asks, "Are these widgets worth half a billion?" The mag doesn't come up with anything more than "maybe," but I'm willing to go a little further. Slide worth $550 million? No, despite its huge traffic numbers. While it's true that advertisers are desperate to reach the 18-24 market, I hardly think SuperPoke is what they had in mind.