Thefacebook.com has been linking students online since its launch last February, but one connection it has yet to make is with rival site ConnectU.com.

The three creators of ConnectU, recent Harvard University graduates, filed suit against fellow student Mark Zuckerberg and Thefacebook.com on Sept. 2, alleging Zuckerberg stole their idea for an online college directory and launched it before ConnectU got a chance.

“We basically felt like ‘Wow, this is unbelievable,'” said Tyler Winklevoss, one of the founders of ConnectU. “It never crossed our minds that a fellow student would do this to us.”

Winklevoss, his twin brother Cameron and Divya Narenda said they hired Zuckerberg in Nov-ember 2003 to assist them in programming their Web site, then titled “Harvard Connection.” Zuckerberg then, the lawsuit alleges, stalled finishing the project for months before launching Thefacebook.com three months before ConnectU.

Zuckerberg denied stealing his fellow students’ idea for his own site and said the two sites were completely different concepts.

“Their site wasn’t a social networking site originally,” Zuck-erberg said. “Originally they told me that they weren’t planning to expand to many other universities, I mean, the title of their original site was ‘Harvard Connection’ … it was just meant for Harvard.”

Winklevoss said Zuckerberg, although he was unpaid, was bound to an “oral contract,” with ConnectU to help finish programming the site.

Zuckerberg stopped responding to e-mails entirely in January, Winklevoss said. When the ConnectU founders discovered Thefacebook.com, Winklevoss said they were shocked.

“[When Thefacebook.com was launched] we thought ‘Isn’t he supposed to be working for our site that’s almost the exact same idea?'” he said.

Zuckerberg said he never had any formal agreement and was never employed by ConnectU. The reason their project didn’t get completed was because he had other priorities, he said.

“The reality was just that I had a lot of classwork to be doing, and I had other stuff that was more important for me to do,” he said.

With its three-month jump on the market, Thefacebook.com grew rapidly, and currently holds 284,000 members at 99 colleges across the country. ConnectU, which offers its services to over 200 schools, has a much smaller membership of almost 16,000, Winklevoss said.

ConnectU’s founders appealed to Harvard’s disciplinary board and directly to President Lawrence H. Summers. Zuckerberg, they said, has violated Harvard’s honor code, which states that all students will be “honest and forthcoming” with other students.

Harvard refused to get involved in the conflict, Winklevoss said, and suggested they take their dispute to court.

“We had well-documented evidence that he breached the student handbook, and we presented our case and they failed to get involved, they refused to step in,” he said.

The Winklesvosses and Narenda, turned away by Harvard, decided to file suit against Zuckerberg, Win-klevoss said.

According to the complaint filed to the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts, the uncalculated damages being sought by ConnectU exceeds $75,000.

Zuckerberg said Theface-book.com is currently breaking even, and will therefore find it difficult to pay for a lawsuit that Zuckerberg estimated could cost over $100,000.

“More than anything else, their strategy isn’t to act because this is what is just and fair, but their idea is that they can kind of put us in a state of financial burden,” he said.

Zuckerberg said he intends to countersue ConnectU for defamation of character.

Winklevoss disagrees, and said the lawsuit isn’t about the profit.

“We didn’t want to file a lawsuit, it was our last resort,” Winklevoss said. “We’re basically trying to get our word out, to say ‘Hey, this is wrong and you can’t do that to us,'” he said.

Winklevoss said ConnectU is trying to put as little effort into the suit as possible, in order to focus their attention on building ConnectU.

“It wasn’t an easy decision to file a suit. We could be putting money into a lot better things, but it seemed like something we had to do,” he said.

Zuckerberg said Thefacebook.com plans to continue normally.

“I don’t expect the lawsuit to go anywhere,” he said. “We’ll find a way to come up with whatever we need to do to keep this going.”