New York - Online social network Facebook is finalizing the settlement of several lawsuits with ConnectU, whose founders claim that Facebook head Mark Zuckerberg stole their idea for a company when they were all Harvard undergraduates, The New York Times reported. Citing a person briefed on the status of the lawsuits, The Times reports that all motions in Facebook's countersuit against ConnectU, which claim unfair business practices, have been terminated, while motions to dismiss all of the pending litigation between the companies are expected to be filed "within weeks."

The South By Southwest conferences and festivals in Austin, Texas, have already kicked off and will go on through most of this week. On Sunday the conference buzz was about a keynote interview with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, in which the interviewer, BusinessWeek columnist Sarah Lacy, was heckled for rambling non-questions. For those of you that are going, DMW is happy to once again bring you the hottest list of buzz bands and parties, courtesy of music publicist Fiona Bloom:

Palo Alto, Calif. - The Facebook online social network on Wednesday announced that it will make its controversial Beacon marketing feature completely optional for the service's 55 million members.

Ah, the sweet ironies (and hypocrisies) in life. There’s something beautifully creepy about a person fighting so hard against the same thing they fought so hard to create. In today’s case, the culprit is Mark Zuckerberg, the young man more responsible than perhaps any other for his generation’s obsession with displaying itself publicly on the internet. The New York Times has reported that a judge turned down Facebook’s request to have “unflattering documents” about Zuckerberg removed from the website of Harvard magazine 02138.

New York - Facebook has asked a judge to throw out a lawsuit filed against it by ConnectU, a rival social network that claims Facebook was created from code stolen from ConnectU's creators, the Boston Globe reported on Friday.

Palo Alto, Calif. - Facebook, the second-largest social network behind MySpace, on Wednesday launched a redesign of its site, designed to add new messaging functionality and make navigation easier. The company also launched more than 47,000 network portal pages for different regions, companies and schools. Each network will list statistics such as number of members, gender, political views and relationship status, aggregated from information its more than 18 million users choose to list in their profiles.