Thefacebook.com is nearing 200,000 registered users at 37 schools. The social networking site plans to expand to 200 schools by the end of the summer. The Web site’s success has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post and numerous other publications.

But there is one thorn in creator Mark Zuckerberg’s side. The rising Harvard College junior is being accused of stealing the Facebook idea while writing the code for a comparable site by Harvard Class of 2004 graduates Cameron Winklevoss, Divya Narendra and Tyler Winklevoss.

They claim that they asked Zuckerberg to develop part of their ConnectU.com Web site in November of last year. According to Tyler Winkelvoss, Zuckerberg then proceeded to develop his own site based on their ideas. Zuckerberg communicated with the ConnectU.com team through 52 e-mail messages and three personal meetings, which Winkelvoss has records of. Zuckerberg, on the other hand, claims that he voluntarily agreed to do six hours of coding for the ConnectU.com site, but he understood it to be a “personals” site to connect students with alumni and employers.

“I never really understood their product, but it was not a social networking site,” Zuckerberg said.

Winkelvoss insists that Zuckerberg is using ignorance as an excuse.

“It was clear to him what we wanted,” Winkelvoss said. “He stalled us for months while he worked on his own idea, which he launched in February as an original idea.”

In fact, Zuckerberg claims that, if anything, the ConnectU.com creators stole ideas from his site, which went up at the end of May. The only similarities between the two sites were that people registered and put up information about themselves that could be used professionally or for dating purposes.

But the social networking, messaging, “poking” and common course listings functions that are on the current ConnectU.com site were all borrowed from thefacebook.com, according to Zuckerberg.

“Mark has screen shots of the site when he was working on a part of it, and it is very much unlike thefacebook.com,” said rising Harvard junior Chris Hughes, spokesperson for thefacebook.com.

When he was working on their site, it was called HarvardConnection.com, which Zuckerberg uses as evidence that their site was never meant to connect students from different schools.

“The site looked completely different when I worked on it,” Zuckerberg said.

But Winkelvoss says that their site was always meant to be an online community for students that would be rolled out to other schools.

“Our site was meant to connect students to alumni, businesses and other students,” Winkelvoss said. “[Zuckerberg] will say it other ways, but it’s all the same.”

The ConnectU.com creators attempted to force the Harvard administration to act on what they viewed as a violation of the university’s honor code. They took the case to the Harvard Administrative Board and the university president, but it was ruled to be outside of university jurisdiction.

The creators don’t plan to take the dispute any further.

“We’re not focused on the legal avenue at this time,” Winkelvoss said. “We will continue to develop our product and let the facts speak for themselves.”

ConnectU.com currently has 1,660 registered users and is growing five to 10 percent per day. Winkelvoss boasted the site’s cleaner layout and book exchange, blog and chat functions in comparison to thefacebook.com. He described ConnectU.com as an online meeting tool versus thefacebook.com as an online directory tool.

Meanwhile, Zuckerberg is residing in Palo Alto area for the summer and possibly the fall. His team has started selling ads on the site to cover the costs, which have grown to $3,000 per month. “A handful of people” have expressed interest in buying thefacebook.com, but Zuckerberg insists that there are no plans to sell it-only expand.

“We’re just having a good time,” Zuckerberg said.

Students can also expect a new version of thefacebook.com, to be launched in mid-August.