All Things Digital

“Windows is too monolithic.” So says Gartner (IT) analyst Michael Silver who, with colleague Neil MacDonald, told attendees of a Gartner-sponsored conference in Las Vegas that Microsoft’s (MSFT) ubiquitous operating system is “collapsing” under the weight of 20 years of legacy code.

Silver and MacDonald argued that the operating system’s evolution is hamstrung by a vast and unwieldy code base that hampers meaningful change. “This is a large part of the reason Windows Vista delivered primarily incremental improvements,” they said. “Most users do not understand the benefits of Windows Vista or do not see Vista as being better enough than Windows XP to make incurring the cost and pain of migration worthwhile.”

Ob-vious-ly. And?

“Windows as we know it must be replaced,” said the two.

OK. But replaced with what?

It should be replaced with a smaller OS, the two analysts said. A thinner, more robust, more modular OS. One that makes application development, support and, above all, the user experience easier, more pleasant. An elegant OS that encourages users to upgrade, rather than desperately cling to older versions.

You mean an OS like … like Mac OS X (AAPL)? Isn’t Microsoft already working on something like that?

Boy, Huddle Chat, currently the “Featured Application” on Google’s (GOOG) new App Engine page, sure looks familiar. Where have I seen it before? Thinking… thinking… Oh, I know! Campfire!

“The layout is the same, the tabs at the top of the screen are the same, the right-side sidebar listing participants and file uploads is the same,” writes Daring Fireball’s John Gruber. “It even copies Campfire’s trick of formatting a message as ‘code’ if it contains literal newline characters.”

UPDATE: Google has taken Huddle Chat offline. Google Product Manager Pete Koomen offered the following explanation for the move:

As one of the App Engine product managers, I wanted to give an update — we’ve now taken HuddleChat down from the App Engine app gallery. The App Engine team was looking for some sample apps to help kick the tires on their new system, so we invited Googlers to build some as side projects. A couple of our colleagues here built HuddleChat in their spare time because they wanted to share work within their team more easily and thought persistent Web chat would do the trick. We’ve heard some complaints from the developer community, though, so rather than divert attention from Google App Engine itself, we thought it better to just take HuddleChat down.

The silly dispute over the provenance of Facebook landed in federal court once again yesterday, this time over allegations that ConnectU hacked Facebook to gather information that could be used to lure its members to ConnectU’s competing social-networking site.

In a motion hearing, ConnectU disputed Facebook’s allegations and asked U.S. Magistrate Judge Richard Seeborg to dismiss the countersuit. “Facebook makes untrue assertions,” said ConnectU attorney Scott Mosko, presumably in an attempt to frame the suit as a dissembling one, filed in retaliation over ConnectU’s lawsuit, which accuses Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg of lifting ConnectU’s source code and business plan when he worked for the company as a programmer.

For his part, Zuckerberg has maintained that Facebook’s code was developed independently. And it may well have been. Although perhaps not by Zuckerberg. According to Aaron J. Greenspan, one of Zuckerberg’s Harvard classmates, he (not Zuckerberg) created the college social network that inspired Facebook.

Months before anyone had even heard of Facebook, Greenspan established a similar service that he called houseSYSTEM. Among its features: “Face Book,” an online system for quickly locating other students.

Simple coincidence? Not by a long shot. “Remember the Web site you signed up for at Harvard two days before we met in January 2004 called houseSYSTEM–the one I made with the Universal Face Book that predated your site by four months?” Greenspan wrote in an open letter to Zuckerberg last year. “Well, I’ve relaunched it as CommonRoom, and just like its predecessor, it has all sorts of features that might seem familiar: birthday reminders, an event calendar, RSVPs, how you know someone, photo albums, courses posters. After all, when you saw all of those features in houseSYSTEM three years ago, you called them ‘too useful,’ but I stood by them as valuable. Fortunately, even though I shut down houseSYSTEM, I can still use those same features on Facebook– and I didn’t even have to write any more code!”