They lost.

In court, I mean, not in rowing!

But I am sad to say BoomTown is deeply uninterested in the long-running legal struggle between Facebook Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and the hot social-networking site and the group affiliated with ConnectU–heretofore referred to by BoomTown as NotFacebook.

Namely the Winklevoss brothers, Cameron and Tyler (and also another guy, not a Winklevoss), who are world-class rowers.

Without going into the gory details, they settled a lawsuit in February that centered on how Facebook was founded and whether or not Zuckerberg stole code to create it while an undergrad at Harvard University.

And then the Winklevosses claimed that that settlement in the endless legal battle should be voided because of fraud and reopened.

The ConnectU side claimed that it had found some “smoking” gun instant messages that proved their case.

Whatever.

The federal judge in San Jose decided to let Facebook enforce the settlement anyway (but, because there are lawyers involved, there will probably be yet another bite at the apple).

In any case, BoomTown fully enjoyed the take-no-prisoners PR stylings of Facebook, now under uber-PR guru Elliot Schrage and, thus, we render the statement about the win here in its entirety:

We are happy that Judge Ware enforced the agreement settling our dispute with the ConnectU founders. ConnectU’s founders were represented by six lawyers and a professor at Wharton Business School when they signed the Settlement Agreement. The ConnectU founders understood the deal they made, and we are gratified that the Court rejected their false allegations of fraud. Their challenge was simply a case of ‘buyers remorse,’ as described by the Boston Court earlier this month.

We were disappointed that we had to litigate the settlement, as we believed we were caught in the middle of a fee dispute between ConnectU’s founders and its former counsel. Nevertheless, we can now consider this chapter closed and wish the Winklevoss brothers the best of luck in their future endeavors.”

As in, don’t let the door hit your Winklevii on your way out!

As usual, BoomTown asked for the obligatory on-the-record interview with Zuckerberg (pictured above), but he still has not invited us over to get social at his social-networking HQ in Palo Alto, Calif. So while we’re waiting by the phone, we need to get busy.

Thus, we continue our thankless quest to decode all memos from Internet moguls (BoomTown speaks fluent Web 2.0 double talk).

(In October, we did this for Randy Falco’s memo about the AOL layoffs. And, back in late August, we also translated a memo from Yahoo President Sue Decker about its reorganization of management.)

So here’s my take on Mark’s take:

Mark wrote: Thoughts on Beacon

Translation: Facebook PR head Brandee Barker’s thoughts on Beacon, so Valleywag’s Owen Thomas will stop pestering her.

Mark wrote: About a month ago, we released a new feature called Beacon to try to help people share information with their friends about things they do on the Web. We’ve made a lot of mistakes building this feature, but we’ve made even more with how we’ve handled them. We simply did a bad job with this release, and I apologize for it. While I am disappointed with our mistakes, we appreciate all the feedback we have received from our users. I’d like to discuss what we have learned and how we have improved Beacon.

Translation: I thought I was the CEO…b#*t#*, as my business card used to read, but it turns out maybe not so much. I would surely like to zombie-bite those annoying reporters, the whiny privacy advocates and those cut-and-run advertisers, who obviously don’t understand my $15 billion worth of genius. I wonder if I could find a way to blame the Winklevosses, who have the audacity to sue me for stealing their original social networking idea at Harvard!

Mark wrote: When we first thought of Beacon, our goal was to build a simple product to let people share information across sites with their friends. It had to be lightweight so it wouldn’t get in people’s way as they browsed the Web, but also clear enough so people would be able to easily control what they shared. We were excited about Beacon because we believe a lot of information people want to share isn’t on Facebook, and if we found the right balance, Beacon would give people an easy and controlled way to share more of that information with their friends.

Translation: When we first thought of Beacon, we thought it would make bank to backfill that kooky valuation, so Steve Ballmer would stop texting me “Where’s the beef, dude?” hourly. By lightweight, we meant we were actually thinking of a sneaky way of tricking users into becoming digital billboards without realizing it. By easy and controlled, we meant an easy way to control their brains into thinking this was a good thing.

Mark wrote: But we missed the right balance. At first we tried to make it very lightweight so people wouldn’t have to touch it for it to work. The problem with our initial approach of making it an opt-out system instead of opt-in was that if someone forgot to decline to share something, Beacon still went ahead and shared it with their friends. It took us too long after people started contacting us to change the product so that users had to explicitly approve what they wanted to share. Instead of acting quickly, we took too long to decide on the right solution. I’m not proud of the way we’ve handled this situation and I know we can do better.

Translation: But we lost our balance sitting on the big pile of money we got from Microsoft and that richer-than-rich Asian billionaire. To repeat: Lightweight=sneaky. Since most of our users are too busy popping each others zits or sending digital teddy bears or being cartoonified, we were shocked that they were actually paying attention to our efforts to milk their interests in, say, mountain biking or spelunking, as if they were cows and we were Old MacDonald. E-I-E-I-Oops.

Mark wrote: Facebook has succeeded so far in part because it gives people control over what and how they share information. This is what makes Facebook a good utility, and in order to be a good feature, Beacon also needs to do the same. People need to be able to explicitly choose what they share, and they need to be able to turn Beacon off completely if they don’t want to use it.

Translation: Facebook has succeeded so far, in part because people are simultaneously natural stalkers and shameless exhibitionists. So we thought they’d jump at the chance to tell all their friends they had bought, say, a year’s supply of Viagra or downloaded songs from Air Supply or ordered several pairs of Spanx.

Mark wrote: This has been the philosophy behind our recent changes. Last week we changed Beacon to be an opt-in system, and today we’re releasing a privacy control to turn off Beacon completely. You can find it here. If you select that you don’t want to share some Beacon actions or if you turn off Beacon, then Facebook won’t store those actions even when partners send them to Facebook.

Translation: Philosophy? All those Harvard philosophy majors now work for me in customer service. Opt-in, opt-out. If we say it fast over and over again, users will hopefully get really dazed and confused and just lay down and accept their ultimate fate as target practice for marketers. More to the point, I just said we will still receive information on all your purchases and I hope you did not notice that. Opt-in-opt-out-opt-in-opt-out-opt-in-opt-out. Are you getting sleepy yet?

Mark wrote: On behalf of everyone working at Facebook, I want to thank you for your feedback on Beacon over the past several weeks and hope that this new privacy control addresses any remaining issues we’ve heard about from you.

Translation: And we have made it extra special confusing to change your Beacon settings, because of all the whining from you teeny brains, which is really annoying to us big brains here at Facebook. To get back at you, we’re hard at work thinking up all sorts of new privacy violations you’ll never be able to understand!

Mark wrote: Thanks for taking the time to read this.

Translation: You may return to your regularly scheduled SuperPoking.

Mark wrote: Mark

Translation: Beacon fiasco aside, I’m still the CEO b#*#*, no matter how many times Swisher mocks my flip-flops.

While Facebook execs have pooh-poohed all the noise, including legal action in Boston taken by photogenic twins named Winklevoss–mostly calling it sour grapes on the part of failed competitors–the collection of stories about founder Mark Zuckerberg’s behavior as a fledgling entrepreneur will surely raise some eyebrows, if only for the manner in which he defends himself in various statements he has made.

Which can pretty much be summed up as: Tough luck!

Here’s a choice selection from Zuckerberg’s letter to Harvard’s Administration Board, the college’s disciplinary committee that first looked into his tussle over work he did–or, more precisely, did not do–for the Winklevosses’ ConnectU service:

I try not to get involved with other students’ ventures, since they are generally too time-consuming and don’t provide me with enough room to be creative and do my own thing. I do, however, make an effort to use my skills to help out those who are trying to develop their own ideas for Websites… Perhaps there was some confusion, and I can see why they might be upset that I released a successful Website, while theirs was still unfinished, but I definitely didn’t promise them anything… Frankly, I’m kind of appalled that they’re threatening me after the work I’ve done for them free of charge, but after dealing with a bunch of other groups with deep pockets and good legal connections including companies like Microsoft, I can’t say I’m surprised. I try to shrug it off as a minor annoyance that whenever I do something successful, every capitalist out there wants a piece of the action.”

As the legal battle works its way through the system, mostly related to the question of whether Zuckerberg illegally stole the basic idea for Facebook, the one carry-away from the article is still astonishing–and also a little disturbing: Just how many enemies he has collected at such a young age.

Sure, it seems a bit, I don’t know, icky for Zuckerberg to have programmed for ConnectU and then to have started his own social network. But I am with the judge who ruled yesterday in a hearing for a ConnectU lawsuit against Zuckerberg that there needed to be more evidence that the young entrepreneur had actually stolen its code and ideas.

“Claims must have a factual basis,” said Massachusetts Federal Judge Douglas Woodlock, in asking for a revised complaint with more meat on it beyond: Zuckerberg stole our marbles!

ConnectU’s photogenic but simply ridiculous founders Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss–no, I am not making the twin brothers’ name up–and also Divya Narendra have been attacking Zuckerberg and other early Facebook employees for years. And their press-conference grandstanding after the hearing earlier this week makes them seem even more silly.

And saying they needed to hold a press circus to respond to the spate of media inquiries, because the Winklevoss brothers needed to concentrate on their rowing aims to get to the Olympics (here one truth–they seem to be very good rowers), sent the whole affair straight to goofyville.

My take, given that ConnectU has about 100,000 users and Facebook 30 million, is that the Winklevosses should go for the gold in the Olympics and stop trying to shake down Zuckerberg for some.