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The CEO of Friendthem.com has threatened to sue Facebook less than 24 hours after the first reports surfaced that the social network was testing an app that allowed people to connect with users who were physically near them.

Charles Sankowich claimed in an email sent to media outlets that he first approached Facebook with the idea in February, only to learn on Sunday that the company had quietly launched and was testing an app called Find Friends Nearby that allowed people to locate other users and connect with them using a smartphone’s GPS signal.

Facebook engineer Ryan Patterson maintains that he developed the app during a hackathon.

ReadWriteWeb has asked Facebook for comment and will update this post when we hear back from the company.

“Even their language is similar to what has been on our website for years now,” said Sankowich, who claimed to have pioneered his app two years ago. He is consulting with attorneys about possible legal action. “One would think Facebook would have learned to play fair after being through the mud previously with legal difficulties, but now they are doing it again.”

The introduction of Friendshake was hailed in reports on Sunday as a step forward in the company’s efforts to improve its mobile offerings. The company also appeared to make a pre-emptive move against privacy complaints by making the feature an opt-in service.

Twitter was blocked in Pakistan for much of Sunday because it would not remove tweets that were considered “offensive to Islam.” The tweets were encouraging the Draw Muhammad Day (#DrawMuhammadDay) competition, which prompted users to post images of Islam’s Prophet Muhammad to Facebook. Even though some of the images posted were favorable, many Muslims regard any depictions of the prophet as blasphemous.    

There were conflicting reports of what was blocked and when. Despite the outages, Pakistan’s Minister of Interior, Rehman Malik, tweeted that Twitter and Facebook were not going to be blocked in the country, and asked citizens to “please ignore the rumors.

Twitter spokesman Gabriel Stricker said Twitter had not taken down tweets or made changes before Pakistan stopped blocking the site.

The ministry restored access to Twitter on Sunday evening.

Earlier this year, Twitter announced that it would be “blocking certain tweets in certain countries,” yet it did not go into explicit detail about what types of tweets it was referring to.

Pakistan went ahead and banned many curse words from texts in November 2011. Many of the words appear to be made up.

Flag image via Shutterstock.

There has been a lot of noise in tech circles about the upset Tim Tebow and the Denver Broncos pulled off over the Pittsburgh Steelers Sunday night. Tebow’s 80-yard pass on the first play of overtime ended up generating 9,420 tweets per second — the most ever for a sporting event and the third most of all-time.

People tend to get excited every time one of these records fall – already in 2012, the second and third most tweeted about events of all time have been recorded (the start of the New Year in Japan weighed in at 16,127 tweets per second and crashed Twitter’s servers). But as I watch stories about each record falling, I can hear the words of my very first editor at the very first newspaper I worked at.

“So what?”

Because that editor was the kind of guy who didn’t like to waste readers’ times with non-news stories. When someone told us something was a story, he questioned it. And the Twitter record stories, which happen every few months or even every few weeks, are worth questioning.

The oldest event on the Top 10 list was in May 2011 — Barcelona defeating Manchester United is still holding in at number nine. No Japanese Earthquake, no Arab Spring, and no death of Osama bin Laden. Even the death of Steve Jobs, now at number 10, is one big event away from falling off the top 10 list.

And here’s why: Twitter is still growing, and more people using Twitter means more people tweeting about the big (and not-so-big) events that tie us together. We all know this, yet we all seem to collectively forget that when we rush to read or cover the latest X-number of tweets per second event.

Last March, as the company marked its fifth anniversary, Twitter said it had about 100 million active users logging in each month. Twitter users were sending about a billion tweets per week; compare that to the the three years, two months and one day it took Twitter to record its first billion tweets.

At some point Twitter will hit a critical mass and its growth will level off. And the current marker of a once-in-a-lifetime event – the “I remember where I was when I first heard about…” factor may very well be replaced someday with the “I remember what I tweeted when I first heard about….”

Until then, however, these tweets-per-second records are going to continue be interesting side notes. But are they really worth the more than 5,000 news stories and blog posts that have been written about Tebow’s record-breaking performance since Sunday night?

Photo by Jeffrey Beall.