When Mark Zuckerburg sought funding from Boston venture capitalists to expand Facebook in 2004, the New England firms declined.  According to the Daily Business Review, they’ve been regretting their decision ever since.

Following their decision to ignore Facebook’s request to provide capital for the world’s most-popular social networking service, Boston venture capitalists sat idly by while Zuckerberg’s moved Facebook from his Harvard University dorm to Palo Alto, California.  Since that time, Boston has continued to lose its market share to Silicon Valley and New York in the past seven years.

“There was a little bit of shock that we missed it, as a community,” [Michael] Greeley, a board member of the National Venture Capital Association, said in an interview. Since then, Boston “really rallied around ‘how do you let these kids know that the state is open for business and a great place to start companies?’ Sort of a post-Facebook echo boom effect. Zuckerberg should never have left.”

In the wake of LinkedIn’s successful initial public offering, and in anticipation for Facebook going public in the foreseeable future, venture capitalists should keep their eyes peeled for the next new media opportunity before it leaves for more silicon-pastures.

A federal appeals court ruled Monday that former Harvard University schoolmates of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg can’t undo their settlement over creation of the social networking site, yahoo reports.

Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, potrayed in the Oscar-nominated film “The Social Network,” argued their settlement with Facebook was unfair because the company hid information from them during talks. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals disagreed.  In the case styled Facebook Inc v. ConnectU Inc., a three judge panel determined that the Winklevoss brothers were sophisticated negotiators aided by a team of lawyers, and therefore savvy enough to understand what they were agreeing to when they signed the agreement with Facebook in 2008. “At some point, litigation must come to an end,” Judge Kozinski wrote. “That point has now been reached.”

The deal called for a $20 million cash payment and a partial ownership of Facebook. The settlement is now worth more than $160 million because of Facebook’s increased valuation. An attorney for the brothers, Jerome Falk Jr., said on Monday his clients would seek a rehearing before a larger, “en banc” group of 9th Circuit judges – which could overturn the three judge panel’s decision.

Former Justice Department prosecutor and U.S. Senate candidate sued both Facebook and founder Mark Zuckerberg on Friday for over $1 billion after the social networking website allegedly failed to remove a page calling for a third intifada against Israel’s Jewish population swiftly enough, Tech Crunch reports.

[Larry] Klayman, who founded controversial law firm Judicial Watch as well as political advocacy group Freedom Watch, alleges that Zuckerberg and Facebook willfully kept a page calling for a third Palestinian intifada against Jews online to “further their revenues and the net worth” of the company. The page, which was removed on March 29 because, according to Facebook, it indeed made “direct calls for violence” in violation of its policies.

On the page, Palestinians were urged to take to the streets after Friday prayers on May 15, 2011, and commence an uprising in the vein of the first two popular intifadas. “Judgment Day will be brought upon us only once the Muslims have killed all of the Jews,” read the call. The page reportedly garnered more than 340,000 fans.