Friendster was granted a couple patents on March 6th.
- System, method and apparatus for connecting users in an online computer system based on their relationships within social networks
- Method of inducing content uploads in a social network
I’ve just begun to read them, but the first sentence was enough to tell me that they just don’t get where the internet is headed:
In a computer system including a server computer and a database of registered users that stores for each registered user, a user ID of the registered user and a set of user IDs of registered users who are directly connected to the registered user, a method for connecting a first registered user to a second registered user through one or more other registered users, the method comprising the steps of: setting a maximum degree of separation (Nmax) of at least two that is allowed for connecting any two registered users, wherein two registered users who are directly connected are deemed to be separated by one degree of separation and two registered users…
Call me crazy, but it would seem that they only care about “registered users”…
Do they really think that in the future there will be one social networking site?
Imagine if Google had decided they would only count the links between “registered pages”, or “pages within our network”. It’s so clear that people will (and do) have multiple presences on the web, and be part of multiple networks. People are already implicitly working on these problems by special forms of linking, which I wrote about last week.
So there’s that.
There’s also the fact that many of the systems they describe, e.g. “reveal the series of social relationships connecting any two individuals within a social network” already existed years ago in other systems. Hello LinkedIn, and even my master’s thesis Outfoxed.
Also, the patents were filed in August of 2006. Much of what they seem to be claiming is covered by the patent I filed in June of 2005, and without the restriction to “registered users”.
Now off for a deeper reading of them…