Friendster nets another social networking patent

Some might argue that Friendster is the one that started it all, and if you look at the historical data, they might just be right.  Friendster was the first social networking platform, as we know them today, to really gain any traction and start connecting users.

Due to a series of mistakes and misplays, Friendster quickly found itself in a very distant backseat to then up and comers MySpace and Facebook.  However, don’t write Friendster off quite yet, as they’ve somehow managed a popularity campaign in Asia of all places.  However, Asia isn’t the only place seeing a lot of Friendster these days; so is the U.S. Patent Office.  Friendster has recently received their fourth patent, with another twelve plus applications currently in the works.

Their most recent patent concerns the “compatibility scoring of users in a social network”.  To put that in digestible English: a method for analyzing and determining just how similar social network users are to each other.

Let’s look at that again.

Friendster has been granted a patent on a ‘method’ used to judge the similarity of different users across a social network.  In other words, one of the main mechanisms that’s fundamental to finding and suggesting friends on a social network – Friendster now has a patent on it.  Whoa.

San Francisco based Friendster was granted these patents based on the fact that it was the first social networking site to gain traction in what is a now crowded marketplace.  A bit like the great land grab of the late 19th century (think Tom Cruise and Nichol Kidman – Far and Away), Friendster was first on the spot, and offered a number of features that are now standard operating equipment on social networking sites.  Friendster also currently holds patents on: how people are connected on a social network, the process of friends encouraging each other to upload content, and ways for users to manage social-network friendships.

So what does it all mean?  Sure they’ve technically got the patents, and technically all other social networking sites are in direct violation of these patents be using these technology without forking over a dime for it.  Theoretically, Friendster could step into a court of law and demand that MySpace and Facebook cough up a buck or two every time a user adds a friend.

So far, Friendster hasn’t bothered to flex the patent muscle, but they’re very well within their rights to do so.  Obviously, Friendster isn’t commenting about their future legal strategy.