CYBERSPACE — Websites touting their “social networking” powers may find things less than friendly now that the once-debt-ridden Friendster has won a patent for the technology.The impact on sites including Tribe.net, LinkedIn, Tagged, Bebo, MySpace, and LiveJournal are currently unknown, but the potential for legal wrangling is clear, particularly given Friendster’s troubled finances and less-than-stunning web popularity.
The company applied for the patent long before it fell into financial hard times and saw a public hungry for social connections fall out of love with its exceptionally mainstream approach to the subject. The patent was granted on June 27th and is exceptionally general, potentially covering any site that allows its members to connect to one another based on mutual personal connections.
Jonathan Abrams, who left the company, is named as the inventor of a “system, method, and apparatus for connecting users in an online computer system based on their relationships within social networks.”
This includes such basic elements as joining a social network, creating a profile, showing connections to other users, mapping those relationships and their degrees of connection or separation, and then connecting to others via mutual friends.
Although an unsuccessful social networking startup, Six Degrees of Separation, had received a patent for social networking technology in 2001 and was purchased by LinkedIn and Tribe.net in 2003, Friendster says that the U.S. Patent & Trademark examiner did not find the two patents in conflict with or overlapping one another and was cited within the Friendster patent.
Friendster’s primary patent claim has to do with the fact it requires a specific number of degrees of separation or connection in order to link users to one another. Some think the patent may have broader implications, however, extending to networks with no limits.
Current company president Kent Lindstrom told RedHerring.com that “It’s way too early to say” whether Friendster will begin pursuing licenses and litigation, although the company will “do what we can to protect our intellectual property.”
Attorney Bill Heinze admits that it’s possible the patent will be challenged within the patent system or the general courts, but also believes that it will not be an easy fight for any brave or foolish enough to dare. “Once the patent is issued,” he states, “there is a presumption of validity that follows with it.”
The news is more than reassuring for the San Francisco company, which surged to the internet’s attention as a networking pioneer before losing massive market share to hipper sites such as MySpace. Although it still claims up to 10 million users, many of them in Asia, it has lost most of its appeal for younger users. During 2004 and 2005 the site had technical problems, including slow load times, which motivated users to frequent more well-oiled online connection communities.
In desperation, the company offered itself for sale, inspired by the dollars earned by MySpace when it was bought by NewsCorp, which laid down $500 million. After three months on the selling block with no takers, the company was running on a financially dry well. A month later, investor Kleiner Perkins pulled Friendster out of debt and gave it the dollars it needed to rebuild itself. According to Lindstrom, it’s still not a money-maker, but it is alive. Income is earned not by member subscriptions but by U.S. advertisers and Asian SMS sales.
Further, Lindstrom says the newly streamlined and efficient team has moved from Mountain View, CA to San Francisco and has managed to improve its page-loading time from 40-seconds (when they even loaded) to two seconds. Its next step will be to do its best to romance American users back to its arms. Currently there are between one and two million domestic members. Part of that strategy includes making user profiles searchable and accessible without being logged onto the site by opening Friendster up to web crawlers. With these changes and improvements, it hopes to lure an older crowd seeking respite from sites often filled with teens and college students.
Although Lindstrom states that the companies financial situation ad nearly made its principals forget about the patent application, another 11 patents are still pending.
