Saturday, July 8. 2006Patents Eat into Social Networking
Could this be the end of Orkut, LinkedIn, Hi5, and many other social networking sites, at least in the way they exist now? If a little used (at least in India) networking site called Friendster has its way, then that may just be true.
Friendster has recently been granted a patent (US Patent No. 7,069,308) that protects a very important feature of social networking. The main claim of the patent protects the following functionality: In a social networking site, people that are related to each other through others (friends of friends...etc.) and the relation is less than a threshold (for example, not more than 5 friends away), then they are allowed to connect to each other. This is accomplished for a pair of users by searching through users that lie within the threshold distance from one user. If the other user lies farther than this distance, the two are not connected. As would be apparent, this functionality is used extensively by such sites. Orkut shows a connection for any profile that you see (how you are connected, A > B > C), on the top of the page. Similarly, LinkedIn shows the path of your connection to any profile. The patent was filed on (and hence its coverage started on) June 16, 2003. Orkut launched in January 2004. However, here is something interesting that I found as a comment to a blog post covering the launch of LinkedIn. The comment is dated May 7, 2003. The idea of the site (LinkedIn) is specifically to disallow trolling for people outside your network. If they're not in your network (i.e., within four hops of you, I believe), then you can't be recommended to them, and so LinkedIn won't allow you even to see them. If that's what you're after, Ryze will do the trick. Look out Friendster! Even if Friendster's patent stands - it would be very difficult putting a monetary value on a feature of sites that are predominantly free. Disclaimer: All views expressed in this article are entirely of the author's and are not provided in any professional authority. The views should not be construed to be a legal opinion. Trackbacks
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But will Friendster have any patent protection in India? Considering that the Friendster's patents will be software patents?
What happens if the system used by Orkut is all kept in India?
...........
Theoretically, nothing!
But then, it would be very difficult for Orkut to maintain their servers across continents. Plus, delays of page loadings will be higher for their major target audience (the USA - check the Demographics section in the News page).
Lastly, I'm sure that Google would not want to be branded as an MP3search.ru that bypasses laws on patents and copyrights by going to an IP unaware country.
First thing that i observed while going through the patent was that the claims could be written in a much better way. There is lots of ambiguity in the claims.
Further, if we consider orkut and other social networking sites check this part of the first independent claim :
"searching for the user ID of the second registered user in the sets of user IDs that are stored for registered users who are less than Nmax degrees of separation away from the first registered user, and not in the sets of user IDs that are stored for registered users who are greater than or equal to Nmax degrees of separation away from the first registered user, until the user ID of the second registered user is found in one of the searched sets; "
This part act as a big limitation to the method claim. An architecture level limitation has be applied on the method by dividing the registered users in two sets.
Sigh!! Orkut is saved.
Hmmm. Interesting point. However, I think a better understanding of the specifications is required. Consider if 'sets of user IDs that are stored for registered users who are greater than or equal to Nmax degrees of separation away from the first registered user' are defined as a master database. Therefore, the system is implemented as one master database having all ids which is equivalent to the above, and one database per user that stores ids within Nmax degrees, which is equivalent to 'sets of user IDs that are stored for registered users who are less than Nmax degrees of separation away from the first registered user'. This is probably the easiest way to implement this functionality.However, I do agree that it could well be the restriction that saves Orkut and others.
Yeah, DS's point makes sense. and given the kind of popularity orkut has, i am sure google will be more than willing to pay some royalty to the friendster guys and keep it alive (if at all they manage to succesfully sue google!!)
Great blog you've got here, Rohan. Keep writing and introducing us to the technologies!
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