By ckeo on

Just curious about how this would affect Drupal installations with social networking features,
because that is what the goal of my own site: http://www.newfoundnews.com is to be.... eventually....

Anybody with thoughts or opinions ?

⋅ Categories: Drupal 4.7.x

Comments

iandickson’s picture

iandickson commented

Filed June 2003, which is very late in terms of prior art etc.

I was doing stuff from 2001, and emint was founded around then, not to mention SNA stuff at the likes of HP.

Friendster was the first BIG one but Ecademy was founded in 1998 and when I saw it 2002 I think - it was running in "friends" mode.

abaryudin’s picture

abaryudin commented

They will have hard time first getting the patent and if they are incredibly lucky, enforcing it.

--
http://www.baryudin.com

ckeo’s picture

ckeo commented

"The U.S. patent,
which was awarded June 27, is extremely general, and would seem to
cover the activities of many other sites, especially those like
LinkedIn that allow people to connect within a certain number of
degrees of separation.

The
new Friendster patent covers the basic steps involved in joining a
social network: entering a personal description and relationships to
other users, mapping relationships and degrees of separation, and
connecting to others through these friends."

Read more at:

http://www.redherring.com/Article.aspx?a=17498&hed=Friendster+Wins+Patent