RED HERRING | Friendster Wins Patent
Thanks to Siggi for the link to this article. I’ve quoted the interesting bits. This patent applies to networks that do not allow you to connect to someone you don’t know (limited by a certain number of degrees). But since Friendster have recently “opened up Friendster to web crawlers, making users’ profiles searchable and accessible without being logged onto the site”, then through social network aggregators with no degree limits and object consolidation perhaps such a connection is still possible, circumventing sites covered by the patent. Also, let’s say a site only allows you to see someone’s friends but there are no facilities for browsing from one user to another at all. It’s still a social network site, but you just can’t create/view connections past one degree. Would this also be covered by the patent?
Friendster said Thursday that it has received a patent that covers online social networks, one the company had applied for long before its decline and recent recapitalization.
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.
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The Friendster patent’s main claim applies to networks that limit relationships to a certain number of degrees of separation—for example, you cannot connect to someone who doesn’t know someone who knows someone you know.
That is very likely to apply to networks like LinkedIn that function with such limits, said Mr. Heinze.
However, the patent might also have broader application, to networks without such limits. “Since [the patent says] you can define that maximum number of degrees as any number, that’s a pretty tough claim,” said Mr. Heinze.
LinkedIn and social networks Bebo, Tribe.net, and Tagged were not immediately available for comment.
I’ve also written social networking plugins for phpBB and vBulletin which in theory are covered by this patent (if the maximum number of degrees is everchanging but still theoretically limited by the maximum chain dynamically created through buddy lists). Does Friendster’s patent retroactively apply to my work?
I talked at our WWW2006 tutorial about how Web 2.0 is creating new connections between collaborative applications. One good example is the social resource aggregator developed by Dermod Moore: a hybrid that allows one to aggregate one’s favourite blogs or other content on a particular topic and then to annotate bookmarks to the most interesting content found.
Scuttle + Gregarius + Feedburner + Grazr = …
I hypothetically extended this idea a bit further with semantics, as a “semantic social collaborative resource aggregator”:
- Okay, it needs a better name, like scraggy or something?
- Social network members specify their favourite content sources
- You and your friends specify any topics of interest
- You specify friends whose topic lists you value
- Metadata aggregator collects content from sites you and friends like (which may be human tagged, or could be auto-tagged)
- Highlights content that may be of interest to you or your friends
- If nothing of interest is currently available, content sources may have semantically-related sources in other communities for secondary content acquisition and highlighting
- You bookmark and tag the interesting content, and share (or even republish using something like reBlog!
Last week, we received a letter from McCann Fitzgerald, solicitors for Mr. Tom Higgins, MD of Realm Communications Ltd. which owns Irish Psychics Live.
To paraphrase, this letter referred to a number of defamatory posts on the site, and that weblogs (sic.) such as boards.ie should not be censored but the defamatory material had to be removed from this thread. In addition, there was a request for boards.ie to publish a sincere apology to Tom Higgins and Realm Communications Ltd. for one month, with an archived copy in perpetuity.
We agreed to remove the content, on the basis that it was not in line with elements of our acceptible use policy (which all individuals agree to on signup): “All messages express the views of the author, and neither the owners of boards.ie, nor Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd. (developers of vBulletin) will be held responsible for the content of any message.” and “By agreeing to these rules, you warrant that you will not post any messages that are … otherwise violative of any laws.”
However, as a mere conduit, we saw no reason for boards.ie to publish an apology.
BlogTalk Reloaded : Main - Home browse
We were delighted to hear that our proposed paper on the SIOC Browser has been accepted for the BlogTalk Reloaded conference in Vienna this October. The abstract is given below:
SIOC Browser - Towards a Richer Blog Browsing Experience
Uldis Bojars, John G. Breslin and Alexandre Passant
Semantically Interlinked Online Communities (SIOC) http://rdfs.org/sioc/ is a framework for expressing information contained within weblogs and online community sites in a machine readable form. It consists of a SIOC ontology that defines the vocabulary used to express this information and SIOC data exporters that provide SIOC data from these sites.
Now that SIOC data export plugins are available for popular blogging and CMS platforms (e.g., Drupal, Wordpress, DotClear) we can use this information to provide users with better and more interesting services. This talk describes the SIOC browser http://rdfs.org/sioc/browser - a tool, currently in development, that allows to browse the information extracted from weblogs. It can be considered the first generation of consumers of SIOC data.
Two features that distinguish SIOC are: (1) that all the entries of a weblog are exported; and (2) that all this information is in a machine readable form. This allows to make queries over the information exported from a blog or set of blogs - such as retrieving last post from a user on a given topic, identifying “hot topics”, and so on.
The browser works in two modes - on-the-fly mode and crawler mode. The former displays the SIOC data received from a weblog (thus providing a uniform interface to all SIOC-enabled weblogs) while the later stores SIOC data in the RDF data store allowing to make more complicated queries via the use of SPARQL query language.
Since the information is published in SIOC - an open and public standard - the same information source (a weblog or a multi-user blog site) can be interpreted by many different users in a number of different ways. This enables to develop a whole kind of browsers similar to what happened with the emergence of RSS feed aggregators. The browser presented here is one of the first in this group.
I had some very interesting chats with Ron from BoardTracker when he visited me in Galway last week. You may remember I mentioned that we are now using BoardTracker to power boards.ie search…
Ron gave a talk to DERI researchers about BoardTracker, his views on the disorganised mess that is the Web, and also the forthcoming Boardscape project. Keep an eye on the latter as by all accounts it will be something very cool!
A quick round up of the latest things related to boards.ie and its subsite, adverts.ie:
- The Hosted top-level category at boards.ie has been restructured, moving from Public and Private forums to topics like Arts, Computers / Technology, Games, etc. (just like the top-level categories). So far this has met with very positive feedback.
- A new Private filter has been added to the main page, showing the latest posts from forums to which individual users have been granted access.
- Lots of new forums have been added including Prison Break, MyGrant.ie, Lego, Google Earth and Weddings / Marriage.
- The PDFs at adverts.ie are now generated daily, rather than on the fly, to reduce memory overheads (we were hitting the PHP memory limit for the main PDF which is over 30 pages).
- Adverts now have “tiny URLs” like adverts.ie/666 for quick access to each item.
- New category icons have been added for the adverts.ie sections.
- Lots more adverts.ie bugs have been either quashed or ignored!
The shareholders of boards.ie are also meeting this weekend in Galway to discuss future strategies for the company. I bullied them into having it here, having gone to Dublin for all the previous AGMs/EGMs
As mentioned previously, Stefan and I gave a tutorial entitled “Semantic Web 2.0: Creating Social Semantic Information Spaces” at WWW2006, the largest international annual web-related conference which was held in May 2006. I’ve been so busy since then that I haven’t had a chance to blog about it…
The overall aim of the tutorial was to discuss and present current approaches to realise the ideas of Vannevar Bush and Doug Engelbart on distributed collaboration infrastructures, which we termed “Social Semantic Information Spaces”. Topics included semantic blogging, semantic wikis, SIOC, SWSE prototypes and digital libraries.
The tutorial was booked out, with 35 registrants and attendees from companies such as Google and NTT. You can access the slides here.
…and I’ve a lot to say, so expect many blog posts from me over the next few minutes 
Things to talk about:
- Our WWW2006 tutorial, my much delayed report
- The latest from boards.ie and adverts.ie
- My meeting with Ron Kass from BoardTracker last week
- Our paper for BlogTalk Reloaded in Vienna
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