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October 12, 2006
Social Networking Patents Don't Make Sense 
I've been doing a lot of patent research lately-- for both RoadSound and FindMeOn, and have come to be simply amazed by the SixDegrees and Friendster Social Networking patents.
Reading them over and over again, I couldn't help but think they were exactly like something I had read about in the 90s.
I've got six words: PGP web of trust.
( I counted the letters PGP each as a word )
I'm not going to delve into an explanation of web-of-trust myself... there's a great simple explanation here:
http://www.rubin.ch/pgp/weboftrust.en.html
In essence, web-of-trust was a way of connecting people through PGP keys -- and finding your closest connection. AT&T even offered a PathServer application that automagically found the connections for you.
Q. And when did AT&T make this automagic tool available?
A. Mon Jul 29, 1996
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.security.pgp.resources/browse_frm/thread/c08ebf6f2fb11cb1/465d68f974c30434?lnk=st&q=AT%26T+PathServer&rnum=10#465d68f974c30434
If you do a find/replace on 'user id' and 'public key' on the friendster/6degree patents, you have a pretty good description of the PGP system. Try it.
Just think of PGP keys as extremely long user ids , and think of signing someone elses key for verification as accepting/defining the friendship. With that in mind, web-of-trust handled all of the friend-making/defining in the 6degrees patent (minus an email) , and all of the connection traversing and trust limiting of the Friendster patent.
I was knee deep in patent-research when I wasn't sure about the FindMeOn patentability ( the server , not the open standard )... there are some similar themed projects and prior art out there, but nothing close enough to make me worry. FindMeOn's server is pretty radical, as it merges a PGP style web-of-trust with social network spidering and account correlations. It's functionality doesn't read like anything else that has been made, and that makes me happy.
But I do know something that is VERY clear though now-- if you're worried about SN patents, add a trivial web-of-trust to your system modeled after the PGP system, and explicitly site the open standards as your model-- not their derivatives. And eventually, the Friendster/Six Degrees patents should be revoked – they're nothing new , just an old idea recycled into a nice package.
Posted by Jonathan at October 12, 2006 4:57 PM
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I should have added-- web of trust and the associated core concepts in the patents were around the PGP scene far before the AT&T Pathfinder. The pathfinder, however, created a 'closed' social network of the keys it knew about -- and offered a website where people could traverse their social network for trust levels.
Posted by: destructuring at October 18, 2006 6:15 PM
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