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January 10, 2008

 FindMeOn, The HUGE Posting: Intellectual Property, Open Networks & Social Network Portability , Big Tech vs. The Little Guy , When The Little Guy Fights Back  

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Intro


FindMeOn has received press over the past week covering some Intellectual Property issues - both in regards to trademark law with our OpenSN ( Open Social Network ) product and speculation over strategies over our patent portfolio.

While many people have been cheering on the little guy, friends have forwarded me some comments from online journals where posters were less-than-favorable towards FindMeOn and our claims. I usually just ignore random ramblings on the internet - but a good friend reminded me that not everyone knows the whole story about FindMeOn: who we are, what we've been doing for the past few years - and most importantly, the backstory behind why we're now pursuing an aggressive Intellectual Property strategy.

I wanted to take a moment and address all these issues - because there's always a bit more to a story than just what people read in the press.



Origins - Quick Recap

FindMeOn started in Late 2005. It was originally the identity component of a PR tool I was working on called RoadSound.com. RoadSound let musicians, labels & venues collaborate on their news, release info, and tour dates... then sync that information onto their websites and social network profiles... and really just get up-to-date accurate and verified information into the hands of their fans. The system was a little too early for the market - everyone was still super-excited about MySpace and very much single-track-minded with the concept of there only being one social network, ever... so RoadSound was temporarily shelved to focus on what people liked the best - the notions of portability in content & relationships, and linking their websites together.

We spent the first few months of 2006 focusing on research surrounding social network portability: where the pain was, what needed to happen to alleviate it, and how could we address this without creating new problems.

Back then, portability wasn't a common or popular thought. In fact, it wasn't a thought at all. This is a full year before phrases "Social Graph" , "Open Networks" or even "Facebook API" even existed. The Social Networks themselves were very much walled gardens at the time - and people literally laughed in disbelief when we said change was on the horizon. In terms of market competition: the market didn't even exist - no one was crazy enough to risk venturing into this area.

We started listing the different requirements we would need to enable portability. Some things were apparent right from the start:
- We needed to push this as much towards open standards as possible. Portability means openness, not proprietary.
- User privacy needed to be a big issue. With too much portability, and by linking all of these sites together, we weren't just making it easier for people to push their identities, content and relations around -- we were making it easier for the aggregate of their information to be exploited.

A huge problem we encountered was that people who were working on open and commercial systems for login style identity projects were coming from the school of thought where you want to live your life openly. These developers and advocates made blogs, journals, and profile systems where people share every little detail about themselves. The products are great, and neat - if you're that kind of person , but not everyone wants everything connected.

Speaking for myself - I don't want my Executive-Level business contacts on LinkedIn being able to easily access my MySpace profile and photos. Like everyone else I have... lets call them different... personalities on each network. I compartmentalize my activities on these networks for a reason - I believe in isolation.

There is an amazing potential for exploiting Social Network Profiles to threaten a person's life and livelihood. Far too many stories have been in the press about people getting fired because of their MySpace or Facebook activity. Most people are getting smart enough not to share too-much information on a given network- but they're not smart about managing the linkage of these sites -- especially when 'experts' are advocating irresponsible technologies. If you go to someone's MySpace page and get their name & hometown, then you look at their genealogy site - and you have their mother's maiden name and father's middle name, you look at their dog profile site - and it mentions their first pet's name , their LinkedIn has employment history... and you see their flickr page - which it has an exterior shot of their house in high-res where you can see the number & street. By linking a few sites together, we now have all of the challenge answers to default questions the banking & credit industry uses. This does sound like an extreme case - but this is the kind of and quality of information that people are publicly sharing right now. Privacy is important.


Starting Up

When you embark on a startup you base it on a thesis , something like: "There is value/opportunity in ____ " , "The market is likely to shift to ______". In 2005 I came up with our core theses:
-Social networks and their usage are proliferating - there will be a need & opportunity to integrate them.
-People are not making privacy an issue right now, but market activity shows direction in that for the future.
-Social network advertising performance is most-likely the result of bad optimization strategies. The aggregate of information on multiple networks is a promising solution to this problem.

At the time I formulated these notions - and really until just about 6 months ago - people only cared about MySpace and Facebook, with a tiny bit of LinkedIn. Niche-networks and 'application' style networks/sites were largely irrelevant to common users. Investors ( Angels & VCs ) didn't believe anything was viable unless it was 100% compatible with the Top-Tier networks - walking into a room and saying that you want to federate identity & content streams between small/fledgling networks, and push them onto the big networks was met with disdain. And laughter. Today that's the hot new topic.

We also pushed privacy - noting that you don't necessarily place the same value on your MySpace and LinkedIn friends, and you might want to both insulate them from one another, and insulate the information they see about you on each network. Again, people laughed and called it unnecessary... and now that is the norm.

Advertising on Social Networks has been a huge joke too. CPM buys on blogs and content sites can easily fetch $10 - $30 ; social network performance is miserable.
In May 2006, MySpace was averaging 10c a CPM ( to their blame too - their clickrate was likely influenced by so many intermediary ad-filled pages on simple actions ). Around the same time, Facebook was claiming $4 CPMs based on their interior targeting engines. You can find all those numbers easily on yahoo. Current numbers are a little tricky - everyone is guarding their averages and performance. I've personally seen Facebook AdBuys as low as .64c , and I've heard reliable stories of them costing $12. I also know of people spending $1.50 per CPM on MySpace's system. In any event, Social Network CPMs are abysmal. Walking into a room and saying "I have the solution" is not easy to meet without a lot of skepticism. Today there are a few dozen companies working on optimizing Social Network Advertising - most started their endeavors within the past 6-10 months.

The context that I'm laying out right now is a simple backstory - we made a couple of predictions in 2005/2006 when we developed & patented the system. Most startups fail because they were wrong on a thesis or two - we were right on every assumption, we just needed to wait the market out. In the words of a VC I recently spoke with: "It looks like you were early and
right on a lot of the key questions." In the words of another: "Wow, you were way ahead of the curve".



Being Different

When FindMeOn finally launched after months of development, the only other website addressing internet identity was ClaimID (which allows people to centralize their content & identities onto a single web resource). We thought ClaimID had an awesome idea - but not without its own drawbacks and limits regarding personal privacy. A group in a related arena was a neat startup called Spokeo - which offers an interface to access content feeds from different social networks. There were systems like Microsoft Passports and SXIP that were focused on identity from an interactive (login/authentication) perspective - but nothing that addressed the Social Networking sector in terms of relations or content.

As a quick note: both ClaimID and Spokeo (very much like FindMeOn) make amazing products that are wholly original and have unfortunately been the model for countless derivatives. If you ever need services like their offerings , I *highly* recommend using both systems above their competitors. Their teams are powered by the talent that was first to see & address the needs and values in their markets, and the experience of teams that have been developing marketing products years ahead of the competition.

A few months after we launched, identity-based websites were the hot new startup - and the market started to overcrowd. An entire crop of firms would tout "meta networks", but really just created a new private network where they imported content from other websites to jump-start their own, then invited all your friends to join - it wasn't creating a meta-layer, it was creating a new walled garden with yet-another-identity. Increasingly, startups took to model themselves after ClaimID or Spokeo, and started to run into trouble: most users didn't want/care about those services, and they were annoying networks by stealing eyes ( pageviews == ad impressions == only revenue stream ). FindMeOn was fundamentally different ( we think ), because the system was designed as an overlay for linkage. We wanted to over everything we could in the widget, without annoying networks , and create the linkage between a user's websites - not ours. We didn't want to pull people onto a new social network, or access existing ones through a management interface we built - we just wanted to help people link and manage their own, porting content and friendships between them all. We were about the user - not ourselves - and sought to be network positive/friendly , not antagonistic. People kept using the term "aggregator" - and we'd yell. We weren't an aggregator, we were a syndicator and a platform . We didn't lie to people and say "We integrate all your networks [by getting your friends on existing networks to join ours]" - we were trying to make using existing networks more portable.



What FindMeOn Released

Ultimately, we ended up having to release and advocate our own open standards, because of a disagreement with the approach/values the Open Source groups prized first.
- A lot of people were pushing for a universal identifier approach to identity. People are now starting to realize this causes significant privacy issues, and is an awful approach.
- Standards Groups were focused on the academic approaches to portability - making new profiles map into antiquated formats.

So we came up with two standards to handle two tasks.

findmeon - node standard for open identity

A way to create highly secure and publicly verifiable 'webrings' of personal sites and information; merges ideas from cryptographic document signing standards with Web2.0 discovery standards embed techniques to ensure anonymity.

OpenSN ( Open Social Network )

We researched several hundred 'profile' oriented websites and applications, and started standardizing profiles to a common format; - OpenSN acts very much like a microformat, and can be output as machine readable text - more importantly, it was designed as an intermediary format... a babelfish or rosetta stone.. almost any existing social network profile can be rewritten in opensn, and once in opensn can be mapped to any other profile. this means that you can quickly encode the entirety of existing profiles into the format. it works for the internet today.

On our machines right now, OpenSN is handling the serialization and analysis of 50MM+ online profiles across 30 networks. It's compatible with 250+ profile formats right now -- but our spiders don't have network parsers for the rest.

After too-long in development, the "Find Me On" page on RoadSound became a full blown Platform for managing & syndicating identities, relations and content. It was private beta in August 2006, and public in October. The .org simultaneously went up with specifications and open code.

The system did a bunch of things in August/October that were new and pretty neat at the time
-you could enter your online profiles & build badges with per-network controls
-badges had all your info ,and could be placed on sites like myspace - or people could build their own through our API
-we had this thing called shouts , which was microblogging with per-network controls. kind of like twitter for the paranoid - we actually launched right when twitter did too, and people weren't quite their paranoid yet, so they chose the clearly more awesome-to-use product
-there was profile management, which let us control which networks or applications could see what portions of profiles you managed.
-there was site-metrics , which let us track how people visited your websites , and how they travelled from one of your profiles to another
-and finally , there was a contact management system - which let you enter/edit information in XFN , or import existing contacts from other services
-when contacts were imported, we didn't invite someone to join our network like other groups did - we just started to track the relationship as a network native & contextualized one

The reason why I'm going through all this is simple:
-for a small company - we pulled off a lot
-and we had that all running for the public in October of 06, and started the patent procedure in january 07
-we started having direct competition on some of these features in February of 07 - by companies that literally had 30x our assets
-towards the summer of 07, direct competition started across the board - by companies that had 100x our assets

If you're a small firm, competition like that almost means death.
We were first, we were right, and we were still ahead - but we couldn't compete on the consumer side - but to be honest, we really didn't want to - which is why we've stuck around. If you ask any industry analyst - not a biased CEO or evangelical pundit - but someone who looks at this sector for investment they'll tell you the same thing I'm about to say: consumers aren't ready for an identity product yet, and won't be for another 2 years.

Instead of competing against better financed people in a market that didn't exist - we focused on institutional applications - working with brands and non-profits to better manage their supporters. We remained eager to get back to the consumer side - and once the market would be ready, we had the platform designed and the patents filed.


Intellectual Property Claims

The FindMeOn system was designed as a switchboard - connecting different websites & identities together , and allowing configurable user filters: "Let Facebook see MySpace", "LinkedIn can know my employment history, Friendster and these messageboards can not", "These messages/postings can be shown on Bebo and Last.fm , don't show them to Flickr". We also imported & tracked online friendships in network-native formats, and correlated them together based on privacy controls.

FindMeOn was the first consumer website to pioneer :
- Platform based SNS identity & content customization/switchboard services through Widgets & API
- Privacy-Oriented identity services
- SNS Contact-import, management, and cross-site mapping services

We had these services built and available for use by the general public in mid-2006. We ended up being in beta during the same time, and launched publicly the same day as Twitter - they had pretty microblogging + sms ; we had boxy microblogging with per-network controls. Obviously they got a lot more coverage and users than us - they deserved it. They had a slick consumer product designed for "The Now" - we had prototype systems that even large corps would have trouble advocating versions of a full year later.

In January 2007 we filed our first patent applications that cover the functionality of these products, and additional systems & methods relating to "People Search" functionality and the application of cross-site metadata to generate highly customized content & advertising. To the best of our knowledge and research, we were the first to develop, market, and seek US Patent protections on these products; and have seemingly done so before our major competitors in the consumer marketplace even entered the concept phase for their products.

Since our initial launch, FindMeOn has seen many companies launch competing services that offer technologies that overlap with claims in our pending patent applications, mostly with ones originally filed in a 30-JAN-2007 document ( 60887253 , "System and Method for Indexing , Correlating , Managing , Referencing and Syndicating Identities and Relationships Across Systems"). This is a partial listing of competing technologies that have launched after our products were in production and patent applications were filed with the USPTO.

- In February of 2007, Wink.com relaunched. Wink originally launched as a "people-enhanced" search engine [1] that was often compared to Digg, and started a restructure in November 2006 into people-search when their business plan encountered too many problems [2]. In February of of 2007, Wink started to compete directly with FindMeOn by launching a new widget + API platform that were visually and functionally similar to the FindMeOn system, however with a lack of the usage-tracking and privacy elements that FindMeOn offered [3]

- In July 2007, TechCrunch reported on an upcoming Plaxo.com development called the Pulse network [1]. According to a Plaxo blog posting by Pete Curley, the Pulse Product Manager: "The version of Pulse you see today is a culmination of about 2 months of work from conception to launch (written on top of the totally revamped Plaxo infrastructure, Plaxo 3.0 that we worked so hard on for the last year) - which means that the Pulse framework was concepted in June 2007 [2]. Plaxo and Pulse do a lot of things, but we believe some of those are things FindMeOn did first and sought patent protection on. Pulse integrates accounts and relationships across social networks, and adds a user-defined privacy layer on top of them. FindMeOn's public system in 2006 and pending patent claims cover the following: i. import profiles & relations from external social network accounts, ii. store relations in network native formats (keeps a network aspect to them), iii. allow users to expose accounts and account attributes to specific members or 'groups' of members, iv. associate multiple contact-methods of another individuals into a single individual.

- In August 2007, Brad Fitzpatrick of OpenID & LiveJournal announced a 'Social Networking Manifesto'. The system he described is substantially similar to the system FindMeOn had operational 12 months earlier. The second Brad's project became public knowledge, we reached out to him in hopes of constructively working together. Brad continually ignored us, moved over to Google, and public proof of us reaching out to him just kind of.. disappeared. We should have made this a huge press issue in Sept/Oct but were too busy with internal company stuff. I've included the info below , along with all the requisite links/proofs.

- In October 2007 Google announced their OpenSocial initiative. FindMeOn has no issue with the technology OpenSocial currently offers - however we've less-than-thrilled with the name Google has chosen. It has caused an unfortunate amount of confusion with our OpenSN (Open Social Network) product, and I really wish it wouldn't.
Many experts have been claiming that Google's OpenSocial initiative is an attempt to break the growing Facebook stronghold. Given Google's core revenue stream being deeply rooted in online advertising, and the data/analysis the OpenSocial initiative affords, we believe there is strong potential for overlap between future Google systems in this area and the content customization and advertising optimization system thats FindMeOn developed and has filed USPTO patent protections for.

We recently released a whitepaper detailing one aventue of a potential for overlap [1], which essentially comes from the use of an identity or other cross-network system like FindMeOn's to amplify social-network-profiles against one another in an effort to better create customized content.

To the best of our knowledge (via research on blogs & 'employer' info on LinkedIn and Facebook), Google's main hirings in Open Social & related endeavors occurred long after we filed for USPTO protection.

- In October 2007 it was leaked that at AdTech MySpace would release a HyperTargeting system based on Advanced user demographics , and Facebook was launching a SocialAds system to offer the demographic targeting of their internal profile based system to external websites. There is a potential for overlap between technologies in that these platforms and claims contained in our USPTO filings in January and August 2007. RevenueScience, BlueLithium, and AggregateKnowledge have been developing heavily in this area, so its really going to be a crapshoot in 3 years as to 'is there overlap?', 'who-did-what-first?', and 'who-is-doing-what-now?'.

- In October 2007 I started hearing from local startups that they were approached by a new midwest startup that had a pitch almost identical to our May Meetup presentation[1][2]. I thought people were crazy, because when I last saw their site in August, that company was pitching a near clone of Spokeo, with some wrappers for mainstream websites. When i looked on their corporate blog and in press coverage, they indeed were a Spokeo derivative during launch and their early career... but when the 'Social Network Manifesto' came out, they sought a new business model. In mid-September, the firm started to blog about a system very similar to ours.

Please note that these comments are in reference to pending patent claims. FindMeOn does not have any patent or protections currently awarded by the USPTO, and the development timelines of competitive products have been sourced from public blog postings and social network employment info. These other companies may have designed , built, and sought IP protection before FindMeOn -- and countless other companies may be actively developing & seeking IP protection in these realms as well. Claims may also be rejected by the USPTO on FindMeOn's applications for any number of grounds. However the timeline of facts strongly suggests that we were far ahead in concept, execution, and intellectual property protection filings and priority dates.

To clarify some points in terms of IP ad Social Network Portability systems - once awarded, we have no plans to enforce IP claims on the end-user data portability aspect of our technologies. What we will enforce rights on are the 'advanced' server side technologies: account and asset management/routing ; contact/relationship management, organization, and grouping ; corollary analytics tools & systems ; cross-site friend management, connection chaining , and search ; and a bunch other stuff not worth mentioning now. We're not claiming IP on porting your profile , relations, or content from one network to another -- but we will be protecting the privacy protocols we developed, the ability of the backend server to automatically resolve "Geoff on MySpace" with "Geoff on Facebook" without the user providing that resolution ( or external-networks being queried for the same email address as the identifier ), and being able to say "Show me friends within N degrees of separation across these networks that match this criteria".



The "Open Social Networks" Situation

* UPDATE * - 2008.03.19
Google/Livejournal's Brad Fitzpatrick and FindMeOn CEO Jonathan Vanasco were finally able to talk.
Mr. Fitzpatrick assured us that any failed responses to communicate were unintentional due to an overload of correspondence, and that the disappearing comment was due to an automated moderation system. Unfortunately it took 7 months for this conversation to happen - and with repeated attempts to connect not responded to, FindMeOn had to assume the worst.

The original text of this section appears below.

---

In August 2007, Marc Canter from PeopleAggregator/BroadbandMechanics suggested there was a "behind the scenes approach that Brad Fitzpatrick and David Recordan seem to be taking in discussing 'social network portability'" [1]. This was in reference to a rumor in Valleywag [2] about what became the upcoming Brad Fitzpatrick 'manfesto'.

Well Marc, I couldn't agree with you any more.

When Brad's Manifesto 1] was released in August 2007, I couldn't help but notice a large amount of similarity between his reasoning to what we had published on our website and advocated publicly for a year by then [2] and spoke about at NYC Tech Events [3]. There was a clear similarity & overlap between his 'groundbreaking' new ideas, and the systems & methods that we had operational for the general public for about a year, and had filed patent applications on months earlier. There a particularly strong similarity between his manifesto and what I had presented at the May NYC Web 2.0 Meetup [1][2] I was pretty *amazed* by this - with all the resistance we were hitting, I didn't think the market was going to move in this direction so fast... The market was clearly shifting now though - and much faster than I expected... with a much better response than I expected too.

We were obviously very excited by this, and saw a lot of overlap and potential for synergy between our efforts, so I reached out to Brad via email hoping to talk/collaborate. I didn't get a response.

Email can be weird, so I signed up for LiveJournal - to post Brad a message/comment on the 'official' manifesto thread saying that there was a lot of overlap between our efforts, and we should talk to push things forward. I didn't get a response.
Email can be weird, and he's a busy guy running LiveJournal, so I sent Brad another email from a different account, in case it was a mail issue. Again, I didn't get a response.

I started to sense a pattern.

I asked just-about every open source developer I knew if they knew Brad, and could broker an intro -- with the traction and coverage his manifesto was getting, and the increasing overlap, I really had to talk to him. Unfortunately, we travel in different Perl circles, and no one knew him. When an offer to make personal intro finally came through several weeks later, the situation had already escalated past where we had to start meeting with lawyers to discuss options.

Then Brad wound up at Google pushing for their version of Social Network Portability, and the comment on his LiveJournal - just kind of disappeared...

There are a lot of reasons why this could have happened - it could be from a user or computer accident, a server/migration hiccup, culled for his believed relevance to the topic at hand, deleted on purpose to be able to claim plausible deniability of our existence or attempts to reach him , or any other random reason. I don't really care why it disappeared , and won't speculate on the reasons or motivations. What does matter, and what I do care about, is that the public knows that FindMeOn and myself went above and beyond trying to contact him and work together on this - and our efforts were fruitless. I want it to be known that we're not "going after the big guys" - we've been trying to work with them since day one. Literally.

Just to clarify and put context on this: This is the same Brad Fitzpatrick who founded LiveJournal, and then left to become the icon of Google's Social Networking efforts and their Open Social initiative.

This is the URL to comments for Brad's Manifesto (search for findmeon to *not* find it):
http://brad.livejournal.com/2338553.html

This is the URL to the direct comment:
http://brad.livejournal.com/2338553.html?thread=14034425#t14034425

Unless the comment has been made magically visible already, you'll note that the in-stream comment does not appear, and that the direct url is blank.
The URL was live in August, and *I think* September/October. When I checked it on Friday to send to a reporter who asked about some Trademark & Patent issues, to show that we did try to work with them, it was dead -- and it remained dead on Saturday, Sunday and Monday. It appears in no recent Yahoo , MSN, or other search engine caches.

This is the text of the comment in question:


From: 2xlp
Date: 2007-08-18 12:34 pm (local)
Subject: Welcome to the club

Nice to see you joining in on this, Brad.

Its crazy to see how crowded this space is getting -- we've been working to address this exact problem on FindMeOn.com since early 2006. Back then, it was pretty much ClaimID and us. Now there are 30+ options?

Anyways, the main difference between our approach and yours is that we've been focusing on the idea of a "lens" of privacy at each network. We love OpenID, but are scared to death of it-- the problem we encountered was with the misuse of OpenID being an be-all solution. With everything resolves to the same endpoint, your work and social lives start to overlap -- especially when you don't want them to. Our solution was to use OpenID as a login mechanism... but use abstracted endpoints ( along with digital sigs for fallback verification ).

Simplest put -- I want to port my friends and profiles around, but I don't want VCs I'm talking with to see drunken photos of me at a Skeeball match.

With that in mind, we launched our system last August ( our 1 yr bday was 2 weeks ago! ) which would allow people to import friends and to cross-site relationship derivation -- but control visibility on a very granular level.

We've got a really lengthy FAQ section that often reads much like your manifesto. It was trimmed down last October, I'd be glad to send you some of the old evangelical copy for review.

When it got to the point of dealing with all the different profiles, we tried using a ton of existing standards... but after surveying 300+ proprietary and open profile formats, we just went with an intermediary that we call OpenSN. OpenSN just wraps every damn field we've run into, so we can quickly convert a myspace profile to OpenSN, then that OpenSN doc to anything else we support under the sun.

We released our identity system as an Open Standard in september at findmeon.org

And we released our profile format as an Open Standard in october - thats at OpenSN.org

If any of that interests you and you want to talk more, please get in touch -- http://findmeon.com/user/jvanasco

I think that's a pretty friendly tone for an outreach, especially one sandwiched between "We need to talk" emails.

As you can see - depending on my login status, the comment is either there or not.

Video:

Screenshots:


If Brad felt like he had to be quiet about this, and not talk because of Patent and IP issues - then he could have said so multiple times. We've had to turn down or put-a-hold on a few partnerships ourselves because of IP issues. We've *always* maintained that the correct way to handle that is to be upfront with people and say "We can't talk. I'd like to, but there is the potential for some IP issues, and we can't risk a technical conversation or overview right now." We didn't get a decline like that from Brad - we got silence. I don't think that response is respectable in any way. We tried to be nice, we tried to reach out, we tried to avoid problems before they started. Brad - and possibly Google - didn't feel the same way... thats too bad -- but we're not taking the blame for that, and we didn't create what is likely to be a big painful IP headache. We tried to avoid it -- literally on the first day.

We're not some crazed patent troll or people looking to abuse or game the system. We invested two years of our time and money to develop technologies in this arena - years before anyone else bothered - and mandated that there was utility , value and need for them when people said "no - that area is not worth it".

We've never been secretive about anything - last October we started approaching every single open standards group asking for inclusion. We've presented our stuff at technology events whenever we could. We even stood on standby to present the system at the bigger NYC Tech Meetup last April ( I was bumped by James from HotOrNot talking about his love for Facebook, which left me half mad and half complacent - he helped some good friends get their company off the ground a while back ). When this started getting all out of control, we started publishing all of our presentations [1] - we've been fully transparent on all these issues.

As the recap:
- Brad Fitzpatrick wrote his manifesto
- FindMeOn immediately read it and said "Lets Talk! We've been doing this for a year!" (3x)
- Brad ignored our existence
- Brad moved to Google and pushed on with his system, knowing we were out there & that there could be IP issues
- Public comments of us saying "Let's talk!" mysteriously vanish from LiveJournal ( which Brad founded )
- FindMeOn starts an aggressive IP strategy

We should have made a BIG PR mess of this in Sept/Oct/Nov - but we were busy with our own business, and my partners convinced me that this would be irrelevant. That very much changed when we got a good look at what is going on behind OpenSocial.

In an extreme, and ridiculous scenario, the person who is the now the icon of Social Network Portability at Google has known about us since before he entered the role, hasn't cared to return our outreaches, and is pushing away at his ( and Google's ) own agenda - which we believe encompasses claims in patents that we've filed.

So that is the situation. Just a few months ago we were the energetic guys reaching out to others and trying to work together - but being ignored. We're not doing that anymore. Now its time for other people to do the reach outs.



Conclusion

Why am I saying all of this now? In regards to our IP situation and current talks/negotiations with lawyers/IP Holding Groups, people are often very quick to say "Wait- you're looking to be the next NTP ?" and talk about how awful patents and trademarks are, and how uncool that all is. People say "You're becoming a troll, because you can't compete legitimately." Personally, I'm tired of hearing that.

From day one, we've been trying to avoid IP problems like this from ever happening. It's really upsetting - personally - to hear people suggest otherwise.

We're not coming out of nowhere and saying "Ha ha ha! we own this IP". We tried to avoid every issue that we could as they arose. Over the past year, we reached out to countless corporations trying to work with them - and not in a threatening "We have patents!" way , but with the dialog "We've been doing this for 2 years - before there was a market. Our technology & research will put you ahead. Our patent filings will ensure it." People weren't interested. We approached open source groups - "Hey, there's a lot of similarities -- lets talk" - they ignored us. We wrote too many scene-blogs and journalists saying "We enjoyed your coverage of ____, however you might not be aware that we released a nearly identical service X months ago". We didn't get the coverage. Is that a troll? Are we being evil? Patent Trolls enforce rights in opportunistic fashion - often on patents they never wanted to commercialize. We tried to commercialize - we built a product long before the market was ready , and when the market caught up -- derivative products were everywhere. In the meantime, we'd been speaking, advocating, releasing open source projects. Is that trollish too?

There are such things as patent trolls- they buy up Intellectual Property from a failed company, and never intend to commercialize it - they just want to litigate , license and extort. We're not that group. We're the little startup that the big-guys decided to compete against, and tried to push under. A few years ago, big-tech corps would purchase startups like crazy. Today, they have internal labs to compete against the startup sector , and use market forces to push competitors with better technology out of business.

Of course we can't compete on products right now. As a self-financed startup , we obviously don't have the resources to compete against billion-dollar companies for users - especially when the products and names are nearly identical. Try raising financing when you list our direct competitors - its not very easy. Is it illegitimate to use established Trademark and Patent law to ensure fair business practices? I'd like to think not.

Like a lot of other startups, we're a small company-- seeded by ourselves, our friends and our family. I quit my job to work on this fulltime in 2005, and haven't had income since... working 100+ hours a week and missing every holiday. No one involved with FindMeOn, aside from contractors, has ever drawn income from the venture - and we've had a handful of people working on this fulltime , plus lawyers, advisors, and multiple consultants for Legal, Technical, and Non-Profit relations. We have rent to pay, insurance to cover, food to buy. We have families, and one of us is expecting a child. Is it wrong to say "We did the a lot of the early work in several sectors and have been up-front about it all; Others have created derivative works either based on our technologies, or using systems & methods we pioneered. We will be legally entitled to a return on our investments through Patent rights - and we are going to pursue that."

People have been quick to comment "Patents are evil". I think they're good... actually, I'd say they're pretty great. Patent abuse is evil. Patents ensure that people who take a risk: spend time and money, toil with research & development... and invent something bold/new have the ability to compete with large and established firms. If we abolish patents, we might as well abolish the concept of entrepreneurship or innovation - the reward of protection is what mitigates the risk for individuals to take a chance and innovate something new. A lack of these protections just says "let the big companies make new products. screw the little guy - because large firms have free reign to clone small entrepreneurs, and the PR budgets to blast them out of the water". We're not talking about a technicality play -- as a small firm we had designed, built and filed patents on systems *extremely* similar to ( and in some sections identical to ) applications designed 6-18 months later by 'leading' companies and name-brand/recognized experts in these fields. They have fancy User Interfaces & Public Relations Budgets - we don't. We have working systems, the scope of our claims, a timeline advantage and the combination of our competitors intelligence and their consumer response -- which have made a great argument for us passing the dreaded new 'non-obviousness to a seasoned professional' test at the USPTO.

Critics have said "You don't have many users or traffic." We stopped working on consumer internet endeavors in Feb 2007 - there was too much competition in the arena, other groups had bigger budgets, and consumer activity was proving a prediction we had made - consumer Identity solutions are not going to viable until 2010, and networks aren't ready for identity portability. Analysts in the space agree. Consumers don't 'get it' yet, and they won't need it for a while, but eventually they will... and traction/development is all moving in the direction we claimed it would. With systems in production and patents filed, we started to focus on B2B applications: institutional services , platform integrations, and analytics.

Patent opponents often use the line "Patents strategies cost too much. Did you read that report where companies spend more on patent prosecution and litigation than they make". Sure - I read that report. I often reply "Did you read that report though , and not just skim the blogging about it ?" Because its pretty clear that the problem isn't in patents altogether, but mindless legal departments and MBAs who have no IP strategy other than 'patent everything'. You're supposed to patent what you need to strategically protect, not every thought you have. When FindMeOn launched, the system had about 16 original/inventive subsystems/daemons/tasks/etc - we applied for patent protections on 5 of them.

From Day One, FindMeOn hasn't said "Don't Be Evil"; we've said "Let's Be Good". We pushed privacy and responsibility when people were careless with information sharing. We held back commercial site developments to work on OpenSource and OpenStandards projects, and like countless others have continually released our custom modules & internal patches to open source projects. Until Patents & Trademarks became an issue, and we had to suspend active development, we were working with some of the most amazing non-profit causes in the country to develop & gift custom supporter management & networking products for them. Our management team's experience is in non-profits, progressive media, and green technology. We didn't set out to sell cigarettes to kids, or create new diversions to a bland workday - we wanted to fundamentally change the way people interact with one another - to empower the groups that are actively helping make the world. When the market drastically shifted this Fall, investors felt uneasy about our competing against companies with billions of dollars in the bank ( and rightfully so ). They're particularly scared of the impact that backing a little group with IP claims can have on negotiations across their other holdings and investments. Our lawyers have been the same way - they all say "You're in the right... but we can't represent you on this matter - we can't go file ___ that opposes the interests of ___, ___, or ___ ; we can't handle a c&d/litigation issue because it could jeopardize our working relations with ____ ; we can't handle financing/etc because of ____. We're now up to 6 law firms and still growing... constantly having to find new counsel for certain tasks. Do you have any idea how insane it is to be working with 6 law firms at once? We should only have 1!

With all that being said... FindMeOn is unfortunately likely to become an entity focused on IP litigation and licensing. We're trying hard to avoid that, and would love to - but this isn't a decision that we're making of our own choice. We would have sold for pennies to any of the major corps we tried to work with months ago, but now competitors have developed the market for our technologies and pending patents. We get much better treatment from IP Groups than corporations or investors. Would I like to still have a company? Yes. Are there projects & systems that I really want us to build? Of course. But we're now in the situation where there is far too much competition for the startup growth we want, we have the earliest IP claims in this area, and we are 100% convinced that these pending claims will clear. If the consumer market keeps following the current patterns, and competitors start building the applications and functions we expect them to, the revenue potential of our patent portfolio alone is nothing short of substantial.

We're shifting gears and doing what we should have been doing from the start - instead of running around America as the meager startup begging "We'd like to work with you... please..." we're doing a complete 180. Our new message is simple and clear: "This is FindMeOn, these are our IP assets, and you should be working with us. We were early, we were right, and we weren't stupid - we filed patents on everything long before others even thought about working in this space. We know the market better than anyone else. You can either work with us now, or regret not making the right decision tomorrow." We're not making phonecalls anymore, we're taking them. We tried to avoid headaches for other people- now its their job to avoid headaches for us. The facts, filings, timeline, and the Intellectual Property Law are on our side. Most importantly, karma is on our side.

We're pushing for the new mantra in technology - don't fuck with the tiny startup. We're doing this for us, and for every other group we've met, who were muscled out or pushed under by the big guys who spend more on PR than they spend on operations.


With all that said: I went to one of the best undergrads in the world; most of my friends are now: doctors saving lives, lawyers defending the innocent, career non-profit workers, scientists searching for cures or how to get people to the moon, journalists reporting on international injustices... and sometimes we all forget there's a war going on right now. I ran into an old friend two years ago at our reunion. He was in-between two tours of Fallujah -- and spending his spare time in-between getting shot-at and carrying dead bodies as active blog/op-ed/ed-let writer on military reform from the inside. Even my Skeeball league friends are Post-Doc Immunology Researchers... All of these people are taking their education and skills to help leave the world just a little better than when they came into it. I know that I am -- and I'd like to think that the world is -- capable at-the-least of a little bit more than sending a virtual beer to a friend across social networks. Honestly - what are we all doing? This whole industry is increasingly petty & egoistical - the open source groups are functioning almost like the 'cool kids' lunch table in a cliched high school movie, the big-corps are simply ruthless and soulless, and even a lot of entrepreneurs will joke "Thats a great idea! Almost good enough for me to steal!" We're better than this. Aren't we? At least I am.


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Clarification: Launch Dates
FindMeOn.com launched as friends only in August 2006, invite-only in September 2006, and public/open registration in October 2006. In talking those dates often get confused, I'm sorry for that. Legally we're bound to the August 2006 date as 'first public disclosure', and often use that date; however its arrogant to talk about a 'secret' thing not open to the general public, so I often use October. The 'legal' and 'social' definitions of public are different - and I apologize for confusion I cause when jumping between terms. FindMeOn started as a component of another project I was working on in 2005 while doing business as SyndiClick- RoadSound.com. RoadSound handled internal workflow efficiency for the PR/Music industry, and would create portable syndicated content streams for Artists/Labels/Venues to instantly update their own websites and multiple-social-network-profiles. In early 2006, RoadSound was shelved and FindMeOn split out and expanded - FindMeOn had a more immediate market opportunity.

Posted by Jonathan at January 10, 2008 12:44 PM

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