For the MySpace generation, there are some common questions, such as: "What is an album?" "What were typewriters used for?" "What was Friendster?"
In another Internet era – that is, a few years ago – Friendster was the cool hang-out for the hip young crowd.
Of course, young people can be fickle. Now, the cool hangouts are MySpace and Facebook. In fact, MySpace is now the #1 Web site in the US – having bypassed mighty Yahoo! Looking at social-networking market share, MySpace commands about 80%.
However, Friendster is not giving up. Rather, it is doing what many tech dinosaurs do; yes, get patents. Recently, the company was granted a patent on, well, social networking systems.
Given the money at stake, it is almost guaranteed that Friendster will start filing lawsuits against the big players. True, such litigation is expensive and time-consuming. But, it does help with PR and may, over the next few years, result in a pay off. Look at what happened to RIMM, which paid over $600 million in a patent dispute over its Blackberry.
Yes, the concern about social networking is trying to find a way to monetize it. Maybe we now have the answer: lawsuits.
Closing Bell: Economic Catapult for Thanksgiving & Black Friday (WMT, TGT, GRMN, GOOG, MSFT)
Deere up on Q4 earnings performance
Reid Hoffman: LinkedIn will go public (at some point)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
7-12-2006 @ 1:20PM
Dave said...
Ah dunno, was Friendster ever "the place" for hanging out online? It was the first of its genre and I don't think it ever really took off for precisely that reason.
12-05-2006 @ 11:39AM
Pat Graham-Block said...
I don't understand what they patented. It's like someone trying to patent "standing around the coffee machine catching up on the weekend".
Who has the patent on that?
And from an internet aspect, yahoogroups have been used for social networking for way more years than Friendster has been around.
Pat