Who owns social networking?

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.