HE last few months have brought a flurry of new Web sites devoted to social networking - that is, helping people use friends of friends to do such things as find better dates or more lucrative jobs. Now, as some industry insiders rush to protect their intellectual property in this arena, others are murmuring about an impending patent war that they expect to bring an industry shakeout.
Friendster, one of the better-known social networking sites and, at nine months, one of the oldest, has been joined by sites like Tickle, Zero Degrees, Spoke and Ryze. Spoke, a networking site for salespeople, has boasted that it has 15 pending patent applications, although the applications have not yet been published, and the company has not disclosed details.
Now come Tribe and LinkedIn, sites started last summer, whose owners paid $700,000 in September to YouthStream Media Networks for United States patent No. 6,175,831, also known as the "six degrees patent," which they consider the seminal social networking patent. It covers an online software platform that allows users to build relationship networks. Andrew Katz, a lawyer with Fox Rothschild who specializes in Internet intellectual property deals, said, "This is probably the pioneer patent out there." Mr. Katz, who said he had no financial interest in either Tribe or LinkedIn, added, "It should be taken very seriously by everybody in the industry because it is in the hands of people who have the means and the business acumen to enforce it properly."
Not everyone agrees. Antony Brydon, president of Visible Path, which creates networking software intended to help salespeople, said his company would probably not be affected by the six degrees patent because his business relied on algorithms that evaluate the quality of relationships, rather than simply building on the fact that two parties acknowledge that they have a working relationship.
"A lot of people treat relationships as binary - a relationship either exists or doesn't exist," Mr. Brydon said. "But social networks are more complicated than anyone could have ever predicted. It becomes very important to figure out which relationships are strong and which ones are very weak. It's important to find the 10 percent of relationships that can actually open deals and close transactions."
Rather than patenting algorithms that cover, for example, monitoring the rate at which members exchange e-mail messages, Visible Path is treating them as trade secrets. "We put those in a black box and don't give access to anyone," Mr. Brydon said. "We think that is a higher form of protection."
Patents, on the other hand, require that the inner workings of an invention be disclosed when the patent is published - the idea being that in exchange for an exclusive right to their invention, inventors must help propel progress by sharing their knowledge.
But Reid Hoffman, chief executive of LinkedIn, and Mark Pincus, chief executive of Tribe, considered the six degrees patent so valuable that they bid on it and won when YouthStream decided to auction it, saying it was not using it in its current business operations. They learned about it from Andrew Weinreich, a lawyer, who founded Sixdegrees.com in 1997 with a friend, Adam Seifer. YouthStream bought the company in 1998 for stock then worth $125 million.
Sixdegrees.com was a social networking company. Its name played on an idea by Stanley Milgram, a Harvard psychologist. More than 35 years ago, he suggested that all people on earth were connected by no more than six degrees of separation - that is, two people who did not know each other would find a link through no more than six people. His idea is not the subject of the patent; rather, it covers the software code for making it work in computer systems.
Mr. Weinreich said in a telephone interview that the six degrees business concept was ahead of its time, coming as it did a few years before digital cameras became ubiquitous. Thus, it could not offer what has become an integral part of the online dating game: photographs.
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