Friendster patents social networking!

I see Friendster has been granted a patent on social networking according to Techcrunch. Could this spell trouble for some of the big players like Bebo or MySpace??? Possibly I guess; what a mess that could be.

Marc Canter has a nice cartoon (from bLaugh) which illustrates the ill feeling this is already creating. I guess we'll have to wait and see what happens next; if they start looking for royalties from companies, that would cause quite a stir I'd imagine, a bit like the whole web 2.0 thingy a while back with O'Reilly Media. It will be interesting to see what (if any) effect this might have on the social networks scene.

Official text of Friendsters patent from the US patents office is here.