Richard O'Callaghan : Blogged

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.

Bebo aquisition offer

According to Michael Arrington on TechCrunch, Bebo has declined a hefty aquisition offer from BT to the tune of $550 million. First word that comes to mind? Insane.

However, for all the talk thats being going on lately about social networks not having a business case, or at least a revenue stream, things like this have to make you wonder: create a mass of users and get bought out for a crazy amount is a reality, revenue stream or not. (I'm not saying Bebo has no revenue stream, but from what I've seen, they aren't serving ad's on their system). I hate the thought of a business plan based on an end-goal of being bought out, but events like this make you wonder.

There has been alot of talking recently about YouTube and where its going, as people bloggers presume they have spiralling bandwidth costs for their video distribution, whilst having no advertising on the site. Are they simply swallowing the costs for the time being?

How soon is it going to be before we here of an aquisition offer on YouTube ??? As Bernie points out, they have 40 million users. Could we see another absurd aquisition offer coming down the line??

If offers like this are being made for social networks, one can only say, that in the current environment, there is a business case for such sites.

Update: Bebo actually do have Google ads on certain pages.