Welcome!
Online Dating Insider delivers cutting-edge insight and commentary on all aspects of the online dating industry. Topics include industry news, site reviews, emerging trends, analysis of dating site features, discussion about safety safety, finance and other issues important to the online dating market. Don't miss our Tools & Services directory, useful to anyone running dating or social networking sites. Subscribe to the RSS feed (you can subscribe via email as well). Your comments and suggestions for stories are welcomed.
Yahoo has filed a patent titled “Method and system for customizing views of information associated with a social network user.”
snip…
A method, apparatus, and system are directed towards managing a view of a social network user’s personal information based, in part, on user-defined criteria. The user-defined criteria may be applied towards a user’s relationship with each prospective viewer. The user-defined criteria may include degrees of separation between members of the social network, a relationship to the prospective viewer, as well as criteria based, in part, on activities, such as dating, employment, hobbies, and the like. The user-defined criteria may also be based on a group membership, a strength of a relationship, and the like. Such user-defined relationship criteria may then be mapped against various categories of information associated with social network user to provide customized views of the social networ
Markus sez:
Basically users can select types of users they do not wish to see in search results and then the system automatically filters on that in the future. So when your logged into the site you search based on a subset of the database according to what the user specified and not the whole site. I believe other sites started doing this but that was after April 26, 2004 so if yahoo wanted to enforce the patent once granted they would have to pay, i’ve been doing it for over 4 years so they couldn’t do much to me…..
Tip of the hat to anyone who can further decipher the rest of the claim, which made my head spin just scanning it.
Link to patent application.
[tags: Yahoo]
Category:Legal Tags: LegalBlog reactions
7 responses so far ↓
1
Fernando Ardenghi (Check me out!)
// Aug 17, 2005 at 4:39 pm
All knowledge-base companies always need
Intangible-assets
to put in the balance as part of company’s valuation
(Many investors / investment rules require it)
Regards,
Fernando Ardenghi
Buenos Aires
Argentina
ardenghifer@gmail.com
2
Edward Orysiek (Check me out!)
// Aug 18, 2005 at 2:18 am
Re: Markus’ comments
I don’t know much about patent law, but I believe that you cannot claim a patent on something that is already in public use.
3
Markus (Check me out!)
// Aug 18, 2005 at 3:48 am
This is the way it works in most countries, but in the united states someone got a patent recently for “a way of pushing someone on a swing set”. The us patent system is joke and you can get a patent on nearly anything.
4
James J. (Check me out!)
// Aug 18, 2005 at 4:43 am
This patent should not be granted because their is prior art (existing use before April 26, 2004), but as Markus explained, the patent office here in the United States will probably grant it anyway. However, if the patent is granted, and Yahoo actually tries to go after someone, the patent would probably be invalidated. But not after a lot of time and money was spent by the party being sued. Because of this I suspect that Yahoo will use this as a defensive patent, only using it as leverage in patent suits brought against them.
5
Fernando Ardenghi (Check me out!)
// Aug 20, 2005 at 9:53 pm
All knowledge-base companies always need
Intangible-assets
to put in the balance as part of company’s valuation
(Many investors / investment rules require it)
Regards,
Fernando Ardenghi
Buenos Aires
Argentina
ardenghifer@gmail.com
6
Jordan Ravka (Check me out!)
// Aug 22, 2005 at 12:57 am
Marcus, come on… tell us. How much actual revenue does your site bring in each month. Its just so hard to believe good money could be made simply by google ads.
As someone who runs a small site I need to know how i am doing compared to the free model.
7
Markus (Check me out!)
// Aug 22, 2005 at 11:34 am
You have a site and you are running google ads all over it, on top of that your charging people. You should know how much your making.