If Friendster had one card left to play, they just sold it to Facebook. According to VentureBeat’s Owen Thomas’ exclusive, besides being the undisputed king of the social networks by the numbers, they now (more or less) own the rights to shut every other social network down, should they so choose. Facebook has purchased 18 patents from Friendster. The purchase price is a cool $40 million reports GigaOM.
But why, you might ask? Look at it this way; the current owner of the original, albeit faded social network Friendster, MOL Global shelled out $39.5 million to buy the company. In addition to a 100% ROI, the company also just scored an extra 500k in bonus cash. Adding to the pats on the back in Malaysia is less than a month old deal signed between MOL Global and Facebook, bringing Facebook Credits to retail stores across South East Asia. Can you say double dipping? The question remains…instead of buying the patents, why didn’t Facebook simply buy the whole kit and kaboodle?
Ok, perhaps not galactic domination (I’ve clearly been spending too much time with StarCraft II), but pretty darn close. As noted above, these patents were the one missing piece to the social networking trifecta. The have the numbers. They have the revenue. And now, they have the legal. Perhaps galactic domination isn’t that far off.
The patents du jour include (via VentureBeat):
“system and method for managing an online social network,” “feeding updates to landing pages of users of an online social network from external sources,” and a “system, method and apparatus for connecting users in an online computer system based on their relationships within social networks,” among others.
While there are a number of factors driving the decision, Ning spotlights misuse of it’s services, mainly spam and pr0n, as the primary factor. What this means to current Ning users, all 2.3 million of them, is that they’ll either have to cough up a fee, or move their social network elsewhere. How much? Well, that depends on how much of Ning’s attention each user wants. The highest figure seeing the light of day is $100/month, the lowest $5. Based on a tiered strategy, users that lay out anywhere between $10 and $100/month will have faster access to Ning’s support staff. $5/month will grab you a custom domain name, while $10/month will nab some extra storage and bandwidth. Moving up the monetary scale, $25 will remove Ning’s advertising (with the option to insert their own). For the same fee, users can also remove Ning’s promotional messages encouraging others to create their own social network(s).
There’s a couple of things going on here that have lead to Bebo’s epic fail. First and foremost, AOL executives obviously have their collective heads up their ass, as they clearly weren’t able to learn a thing from News Corp’s purchase of MySpace.com. AOL shelled out a massive $850 million to Joanna Shields of Bebo in 2008, hoping to corner the marketing on UK teen girls.
Only about a month and a half after Open Feint’s announcement of their 
Little World Gifts will soon be adding three WWF branded items to it’s inventory. A virtual replica of the WWF’s ‘iconic’ panda logo will take a seat as a virtual collectable box, as well as a ‘wooden tiger toy’ and an animated Adelie penguin. These virtual gifts are slated to run between $3.99 and $4.99, and may be purchased using Apple’s microtransaction mechanism. Little World Gifts reports that 36 percent of the revenue generated will go directly to the WWF.
This kind of virtual gifting very well may have tremendous potential. Instead of picking up a handful of postcards with images shot years ago, a visitor to Vienna, for example, might be able to pick up a virtual Riesenrad, or a Tour Eiffel in Paris. They could then keep this virtual souvenir, or send it as a gift (a “Wish You Were Here”, if you will) to a friend or family member back stateside.
The News Feed patent now shores up Facebook’s main content delivery mechanism to be free from copycats. In the official 
To speed up the process and get in the game, Ubisoft recently 
Over the past 16 months, Facebook’s user population has tripled and grown to more than 350 million users. Adding Sandberg to the Disney board as a director would give Uncle Walt direct access to a highly coveted access. Not to mention, this appointment would facilitate an unprecedented level of cross platform promotion and integration between the worlds largest social network and one of the worlds largest entertainment giants.
Disney spokesman Jonathan Friedland comments, “She knows a lot about a lot of the areas of new media and technology growth that we are interested in, so it makes a lot of sense for us to have her.”
