Friendster Inc. recently won a social networking patent and now a new Wall Street Journalarticle says Friendster execs are evaluating what to do with it.
Now, company executives are weighing their options, including whether to sue rivals. "We want to protect our intellectual property," says Kent Lindstrom, Friendster's president. "We're evaluating what we should do."
Patent controversies have become a familiar hazard on the Web as companies seek protection for emulating real-world concepts in virtual environments. For Friendster, patents could be an important new asset as it tries to reinvent itself. Many Web users have ditched it in favor of trendier rivals like Facebook Inc. and News Corp.'s MySpace. In June, the number of monthly U.S. visitors at MySpace tripled from a year earlier to 45.8 million, and visitors at Facebook doubled to 7.9 million, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, which tracks Web traffic. The number of visitors to Friendster is still under one million.
The WSJ article also shows a graph with soaring traffic growth for MySpace, strong growth for Facebook and a flat line for Friendster. (via Eat the Press)
