B. Mann Consulting

Via INSNA and Mark Surman (who is doing seriously cool things with the Shuttleworth Foundation around Open Everything), I was copied on a request to look at prior art around a Microsoft patent application:

Microsoft has a patent application posted on the Peer-to-Patent site for Recommending contacts in a social network.

We are soliciting your help and that of the communities you know in finding prior art that will help the Patent Office to examine this application and determine if it deserves a twenty-year grant of rights to prevent all others from making, using, or selling this invention (this includes any research and R&D that would touch upon the claims of the invention, if patented). Can you let people know about this opportunity? We invite them to submit:

1. prior art
2. to annotate the prior art submitted by others
3. to vote on the relevance of the public submissions, and
4. to suggest fruitful avenues for research for the USPTO when examining this application.

Peer-to-Patent is not just another blog, wiki or website. It is an "extension" of the government institution! Posted information will be forwarded directly to the United States Patent and Trademark Office and be used in the examination process.

Here's a bit more detail about the application and about Peer-to-Patent:

Recommending contacts in a social network

A method and system for recommending potential contacts to a target user is provided. A recommendation system identifies users who are related to the target user through no more than a maximum degree of separation. The recommendation system identifies the users by starting with the contacts of the target user and identifying users who are contacts of the target user's contacts, contacts of those contacts, and so on. The recommendation system then ranks the identified users, who are potential contacts for the target user, based on a likelihood that the target user will want to have a direct relationship with the identified users. The recommendation system then presents to the target user a ranking of the users who have not been filtered out.

Via IM from James and posting from bopuc, it seems that Flickr is patenting "interestingness".

What?!

Are you kidding me?!

How about we do the same thing...only call it "intriguingness". Perhaps "disgustedness" would be a better term.

Reading through the patent, it seems very specific to interestingness and Flickr's implementation. So, I would kind of figure...why bother patenting? I guess this is the lawyers at Yahoo getting hinky.