IanKelley - 9:01 pm on Feb 26, 2010 (gmt 0)

So it's really about about the alerts, where a is friends with b kinda thing

There's absolutely NOTHING original here.

Agreed. The US patent office grants patents for most absurdly common sense ideas as long as it's computer tech, and involves an "algorithm", which they apparently don't understand.

The trend seems to be getting worse, hopefully someone wakes up before it really starts to stifle innovation and competition.

This patent is a perfect example of that. It's a very basic, obvious, thing that now no other (US?) social network can do, and therefore they can't give their users the features they will have come to expect.