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Pratap Ravindran

Google is going places with social networking but is also finding itself the subject of patent wars.

WHEN Google edged into online social networks in January with a low-profile launch of Orkut.com, presumably because it wanted to grab a piece of the hot action at a time when it was gearing up to go public, it probably didn't realise that it would find itself plumb in the middle of patent wars.

But that's exactly what's happened with Affinity Engines, a Silicon Valley start-up, filing a lawsuit in the Superior Court of California in Santa Clara, seeking unspecified damages and royalties and alleging that a Google engineer, Orkut Buyukkokten, had stolen code from the firm (his former employer) and that he had promised he would not develop a competing social networking service when he quit to sign up with Google.

Google has confirmed the lawsuit... but insists that its Orkut social networking site does not feature any source code developed by Affinity.

However, according to the complaint, Buyukkokten and Tyler Ziemann, both students at Stanford University, first thought up of an online social networking site tagged Club Nexis in 2001. In the following year, the two founded Affinity Engines. Subsequently, Buyukkokten, who happens to be a Turkish citizen, left Affinity Engines to join Google, stating that he had to get a job in order to obtain a US work permit. He apparently signed agreements before leaving Affinity Engines that he would not take the firm's technology to a third party.

The complaint goes on to say that, in October 2003, Friendster turned down Google's offer to buy the company for $30 million following which a Google executive asked Buyukkokten to come up with a competing social networking site. Somewhere down the line, according to Affinity Engines, it requested Buyukkokten to return a CD containing some source code for its social networking product and that Buyukkokten did not respond to this request.

Early this year, Google launched Orkut.com as part of its programme to make available to its market a steady stream of new products. Google, in addition to search, helps users in following the news, Web publishing, comparison shopping, eliminating pop-up advertisements and tracking stock information.

Some analysts are of the opinion that Google, its stated mission of organising the information available on the Web notwithstanding, has now developed an interest in helping people connect with each other rather than just information.

Google, for its part, has not formally enunciated a change in its mission.

Be that as it may, the firm went ahead with Orkut which it described as "an online trusted community (which means you get to join only by invitation) Web site designed for friends."

According to the Orkut Web site, the main goal of the service, "in affiliation with Google," is to make "the social life of yourself and your friends more active and stimulating."

At the time of the Orkut launch, a Google spokesperson had stressed that the site was the independent project of one of its engineers, Orkut Buyukkokten, a computer science student who was into user interface design, and that he had created Orkut.com by working on it about one day a week.

Google, incidentally, likes its engineers to work on personal projects. Google News represents a case in point: It began as a personal project of one of its engineers, Krishna Bharat, in 2002, and it now has a large number of users even though it is still in beta.

The spokesperson had further stated that despite Orkut's affiliation, the service was not in Google's product portfolio - and that Google owned the technologies developed by its employees.

It remains to be seen whether Orkut will make the social life of its users more "stimulating" - but it has already stimulated a lawsuit against the search giant at a point of time when it is in a patent infringement fracas with Overture Services, a Yahoo subsidiary.

It may be recalled that shortly after Yahoo dumped Google as its provider of Web navigation software in February, the two companies have been facing off over the patent for a bidding system that powers search-related advertisements inherited by Yahoo when it bought Overture Services.

Analysts are inclined to view this brawl as a portent of things to come.

Search is now recognised as a major business with search-engine advertising emerging as one of the most promising segments of the Internet marketing sector.

Inevitably, technology heavyweights are now prioritising research and development in search and are filing patents by the tonne.

Yahoo holds a whole bunch of patents, many of which it picked up with the acquisition of Overture and Inktomi.

Microsoft too holds several general search-related patents in methods for searching information in directory listings - improved search area selection, "concept" searching that uses a Boolean or keyword search engine and so on.

Google weighs in with at least eight known patents. However, the word is that it has many more, including those relating to ways of extracting information from a database and the detection of duplicate and near-duplicate files.

eworld@thehindu.co.in

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