"Friend-what?" you might be asking, but it's true: Red Herring is reporting that Friendster, the ill-fated social networking that (I think) started it all, has been granted a patent on social networks. Following a great tradition of painstakingly clear patent language, Friendster owns the patent for a "system, method, and apparatus for connecting users in an online computer system based on their relationships within social networks".

Whether Friendster will use the time-tested 'if you can't beat 'em, take em to court' strategy is yet to be seen, but to their credit: they apparently applied for the patent (issued June 27 of 2006) way back in the day, before they fell from their perch.

[via Slashdot]

Gabe Rivera, proud pappa of Tech.Memeorandum and a growing number of other automated memetrackers on various topics, today launched one on baseball.  Ballbug tracks the most linked to posts about baseball around the athleto-blogo-sphero.  When will he stop launching these kinds of sites on various topics?  He seemed to indicate to me in a rather cryptic comment here awhile ago that it couldn't go on forever, but he wasn't about to stop either. 

I'd like to take this opportunity too to say that I don't think these kinds of sites, which are fully automated, can be described using the same word as we use for sites like Digg.com - where storyies rise to the top because of human votes inside the system.  The word "memetracker," is I believe, misused when it's applied to Digg and other systems directly influenced by humans.  Plus those types of sites are tracking, if anything, specific URLs more than general memes defined by URLs grouped together - aren't they?  That's my two cents on the subject.

Check out Meneame.net, a Digg type site in Spanish.  While there are innumerable Digg clones online, and apparently a fair number of Spanish ones, Meneame looks like it's built a healthy community of users.  Not a huge pile of comments after each post, but a fair amount of votes (Meneames?) for the top stories.  No groovy AJAX comment mod system yet like Digg has, which I like quite a bit.

I love it when things like this happen, Web 2.0 has got to be less US centric.  Found via the newsletter of Wikispaces, who host the Meneame code development wiki (does Digg do that?) - their highlighted wiki of the month.

Update:  I just saw that there's a FeedFlare plug-in for Feedburner to one-click submit an item in a feed to Meneame.  Is that cool or what?