Patent Application
20070271336
A restricted online social network system: The social network system is restricted by not exposing a member's social connections to any other member. That is, a member can only see his/her own friends and cannot see his/her friends' friends. Because of this restriction, members cannot contact/solicit a friend's friend in the system. These restrictions allow the system to model a grassroots social network without compromising on the privacy of its members and their connections.
The message, its creation and its properties: A member of the system can create a message and thereby become its author. A message is just like a web page and it can have links, forms, links to downloadable documents and embedded audio and video files. It can be in common internet formats like HTML, XHTML, DHTML and XML. Also, a message can have several parts including a title, summary and a description.
A message author can place the message into different categories. He can also specify keywords in the message. The system itself will create a search index on the message. These methods allow efficient searching of the message by other members using categories and keywords. It also allows the system to compare two messages for closeness of content and warn message authors of duplicate messages. A message author can mark a message as private, thus making it unsearchable by other members in the system.
Message forwarding: Once a member creates a message in the system, he/she can ask the system to show the message to one or more of his/her friends in the social network. This act is called forwarding the message. All those friends would then be able to view the message when they subsequently connect to the system. If those friends are already connected to the system, the system might automatically refresh their screen and show the new message. The system does not lose the context of the message as it gets forwarded, unlike an email. The system maintains an unique identifier to a single copy of the message and it serves that same copy every time a member requests for the message.
Member actions on a message: A member that sees a message is called a viewer of the message. A viewer can take one or more of the following actions on each message he views:
Success metrics of the message: The system records each above action of a message viewer on a message. For video and audio files, the system maintains how long the viewer watched or listened to the content. Based on these data, the system calculates the metrics related to the overall success of a message. Some of the possible message metrics are number of members (and percentage of total members that this message was forwarded to) that have
Message promotion: A message author can ask the system to promote the message to other members that are not directly connected to her.
The system also uses collaborative filtering technique to show other messages to a message viewer. This technique looks at a subset of messages that a viewer acted on, then selects other members that acted on all the same messages the same way. Among the selected members, the system picks other messages that they acted on. It then shows these messages to the message viewer.
A message author can submit the message and the keywords in the message to one or more internet search engines like Google and Yahoo, so that, internet users searching on those keywords would find the message in this social network. The author can also ask the system to place advertisements for the message in other internet websites.
Soliciting messages with additional system functionality: A message author can use enhanced messages to solicit message viewers to conduct an online transaction or send an online communication by submitting a web form embedded in the message. These enhanced messages are defined by the system using message templates and it will include web form fields that are necessary to conduct a particular transaction or send a certain communication. The author and viewers of the message can forward these soliciting messages just like other messages. When a member views this message, one or more fields in the form might get filled automatically from the viewer's profile in the system. When the viewer submits the form to the system, the system will conduct an online transaction or send an online communication depending on the message template.
Some such soliciting messages are:
Grassroots advocacy example: An author creates a message using the Grassroots Advocacy template which solicits the message viewer to email his legislators. The template provides placeholders for the author to fill up the message title, a description and the body of the email that would be sent to the legislator. The author uses these fields to write about Global warming and he forwards the message to some of his friends who forward it to others. When the message viewers click on the submit button in this message, the system uses the viewer's name and home address to match him to his legislator and emails a letter to the legislator on his behalf.
Fundraising example: An author creates a message using the Fundraising template that solicits message viewers to contribute money to an organization. The author uses the placeholder fields to write about The Red Cross organization and the suggested contribution amounts and forwards it to her friends. Message viewers can use a drop down box in the message to select one of several contribution amounts that the author picked and enter their credit card information. When a viewer submits this form, the system uses the viewer's credit card information and the dollar amount she chose to make a contribution to the Red Cross organization on the viewer's behalf.
Product/Service purchase example: An author uses the online transaction template to create a message. The template will provide a placeholder for the product or service and a placeholder for the online store that will fulfill that request. The author will choose his product or service from those lists and forward the message to his friends. The viewers of this message can use a textbox to fill a quantity of the product that they want to purchase and also their credit card information. When the message viewer submits the form, the system will use the member's credit card to place an order for the product with the online store on the viewer's behalf.
