Still thinking through this one, but great talk. My favorite quote: “There are more Farmville players than there are TWITTER ACCOUNTS.” True comedy…

And yet another sordid chapter in software patents begins, as Winksite files suit in Manhattan federal court for  infringment of yet another highly vague software patent, this time over using a mobile phone to connect to social websites.

Winksite, which I had never heard of until yesterday (and I bet you didn’t either), describes itself as:

As reported all over the net this week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and a number of other Facebook execs have been awarded US Patent #7,699,123: Dynamically providing a news feed about a user of a
social network, yet another highly vague, general software patent.  The abstract:

A little story i’ve been following for about a year now, regarding Yelp and their “advertising sales tactics” seems to have grown some teeth.  According to numerous sources, a class action lawsuit has been filed in Los Angeles Superior Court against Yelp, the massive directory / review website, alleging:

The lawsuit alleges that Yelp runs an extortion scheme in which the company’s employees call businesses demanding monthly payments, in the guise of “advertising contracts,” in exchange for removing or modifying negative reviews appearing on the website.

I can’t say this comes as much of a surprise.

Recently, my good friend Aanarav Sareen over in NYC finished his book, Digital Media for Business, a great primer on the new wave of social and web technologies.  Him and Mike Raffensperger worked their tails off to get this thing done in record time, and i was lucky enough to be asked to edit it.