Aardvark, the Q&A service that was recently acquired by Google, has filed a patent for “promotional status messages”.
You know when you sign up for a service and it lets you post a message to your friends on Twitter or Facebook inviting them to join? Yup, Aardark is somehow claiming that this was the company’s own invention, writes GoRumors. The patent reads:
“A user of a web service is prompted to endorse the web service to the user’s friends or other connections by submitting a status message to one or more status messaging services to which the user belongs.”
Could Aardvark really be granted a patent on something so obvious as posting a Tweet to a user’s friends? If granted, might they enforce such a patent to prevent other companies from posting “tell a friend” messages to Facebook and Twitter? Or perhaps this is simply a defensive filing – an attempt to grab a silly patent before someone else does, and decides to use it.
Tags: Aardvark, Google, patent
