In what is either the boldest gamble of its history or the most boneheaded, Yahoo has filed a massive patent infringement lawsuit against Facebook.

The attack by the Silicon Valley Internet icon against perhaps the most powerful consumer social networking site today — also based in tech’s heartland and also an important partner of Yahoo — is sure to be a controversial one, pitting Yahoo against a company that has surpassed it handily in recent years in regards to popularity among consumers.

“Facebook’s entire social network model, which allows users to create profiles for and connect with, among other things, persons and businesses, is based on Yahoo’s patented social networking technology,” Yahoo’s lawsuit reads, in part.

That includes, Yahoo alleges, Facebook’s popular News Feed, advertising methods, privacy settings and more. The company adds that Facebook has been “free riding” on Yahoo’s intellectual property and that royalty payments alone will not suffice.

So what does Yahoo want for this alleged free ride? Triple damages and to enjoin Facebook from operating by using said patents.

The 19-page lawsuit over 10 patents — related to advertising, privacy, customization, messaging and social networking — comes as Yahoo is seeking to right itself under new CEO Scott Thompson.

Multiple sources said he is primarily driving this new aggressiveness from Yahoo.

Since Yahoo told the New York Times that it was considering such a move last week, the issue has been widely debated within the company, with many top techies there opposed to it, due to the company’s longstanding ethos of using patents for defense rather than offense.

Thus, the decision to move was closely held, sources said, with only Thompson and legal chief Michael Callahan largely working on it.

Still, patent lawsuits have become ever more prevalent among tech companies, as they seek to battle for advantage in a rapidly changing competitive landscape. Apple, Google, Microsoft and others are involved in several legal actions, although they are largely related to mobile technology.

Yahoo’s lawsuit is the most prominent in the social networking arena, a sector that has seen a huge explosion of late. Its timing could not be worse for Facebook, since it is in a quiet period for its upcoming IPO, which is expected to value the company at close to $100 billion.

Yahoo has done this kind of thing before, of course, having wrangled with Google until right before it went public in 2004 over search patents from its Overture acquisition. The pair settled 10 days before the Google IPO, with Yahoo getting several million more shares of that stock.

Yahoo is shaking Facebook down for much more here and with much higher stakes for both companies. If successful, Yahoo could seriously damage Facebook’s initial public offering; if not, Yahoo will cement its growing reputation as a company with nothing to lose, whose value is built not on its current business, but on non-operating assets.

More importantly, at least initially, the move did nothing to boost Yahoo’s moribund shares — the stock was down about one percent to $14.49 in after-hours trading.

More to come, but here is the entire document below. The lawsuit has been filed in San Jose, Calif., federal court.

Lastly, the official PR back-and-forth:

Said Yahoo, in its statement:

“Yahoo! has invested substantial resources in research and development through the years, which has resulted in numerous patented inventions of technology that other companies have licensed. These technologies are the foundation of our business that engages over 700 million monthly unique visitors and represent the spirit of innovation upon which Yahoo! is built. Unfortunately, the matter with Facebook remains unresolved and we are compelled to seek redress in federal court. We are confident that we will prevail.”

Facebook, obviously, disagrees, and also threw in a jab about the lack of discussions over the issue between the pair:

“We’re disappointed that Yahoo, a longtime business partner of Facebook and a company that has substantially benefited from its association with Facebook, has decided to resort to litigation. Once again, we learned of Yahoo’s decision simultaneously with the media. We will defend ourselves vigorously against these puzzling actions.”

I’ll admit to also being puzzled about the strategery here, but I am sure there will be much more to come.

Until then, read on:

Complaint

And here is what I wrote last week on the subject:

Apparently, Yahoo’s new motto: If you can’t beat ‘em — and it can’t — sue ‘em.

That would be Yahoo — the perpetual 98-pound weakling of the Internet these days — threatening powerful Facebook, which had cleanly bested it by attracting hordes of users with a plethora of popular products and services.

Yahoo has already lost its audience to Facebook, which was most recently followed by its frittering away a commanding lead in display advertising, too.

That would also be the Yahoo whose most recent success in improving its increasingly tenuous connections with customers was, in fact, by deeply integrating Facebook’s social hooks into its Web properties.

That would be the Yahoo which has failed time and again to innovate its own offerings so drastically over the years that it has now apparently decided that its first and best strategic move under Thompson’s rule is a shakedown.

Such a cynical move on rights Yahoo has long held seems more a play for the cheap seats of Wall Street, given that the company needs to look like it is doing everything it can to turn things around right now as it faces a proxy challenge.

First, it ended difficult talks with its Asian partners, Alibaba Group and SoftBank, over selling back lucrative stakes there.

Now, according to sources, Yahoo’s Thompson has actually been trying to make very nice with activist shareholder Daniel Loeb of Third Point — on-the-down-low chitchats that might have played a part of this latest unusual move.

At least Kodak had a good excuse. The once iconic camera company had recently been trying to take advantage of its trove of patents as a way to stave off declaring bankruptcy.

That didn’t work for Kodak, and it will also not work for Yahoo, whose only real option is to try to innovate its way out of the mess it has landed itself in.

You know, with good ideas.

Instead, the company’s leadership has opted for a road that could rain down trouble and paint Yahoo as a company bereft of talent to win any other way.

And while a range of intellectual property lawsuits have broken out all over the digital sector, involving Apple, Microsoft, Google and many others, such a strategy for Yahoo could be dangerous if it fails in its legal effort to take advantage of its 1,000-plus patents, including those related to search and advertising.

Others — including such tech luminaries as LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, who co-owns the seminal Six Degrees patent for constructing a networking database and system — hold a number of critical social networking patents, too, so who knows where this thing will go.

Nonetheless, Yahoo has decided to emulate those companies with one of the few valuable assets it might have, waging its little war, right as Facebook is in the midst of its initial public offering period.

Yahoo has done this before, of course, having wrangled with Google until right before it went public in 2004 over search patents from its Overture acquisition. The pair settled 10 days before the Google IPO, with Yahoo getting several million more shares of that stock (which it then, of course, sold too soon).

That certainly could happen here, with Yahoo managing to grab a chunk of Facebook’s pre-IPO stock.
That would mean that Yahoo’s most valuable asset would be those shares, as well as its stake in Asian companies it bought a while back for a bargain and now makes up a bulk of the company’s valuation.

As to Yahoo’s core business — investors consider it almost entirely worthless.

And let’s not forget: Facebook could also sue right back, which it very well might do. Or, perhaps, cut off agreeable ties that have aided Yahoo in recent years.

In other words, in poking Facebook, Yahoo might now learn what it is really like to be de-friended.

And in 2012 — which also happens to be the 10th anniversary of the confab of tech and media titans — it’s already shaping up to be another fantastic event in terms of programming, with a lineup of onstage appearances that is sure to make some news.

There are many more very big names to come, but Walt Mossberg and I are pleased to introduce the first group of interviewees, which will give you a glimpse into the firepower we expect at D10 in late May. It is again being held in Rancho Palos Verdes, just south of Los Angeles.

The initial speakers we have confirmed so far include: New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg; serial entrepreneur Sean Parker, who will appear with Spotify co-founder and CEO Daniel Ek; Zynga founder and CEO Mark Pincus; Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz; LinkedIn Chairman and VC Reid Hoffman, who will appear with LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner; and Skype CEO Tony Bates.

It’s hard to imagine someone we have wanted to have onstage more than Michael Bloomberg, a man of many talents and interests. He’s known worldwide as the 108th Mayor of the City of New York. First elected in November 2001 (and again in 2005 and 2009), he is also one of the most compelling politicians in the U.S. today.

But Bloomberg is also a pioneer in terms of the business of digital news and information technology, having built a huge and groundbreaking media company and information service. Bloomberg (the company) has 310,000 subscribers to its financial news and information service, and more than 15,000 employees worldwide.

There will be a lot to talk about with him, from the upcoming presidential election to the state of our government to the future of innovation, news and technology.

Also sure to be voluble is Sean Parker, the legendary Silicon Valley entrepreneur who has been on the cutting edge of innumerable important digital trends of the recent decade. In 1999, Parker co-founded Napster, the controversial and industry-changing music service, at the age of 19.

He followed up with early contact information service Plaxo, and then shifted over to his critical involvement as founding president of Facebook in its early days as a start-up, an experience which was dramatized in the movie “The Social Network.” Parker continued to found and also invest in companies, from Causes to Spotify to his most recent, Airtime, a social video company that he is doing with his Napster co-founder Shawn Fanning.

Parker will be appearing onstage with Daniel Ek, another serial entrepreneur and technologist, who started his first company in 1997 at the age of 14. The Swedish native later co-founded online music phenom Spotify in 2006, with Martin Lorentzon.

The former CTO of Stardoll and founder of Advertigo leads a company that is changing the way music is delivered and consumed by fans, against a backdrop of intense change in the industry, succeeding even as a plethora of other services have stumbled.

Also a groundbreaker is Zynga CEO and founder Mark Pincus, yet another serial entrepreneur, whose latest effort in the online gaming arena has finally resulted in his biggest success. It recently went public, and now has a nearly $10 billion market cap.

Before founding Zynga in 2007, Pincus had already started three other companies: Push start-up Freeloader in 1995; automated tech-support company Support.com after that; and early social networking site Tribe.net in 2003.

(I met Pincus when he was at Freeloader in Washington, D.C., while writing a profile of him for the Washington Post, so I have enjoyed tracking his progress since then.)

Pincus is also an avid angel investor, with early stakes in Napster, Brightmail, Twitter and Facebook.

Reid Hoffman was another early investor in Facebook, along with many of Web 2.0’s most successful ventures. Well-known in Silicon Valley as an entrepreneur and VC, and recently dubbed the “start-up whisperer” by the New York Times (although I am not sure exactly what that means), he’s also chairman of LinkedIn, the business-networking service that also recently went public (at a $10 billion valuation, too).

He’ll appear with LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner, who started out life in Hollywood, but soon made his way to Silicon Valley as a top exec at Yahoo. After running its media division, Weiner spent a short time at venture firms before going operational again at LinkedIn.

What it takes to build and maintain momentum as tech companies move into more mature stages, as well as how the social networking space evolves, are among the many topics on tap for the pair.

The evolution of a start-up phenom — in this case, Internet telephony service Skype — will be among the topics covered by Tony Bates, who is now a president at Microsoft, which bought it last year.

As such, he is responsible, says the software giant in its description of his job, “for overseeing the company’s direction, strategy and overall mission to become a global communications service that will eventually reach billions of users.”

That’s a tall order for Bates, who came to Skype from a top job at Cisco. Bates has deep roots (or maybe, routing?) in the guts of the Internet, having done backbone-engineering strategy for Internet MCI. The U.K. native also holds nine patents.

Lastly, given all the activity we expect will happen between government regulatory agencies and tech companies over the next few years, we felt it was key to bring in FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz. He has been at the FTC as a commissioner since 2004, but was given the top job by President Barack Obama in 2009.

Among his priorities, according to his bio, is “promoting competition and innovation in the technology sector through law enforcement and policy initiatives; and protecting consumers’ privacy — especially while they are using the Internet.”

Uh-oh!

Leibowitz knows from regulation, having served as the Democratic chief counsel and staff director for the U.S. Senate Antitrust Subcommittee from 1997 to 2000, where he focused on competition policy and telecommunications matters, as well as a similar stint at the Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism and Technology before that.

There will be a lot more speakers to come, of course. But, so far, we think D10 is off and running fast.

In fact, its last acquisition was the restaurant-recommendation app maker Clever Sense, which was announced Dec. 13. A Google spokeswoman confirmed the company hasn’t bought anything since then.

Sources at Google said the main reason for the dearth of deals is CEO Larry Page’s focus on streamlining his company around key products. Plus, there’s “seasonality” around the turn of the year (but c’mon, it’s March; that would be an incredibly generous winter holiday break!).

Sources also maintained that new acquisitions are in the pipeline, and should be announced in the coming weeks.

Page reorganized Google last year around seven areas, like Android, Google+ and YouTube. New acquisitions are supposed to fit into that larger structure, sources said. So, in addition to having a dedicated sponsor within the company, each deal also has to be advocated for by the head of one of the product divisions.

That’s a change from the Eric Schmidt era (though perhaps a deferred change, given Page took over in April 2011). In recent years, Schmidt seemed to make continual pronouncements that Google was stepping up the pace of its acquisitions.

Another cause for the slowed pace of acquisitions could be a string of departures from Google’s corporate development team, which has been led by David Lawee since 2008.

Last year, Groupon hired Jason Harinstein, Facebook lured Amin Zoufonoun, and Neeraj Arora went to mobile messaging start-up WhatsApp.

There’s also the distraction of Google’s massive $12.5 billion acquisition of Motorola, which hasn’t officially closed yet, but presumably will soon.

It’s not like there’s an industry-wide acquisition dry spell. In recent months, newer buyers like Groupon and LinkedIn have been particularly active on the talent acquisition front. Facebook even acquired a company on the same day it submitted papers to go public, and disclosed that fact (but not the name of the company) in its S-1 filing.

(Image courtesy of BustedTees)

It was Yahoo legal head Mike Callahan who had the thankless task yesterday of calling Facebook’s general counsel Ted Ullyot to tell him the Silicon Valley Internet giant was intent on pursuing patent lawsuits against the social networking giant.

The charge was being led by Callahan, as well as Chief Product Officer Blake Irving and, especially, Yahoo’s new CEO Scott Thompson.

Much of Yahoo’s senior leadership had no idea of the impending move until Callahan informed them it was about to happen at meeting Monday.

Facebook had known of the patent concerns of Yahoo for some months — the issue had also gotten some coverage in the media — but had not engaged formally on the topic, several sources said.

So, the suddenly aggressive call also apparently blindsided Facebook, even though it had been aware of the possibility of such an outcome.

Thus, it had little time to respond, since Yahoo was also simultaneously briefing the New York Times, according to numerous sources at both companies, and then released an astonishing statement to the newspaper:

“Yahoo has a responsibility to its shareholders, employees and other stakeholders to protect its intellectual property. We must insist that Facebook either enter into a licensing agreement or we will be compelled to move forward unilaterally to protect our rights.”

Apparently, Yahoo’s new motto: If you can’t beat ‘em — and it can’t — sue ‘em.

That would be Yahoo — the perpetual 98-pound weakling of the Internet these days — threatening powerful Facebook, which had cleanly bested it by attracting hordes of users with a plethora of popular products and services.

Yahoo has already lost its audience to Facebook, which was most recently followed by its frittering away a commanding lead in display advertising, too.

That would also be the Yahoo whose most recent success in improving its increasingly tenuous connections with customers was, in fact, by deeply integrating Facebook’s social hooks into its Web properties.

That would be the Yahoo which has failed time and again to innovate its own offerings so drastically over the years that it has now apparently decided that its first and best strategic move under Thompson’s rule is a shakedown.

Such a cynical move on rights Yahoo has long held seems more a play for the cheap seats of Wall Street, given that the company needs to look like it is doing everything it can to turn things around right now as it faces a proxy challenge.

First, it ended difficult talks with its Asian partners, Alibaba Group and SoftBank, over selling back lucrative stakes there.

Now, according to sources, Yahoo’s Thompson has actually been trying to make very nice with activist shareholder Daniel Loeb of Third Point — on-the-down-low chitchats that might have played a part of this latest unusual move.

At least Kodak had a good excuse. The once iconic camera company had recently been trying to take advantage of its trove of patents as a way to stave off declaring bankruptcy.

That didn’t work for Kodak, and it will also not work for Yahoo, whose only real option is to try to innovate its way out of the mess it has landed itself in.

You know, with good ideas.

Instead, the company’s leadership has opted for a road that could rain down trouble and paint Yahoo as a company bereft of talent to win any other way.

And while a range of intellectual property lawsuits have broken out all over the digital sector, involving Apple, Microsoft, Google and many others, such a strategy for Yahoo could be dangerous if it fails in its legal effort to take advantage of its 1,000-plus patents, including those related to search and advertising.

Others — including such tech luminaries as LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, who co-owns the seminal Six Degrees patent for constructing a networking database and system — hold a number of critical social networking patents, too, so who knows where this thing will go.

Nonetheless, Yahoo has decided to emulate those companies with one of the few valuable assets it might have, waging its little war, right as Facebook is in the midst of its initial public offering period.

Yahoo has done this before, of course, having wrangled with Google until right before it went public in 2004 over search patents from its Overture acquisition. The pair settled 10 days before the Google IPO, with Yahoo getting several million more shares of that stock (which it then, of course, sold too soon).

That certainly could happen here, with Yahoo managing to grab a chunk of Facebook’s pre-IPO stock.

That would mean that Yahoo’s most valuable asset would be those shares, as well as its stake in Asian companies it bought a while back for a bargain and now makes up a bulk of the company’s valuation.

As to Yahoo’s core business — investors consider it almost entirely worthless.

And let’s not forget: Facebook could also sue right back, which it very well might do. Or, perhaps, cut off agreeable ties that have aided Yahoo in recent years.

In other words, in poking Facebook, Yahoo might now learn what it is really like to be de-friended.

First it was the baggage fees, and charging for legroom. Then it was denying us our Words with Friends. Now, the New York Times reports, it’s bringing Facebook and LinkedIn to the seat-selection process, so you can gather more information on customers … I mean, pair up fliers with similar interests.

Soon enough, we’ll hear people’s no-longer-serendipitous tales of purposely meeting their soul mate, or maybe selling their company to the passenger in seat 24E.

I’ve got one word for you, airlines, or really, one word that’s used twice to create another single word: GoGo. Wasn’t it just a few years ago that Internet broadband access became an in-flight possibility, allowing us to bury our heads in laptop screens, plow through work while 30,000 feet above the ground, and effectively avoid human interaction? Even the subject at the top of the Times story, Jeff Jarvis, grumbles that he usually has work to do.

And now, you want us to talk to people while we fly? (How does one do that, anyway?)

In case you missed the story, KLM Airlines and others have recently integrated aspects of social media with customer profiles, allowing prospective passengers to share personal information and choose seat buddies based on their profiles.

Sharing the social info is completely optional, and if a customer is uncomfortable with the person who has chosen to sit next to him or her, the seat can be changed up until two days before the flight.

As the story points out, this is likely to appeal to business travelers who are interested in real-life networking, not just social networking.

On one hand, providing more personal info to airlines could help them tailor the flight experience to suit fliers’ preferences, going beyond just the standard meal selection.

And one of the services mentioned, Hong Kong-based Satisfly, lets fliers indicate their preferred level of chattiness during a flight. So the tired mom might not get the talk-shop guy, and maybe the fearful flier won’t get paired with another white-knuckler. (In the videogaming world, I’m told, multiplayer gamers find this kind of feature to be invaluable when they create profiles, so jabberers and silent Halo-ers can peacefully coexist.)

But allowing fliers to handpick their seatmates based on social profiling could also have its pitfalls. As Jarvis aptly says, “Pity the poor venture capitalist who gets seated with the start-up guy who talks his ear off for four hours.”

Which might present another opportunity for airlines: Charge extra for high-tech noise-canceling headphones …

Readers, what do you think? Would you use a social networks to choose a seatmate on a flight, or opt not to share your profile?

(Photo courtesy of Flickr)

Rapportive CEO Rahul Vohra said in a blog post today that Rapportive would continue to be available for Gmail users as a plugin that overlays information about their contacts inside their inbox, as it is today.

Rapportive has drawn many passionate users — it hadn’t disclosed how many — who were worried that it might be shut down, given the tendency by top tech companies to “acqhire” small teams for their talent but not their products.

Vohra said today, “At LinkedIn, we will support Rapportive, and we will continue to build beautiful products that make you brilliant with people.” Rapportive users will now be covered by LinkedIn’s terms of service and privacy policy.

LinkedIn offered Rapportive “low teens” of millions of dollars worth of cash, beating out other potential acquirers such as Twitter, sources said. As of Feb. 7, when we first wrote about it, the deal had not closed but was well on its way.

Rapportive raised about $1 million in 2010 from investors including Charles River Ventures, Dave McClure, Paul Buchheit, Jason Calacanis, Gary Vaynerchuk, Shervin Pishevar and Venture Hacks.

Social networks — LinkedIn especially, but also Facebook — are supposed to make it easier for people to see who works where, and maybe do something about it. Once you’ve decided where it is you want to work, your second question is something like: “Do I know anyone who works there?” At which point, you trawl your network of friends. Often the search is unsatisfying for the job-seeker. “People hit a dead end too fast,” says CEO Joe Essenfeld (pictured). “Once you realize you know five people who work at the company you want, the question then becomes, ‘What do I do next?’”

And on the other side of the equation, employers don’t always have it easy, either. There are often hundreds of applicants to sort through. A good referral by an insider who knows the job could make all the difference. Companies often pay their employees a bounty for a successful referral, but it can be too much trouble to collect.

JIBE is a New York-based start-up that aims to turn both sides of that equation on their respective ears, and today it’s launching three products aimed at enterprise companies and the people who want to work for them.

The first is Get Referred. When you’re looking over a company’s Web site and see a job you want, wouldn’t it be great if you could instantly find out who you know who works there? JIBE’s Get Referred Web button will tell you right away. From there, you can ask someone you know to refer you. Already, Accenture, the IT consulting firm, has used the Get Referred tools to help it fill some of the 50,000 or 60,000 jobs it will have open this year.

The second new product is JIBE Apply, which makes it easier for companies to create mobile-ready versions of their job and career sites, by harnessing data from existing ATS — Application Tracking System — software.

Finally, JIBE Post makes it easier than ever to share new job postings on the social networks and job boards you want to send them to, not just the ones your ATS vendor has picked. Want to share a job posting on a weird combination of Monster and Facebook? Done — easily, and for a smaller cost than with other products.

JIBE has been on a bit of a tear in the last year. It has landed $6.9 million in venture capital investments from DFJ Gotham, Polaris Venture Partners, Zelkova Ventures, Lerer Ventures, Thrive Capital and Jason Calacanis’s Launch. That list is impressive in itself, but even more impressive is its list of customers. Aside from Accenture, companies as varied as Amazon, Bank of America, Intel, Hewlett-Packard and Lockheed Martin are using it to find and recruit new employees. The plan over the next few quarters, Essenfeld says, is to add more large enterprise customers like these.

To that end, JIBE is adding new muscle to its sales team. Cindy Songne has joined as JIBE’s new VP for agency relations. Her last two jobs were at JobTarget and Monster Worldwide. Cindy Dole, an alum of Yahoo’s HotJobs who stayed on after Monster acquired it, is joining as director of enterprise sales for the West Coast region. She’s also worked at CareerBuilder.com. Tom Strauss will be director of enterprise sales for the Midwest region. Like Dole, he’s a Yahoo veteran.

If the point of helping people get referred for jobs they want seems a little trivial, it’s not. People who apply for a job, having been referred by someone they know, have one chance in 10 of getting that job, according to CareerXroads, a staffing firm. Compare that to applications submitted blindly, where the odds are more like one in 100. And it doesn’t just help the employee. Companies can sift through fewer resumes to find the right person, and are more likely to find someone who works out in the end, saving companies the costs associated with advertising open jobs, and then onboarding those they hire. Is it too corny to call that a “win-win”?

The professional social-networking service said its fourth-quarter net income rose to $6.9 million from $5.3 million a year ago, while revenue hit $167.7 million from $81.7 million a year earlier. Analysts had expected LinkedIn to report adjusted earnings of seven cents a share, and $160 million in revenue, according to Thomson Reuters data.

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Tech companies have recently ratcheted up their offensive use of intellectual property, especially in the mobile space — but not so much in social networking.

Just in case patent wars happen to be contagious, it seems worth evaluating which social networking players are best-equipped.

I wrote on Wednesday about a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who is hopeful that Google may pursue some of the patents and patent applications he filed on behalf of a company he started that Google later acquired.

Also on Wednesday, on the occasion of Facebook filing to go public, two patent researchers from Envision IP posted a good summary of the distribution of social networking patents among tech companies.

Here’s a breakdown:

Facebook: Facebook told prospective investors that it has “56 issued patents and 503 filed patent applications in the United States and 33 corresponding patents and 149 filed patent applications in foreign countries relating to social networking, web technologies and infrastructure, and related technologies.”

(Here’s a list of some of the granted patents, direct from the USPTO.)

This Facebook news feed patent lists Mark Zuckerberg as the first inventor.

Facebook’s patents cover inventions created at the company, like its news feed and some privacy features, as well as some additional intellectual property it acquired.

The biggest patent acquisition deal Facebook has done was with MOL Global, for the Friendster patent portfolio of seven patents and 11 patent applications in May 2010. That cost $40 million — something insiders considered a steal, given the risk of the patents falling into someone else’s hands.

The Friendster patents cover topics like making connections on a social network, friend-of-a-friend connections through a social graph, and social media sharing.

At Facebook’s most recent internal valuation, the stock alone spent on the Friendster patent deal is now worth more than $100 million.

(Personal side note: The Friendster patents are something I’ve now written about for years. I broke the news, for Red Herring, on Friendster being awarded a patent on social networking in 2006, then reported on Facebook acquiring them at GigaOM.)

Google: Though Google hasn’t been a major social networking provider for all that long, it has 25 U.S. patents and 40 pending U.S. patent applications on the topic, by Envision IP’s count.

Google has aggressively hunted intellectual property about social networking. As I referenced earlier, it got a patent portfolio through its acquisition of the Dealmap (previously Fatdoor). That includes patents and patent applications on things like regions of influence within users of a network.

Image from the core Dodgeball patent

Last year, Google also acquired some patents from the shut-down social search engine Wowd, including one on user-driven ranking of Web pages. In an interesting twist that resulted from a three-way split of Wowd’s assets, Google currently licenses those patents to Facebook. Backstory here.

Back in 2005, Google also bought Dodgeball, the mobile social application created by Dennis Crowley, which predated Foursquare. And it turns out that because of Dodgeball, Google is assigned what looks to be a broadly worded patent on “location-based software for mobile devices” that describes messaging between two users who are in close physical proximity to each other.

The Six Degrees patent: Back in 2003, Reid Hoffman and Mark Pincus paid $700,000 in an auction for a seminal patent from the failed social network Six Degrees, in part to keep it away from Friendster’s control. Hoffman recently told me that he and Pincus bought the patent as individuals, and then assigned it to their companies, LinkedIn and Tribe.net.

Apple, Yahoo, Microsoft, IBM: Envision IP notes that Apple has 35 U.S. patents and 76 U.S. patent applications that seem to be about social networking and collaboration, many of them focused on mobile. Yahoo has an armory of patents on all sorts of general Web technologies, while Microsoft and IBM have about 80 patents on file sharing, messaging and infrastructure that could be used for social networks.

LinkedIn and Twitter: LinkedIn has one patent, on evaluating user reputations within a social network. Twitter doesn’t seem to have applied for a single patent (at least, not prior to 18 months ago, since that’s the period after which patent applications are published).

What are the other pockets of social networking intellectual property out there, at other companies and around the world? I’m sure I’ve missed some, so please add to this list in the comments.

LinkedIn declined to comment, while Rapportive CEO Rahul Vohra ducked our attempts to talk to him.

Sources familiar with the negotiations said LinkedIn offered Rapportive “low teens” of millions of dollars worth of cash. The deal has not officially closed yet.

Rapportive, which is still available only for Gmail, overlays an email correspondent’s social networking accounts alongside open messages and drafts. So, for instance, you can see a person’s most recent tweet and mention it in your email to them. Or you can realize that you’re not connected on LinkedIn to a person you just had a meeting with, and rectify that.

Rapportive hasn’t publicly disclosed how many people use it, but in September, Vohra was quoted as saying Rapportive users viewed more than 65 million contacts per month. He also said at the time that the company was preparing to sell premium products.

Competitors to Rapportive include Xobni (our coverage) and Mingly (our coverage). LinkedIn also bought a somewhat similar contact management start-up called Connected last fall.

Last spring, Google introduced its own competing “People Widget” for Gmail, which Rapportive then integrated with its own product.

Rapportive raised about $1 million in 2010 from investors including Charles River Ventures, Dave McClure, Paul Buchheit, Jason Calacanis, Gary Vaynerchuk, Shervin Pishevar and Venture Hacks.