TECHNOLOGY NEWS:Google plan to rank social networking users

PERHAPS you think only extroverts care how many friends they have on their social networking profile. You'd be wrong — Google cares too.
The web giant could apply the technology it uses to rank search results to people in a bid to sell advertising on websites like Facebook and MySpace.
Patent application documents published this year show the company has devised a system to "rank" users of social networking sites depending on how influential they are.
Users would be given a rating based on how many people visited their profile, how many friends they had, how active they were, which groups they were a member of and so on.
The most popular users in a community, dubbed "influencers" by Google, would then be singled out to have advertisements displayed on their profile.
"The number of advertisements displayed on a profile depends on the rank of the member within the community," reads one example of how the system would work.
A spokesperson for Google played down the application and said the company filed plans for many ideas but did not act on all of them.
"We file patent applications on a variety of ideas that our employees come up with. Some of those ideas later mature into real products or services, some don't," said Google Australia spokesman Rob Shilkin.
"Prospective product announcements should not necessarily be inferred from our patent applications."
The patent application was revealed in July after being kept under wraps for 18 months in line with the US Patent and Trademark Office's pre-grant publication rules.
The office has published 69 applications for patents filed by Google so far this year, containing ideas ranging from smart billboards that could display products available in nearby stores to floating data centres that draw power from waves.
The 15-page document on social networking ranking details a series of methods to determine a user's influence that go beyond simply counting how many friends they have.
For example, a user who acted as a conduit between different groups of people would be ranked higher than one who had more friends belonging to just one circle.
"Factors such as member interactions, content on member profiles, dynamically changing size of the community and the like establish a hierarchy within a community where certain members are more popular than others and, consequently, wield enhanced influence over other members," the application says.
The application also mentions the possibility of using PageRank, the system Google uses to rank search results, to determine the influence of each user in a community.
If adopted, the system could give Google an edge over rival Microsoft in controlling advertising on social networking sites.
Microsoft currently has a deal to provide ads for market leader Facebook, in which it owns a small stake, while Google has a partnership with MySpace.