The Design and Implementation of laffer1

http://www.redherring.com/Article.aspx?a=17498&hed=Friendster+Wins+Patent

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/07/07/1520208

This could be a problem for JJ. I can't implement the myspace style or xfire friends list features in the same way. They also think they can generalize to all "friends" based systems although another patent supposedly doesn't overlap, I think it would in that case. How the hell did this get patented?