If Friendster heads in the wrong direction with their social networking patent, I think a link boycott should be called for. How does link boycott work? A link boycott is intended to starve a domain out of the Web by a) refusing to serve requests from a link from the target site and b) directing all links to target site to elsewhere. That leaves only bookmarks as the sole onramp to the target suckster. Ouch, that should hurt.

a) is easy to do. b) take some massaging. All this can be implemented transparently with a proxy or filter.

I hope Friendster tries to push the issue. I want to see how effective link boycott can be in practice. Note that such a boycott won't be as effective against China because links across language barriers is not very strong. Still, I think link bocotting China could be annoying enough to force them to abandon broad censorship, particularly when the next Olympic nears.