Dear Friends, Peer-to-Patent (www.peertopatent.org) is an online community that opens the patent examination process to the public. In collaboration with the USPTO, the site allows inventors to consent to public review of their patent applications. Applications are published on the site for a period of time and reviewers can discuss the claims, submit prior art references, and more. One application, "Recommending contacts in a social network" is about to expire. This means that the public review process will be closed and the materials on the site will be forwarded to the USPTO for consideration during the examination process. This patent application was submitted to Peer-to-Patent by Microsoft for community review. A summary is below. This application is highly relevant to various web technologies and does not require a high level of technical skill for participation or understanding of the claims. If you have any information to add, prior art that has not been submitted, or further comment, please visit http://peertopatent.org/patent/20080059576/activity. We strongly encourage you to forward this to your peers. Application Summary: A social network consists of individuals and their relationships to other individuals. Two individuals in a social network may have a direct relationship and may also have indirect relationships. For example, if Tom and Mary both have a direct relationship with Jim they have an indirect relationship to each other. The number of relationships between two individuals is commonly referred to as their “degree of separation”. For example, Tom and Mary have two degrees of separation. Because social networks can have thousands of individuals social networks can be very complex. Luckily, much of a person’s direct relationships can be derived from data stored by computer system such as contact lists for e-mail programs, instant messaging programs, event organizing programs, or so on. This application relates to a method and system for recommending potential contacts who are related to the user through no more than a maximum degree of separation. The system identifies the user’s contacts and then identifies contacts of those contacts until the maximum degree of separation is reached. The system then may rank the contacts based on contact paths and may also filter out identified users who do not satisfy a recommendation criterion. The user can then decide whether to add the presented users as one of their contacts. Summaries of additional applications available for review, and links to the applications, can be found here: http://dotank.nyls.edu/communitypatent/applications.html Your continued support of this project is greatly appreciated and is having noticeable effects. Our recently released Anniversary Report details your success. It is available for download at http://dotank.nyls.edu/communitypatent/P2Panniversaryreport.pdf Regards, The Peer-to-Patent Team