Hey there little fella, did I confuse you? Let me re iterate…… you ever feel like youre addicted to myspace? Logging in multiple times a day to see what your 15 year old neighbor is up to with her and her friends. Shopping around at the mall, catching up on her teen vogue gossip. Well fear no more, as now, there is a reason for you to be wasting away all your time on social networking sites. Perhaps you thought only teeny boppers, extroverts with no friends “off line” and pedophiles cared about how many friends they had on social networking sites such as facebook and myspace. Well think again - Google cares too.

The word on the street is this: Google is going to start “ranking” social networking users according to how influential they are. The most influential users on a social network, as determined by a predetermined equation, something such as # of friends x logins x posts a day x how many people read your posts will be strategically chosen to display google adwords on their profiles.

This is happening, and is true. Google recently applied for a patent on the technology and given their track record with discovering ingenious ways on how to monetize online advertising - it only seems fitting this a step forward with their heavy user-targeted-ad-buy-relevant-content-to-everyone strategy…..or something like that.

In a nutshell the web giant will apply this technology to rank search results on certain online personalities in an attempt to sell advertising on their respective profiles.

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.”