Can You "Patent" The Use of a Promotional Status?

About this time last semester, I thought about how useful it would be to companies to be able to influence users on social networks to say good things about their brand. Doing things like having users make their status a link to a website/video/article, or saying things like "Man, the new coke zero actually does taste a lot like regular coke" would be huge.

However, there are a number of questions here, the biggest one being: Is this ethical or even legal?

The social network site recently acquired by Google is making the first move in this direction. They are having users link to their Aardvark page as one of the last steps when they sign up. In this article, there is a graphic that clearly depicts how this all works.

But their use of this feature isn't where this ends. They are applying for a patent for using a tool to publicize through social media statuses, which reads:

“A user of a web service is prompted to endorse the web service to the user’s friends or other connections by submitting a status message to one or more status messaging services to which the user belongs.”

Who knows what will happen with this patent, but the message to me is clear. Companies have realized how big of a deal it is to get control of Twitter and Facebook users' statuses. Testimonials and recommendations from friends do so much more for a company than their advertising. With that in mind, look for this to be a highly used service in the future.