CircledSpace - Social Networking based on Groups of Friends

I had thought of the concept of  social networking website based on the concept that a user can create and manage groups of friends. Groups may be created based on groups like family, online friends or groups based on interests of the user such as swimming, writing, basketball and so on.  I thought of this idea in 2008.   I thought at that time this would not be MySpace or Facebook killer.    I wanted to enable users to communicate to other users with the same interests and I would provide privacy tools that a friend in a certain group may not have access to messages, notifications, friends, photos, videos of different groups. Let’s say, a message meant to be sent to the group Family will not be received by the friends of group Online Friends. Also, friends in the group Online Friends will not be able to view the user’s family pictures and videos unless explicitly granted by the user.   My vision was to create a social networking site for people who do not like Facebook’s and Myspace’s single pile of friends and lack of privacy tools. The concept of groups to me is not new as I had the idea of grouping invitees when I bought the  domain name ClickToRSVP.com in 2004.  While thinking of a matching domain name for the group social networking site,  I kept looking for funding . In order for me to hide this idea and not to get stolen, I  instead disclosed my idea of a local search website but told the prospective investors that part of the funding will be used for patent expenses of a new generation of social networking website and telling them they will also co-own it without disclosing the actual concept. Unfortunately, I was not able to secure any funding. The breakthrough could have happened when a friend was about to pour-in some minimal funding but backed-out later on.   I knew,  this idea will be my means to get college funds for my kids.  I need to patent this idea but I had no means to make it happen.

It was in 2010 that I came up with the matching name for this website. It is CircledSpace.com -- circles would represent the groups and the space in the name is to indicate it is a social networking website such as the word space in myspace.com. I was so excited when I got that name, I told my kids that even if we could not secure any funding, the three of us will make this happen. My son, 13 years old, will take care of the CSS and some minor Javascript coding and  my daughter, 11 years old, will take care of the design images and I will take care of the actual programming. I told my kids that circledspace.com will be the means tosecure funds for their college education. We used to talk about the plan and this dream but we knew the mounting task ahead of us.  It was planned that we would start developing circledspaced.com in summer of 2011 as the kids are out of school.   They may work 1 to 2 hours a day while I work on this at night time and weekends, hoping to come up of a small prototype so we may use for securing initial funding and my number goal one is to secure patent money first.   I believe we could accomplish this as my kids are very talented and  I, myself, was able to successfully launch a cake website in 2006.

Then, on Tuesday, June 28th 2011,  a major technology news broke out...  Google launched its social networking product which is Google+ wherein its main component is the Google Circles.   When I read the news I  was shocked...  I felt a sudden weakening of my body, my eyes became teary, and I just had  murmured , my family just lost a dream. Google + Circles is 100% the same as my concept of my circledspace.com. Since that day until now I am still having difficulty sleeping. I had that idea for years. I thought my family could have hit a home run but a very big  and powerful company took it from us because I was not successfully able to patent it.