When the early social search engine Wowd started to wind down last year, its assets were divided among three parties: Facebook, which “acqhired” seven of its engineers and licensed its technology; Jildy, a new start-up created by a Wowd co-founder and backed by Wowd’s venture capitalists, that also licensed the technology; and a “large public company” that bought the patents outright. Public records now show the buyer was Google. So yes, indeed, there is a body of social search intellectual property — around things like user-driven ranking of Web pages and a distributed file system — that three companies have the rights to use: Google, Facebook and the virtually unknown start-up Jildy. Last week Jildy released its very first product: An iPhone app for clustering and sorting Facebook friends and status updates. The Jildy interface is rudimentary and so far only includes Facebook data, but it already provides some interesting tools Read More