Seems to me that ‘personal data mining’ as microsoft calls it, has been around for quite some time in various forms….not sure how they can slap a patent on it in the year 2008.
The data mining component 112 can [...]

Andrew Chen sums it up perfectly,
Viral marketing is not a marketing strategy
Many times, viral marketing is seen as a “marketing strategy” that is interchangeable with other methods of acquiring users. That is, you go through three steps:

Develop your product
Think through [...]