Unless you’ve spent the last few months living on the moon, you’ve heard of Friendster — the funky, upbeat site for hooking up with like-minded, amiable folks. Fittingly, the original investors in Friendster were also, in real life, actual friends themselves: Jonathan Abrams, who runs Friendster, and Reid Hoffman and Marc Pincus, who respectively run the alternate social-networking sites LinkedIn and Tribe.net. All very chummy.

Until, of course, the money comes along — and the daggers come out. Now that the sites are scrambling for venture capital, the founders are practising all manner of bullet-time CEO jujitsu. While Abram was off securing another $13 million in financing from Benchmark Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, his pals Hoffman and Pincus were sneaking around behind his back: They formed a limited partnership to secretly buy up a $700,000 patent on the “Six Degrees” technology that underpins all three sites. Obviously, if they own the technology, they could drive Friendster out of business in a flash. As ZDNet reports:

“I didn’t involve Jonathan because I thought Kleiner and Benchmark would try to bid me out,” Hoffman said. “It’s better to be safe than sorry.” Hoffman described the Six Degrees patent as “central to this field.”

I wonder if Abrams is off erasing the testimonials he wrote on Friendster for his good pals Hoffman and Pincus?

(Thanks to Jeff Heer for finding this one!)