Thanks for correction. I treat NDAs as enforceable, I stick by my word. Just to be clear: I am entirely against IP theft (taking actual source code from a company).
Nonetheless the idea of "social network for X" is not unique and deserves no protection similar to what a chip architecture or a machine learning algorithm may receive. Not that there aren't ambiguous examples e.g., using SVMs to categorize users of a social network or using an emulated RISC architecture to profile the GUI front-end of a web application (such as a social network) but in the cases the idea is not very useful without the engineering chops to put it into use.
Nonetheless the idea of "social network for X" is not unique and deserves no protection similar to what a chip architecture or a machine learning algorithm may receive. Not that there aren't ambiguous examples e.g., using SVMs to categorize users of a social network or using an emulated RISC architecture to profile the GUI front-end of a web application (such as a social network) but in the cases the idea is not very useful without the engineering chops to put it into use.