However, Facebook didn’t have time to react to Yahoo’s statement, with Barry Schnitt, a spokesman for Facebook clarifying “Yahoo contacted us the same time they called The New York Times and so we haven’t had the opportunity to fully evaluate their claims.”

In a strategic review late last year, Yahoo discussed the value of more than 1,000 of its patents and talked up the chances of potentially selling stakes to outside investors.

The patents being discussed with Facebook include some of those that were first granted to Yahoo, according to a report from the New York Times. It also gained a slew of patents when it acquired Overture Services, a search-advertising company, in 2003. Overture services had previously sued companies like Google over issues pertaining to intellectual property.

In addition to Yahoo, a number of other internet technology companies such as Amazon and Microsoft hold an abundance of patents that deal with the modern web. Amazon, for example, holds a patent on a “social networking system capable of notifying users of profile updates made by their contacts,” which also seems like basic Facebook feature.

According to a report on All Things D, even many tech-gurus, such as LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman (who co-owns the seminal Six Degrees patent for constructing a networking database and system) — hold a number of critical social networking patents, too.

Few possibilities that could be the turnout of this patent war: either Yahoo could lose to Facebook, or they could settle, or there could even be third-parties circling to take advantage of this situation.

In any case, time is bound to show where this road will lead.