MS Patents IM Feature Used Since At Least 1996

splorp! writes "Once again, a company is patenting a feature that another company implemented years before. C|Net's News.com reports that patent no. 6,631,412 grants Microsoft the rights to 'an instant messaging feature that notifies users when the person they are communicating with is typing a message.' Excuse me? Does anyone remember Powwow (now defunct)? I remember using that one back in '96 and it alerted the other people to whom you were chatting that you were typing. Or, alternately, it allowed you to SEE the other people typing in real time. Yeah, Powwow is gone, now, but that doesn't mean those features never existed."

Comments

Re:It's the application date that matters

[Blob Pet]

if you look at the patent, it looks like december 2002.

Re:Even older prior art

[NickFitz]

RTFP. From this week's "great innovation for customers":

Unlike telephonic communication, when participants know that a person is speaking, participants in an instant messaging session do not know that somebody is preparing a message for transmission. Without a cue that the other person is transmitting information, it is difficult to have a smooth conversational flow. One mechanism that addresses this problem is employed by a UNIX "talk" program, which performs a character-by-character transmission of an instant message. That is, each time individual types of a single character on the computer keyboard, that character is transmitted to all other participants in the instant messaging session. Because other participants are essentially watching the person type, there are clear cues that a user is "talking."

However, this approach has several limitations. First, character-by-character transmission greatly increases the flow of network traffic because each character requires one or more data packets to be sent to each participant in the instant messaging session. In addition, many users do not like to be "watched" as they type, as their typing errors and incomplete thoughts are transmitted before they can be corrected. Finally, message recipients are often distracted by watching the flickering screen in which characters appear one time as a complete message is formed. Therefore, it can be appreciated that there is a significant need for a system and method that will provide the desired notification of user activity in a computer network. The present invention provides this, and other advantages, as will be apparent from the following detailed description and accompanying figures.

As far as I can see from a quick reading, the idea is not that you see what people are typing, but that you have an indicator which lets you know that they are typing.

Re:Unix talk

[gowen]

Sheesh, read the friggin patent:

One mechanism that addresses this problem is employed by a UNIX "talk" program, which performs a character-by-character transmission of an instant message. That is, each time individual types of a single character on the computer keyboard, that character is transmitted to all other participants in the instant messaging session. Because other participants are essentially watching the person type, there are clear cues that a user is "talking."

However, this approach has several limitations. First, character-by-character transmission greatly increases the flow of network traffic because each character requires one or more data packets to be sent to each participant in the instant messaging session. In addition, many users do not like to be "watched" as they type, as their typing errors and incomplete thoughts are transmitted before they can be corrected.

RTFP

[Godeke]

If you read the patent, you will see that TALK and other prior chat systems are mentioned in the references and body of the patent. The specific "innovation" here is that the system polls for activity on a timer, and turns on and off the "user typing" message based on activity during the timer period.

While I think that it is absurd that this was granted, it is not any of the things being thrown around on /. as prior art. Even Yahoo's "user is typing" simply toggles on and never turns off if you abandon typing. Is polling periodically obvious? Surely. Remember, the USPO is a profit center, and granting obvious patents brings profit to both them and patent attorneys, so there is no motivation not to allow such simple changes to be patented.

Re:History of "talk"

[acroyear]

As I've posted time and again on every "patent on prior art" Slashdot post since 2000 at least: the PTO has gone on record (including in an interview here at slashdot a couple of years ago) to say that the only source they have or use for Prior Art investigations is their own database. If a patent application has been filed on it, there's prior art. If it hasn't, then there isn't any prior art and it never existed before.

The PTO just automatically assumes that anything one person feels worthy of patenting is something that everybody else should have felt it worthy.

That's it. No google, no interviews with field experts, nothing. If a patent's been filed, there's prior art. If not, then it passes the "new" test.