Mark Zuckerberg, Inventor

theodp writes "Move over, Thomas Edison. Here comes Mark Zuckerberg, inventor extraordinaire. Zuck's still waiting for that elusive first patent to be issued, but take a gander at the Facebook founder's patent application for Dynamically Generating a Privacy Summary to get an idea of what's in the works. After you check boxes on a form to indicate that 'Everyone from San Francisco, CA, Social Network Provider, and Harvard' can see your profile, Zuckerberg's 'invention' will miraculously display: 'People from San Francisco, CA, Social Network Provider, and Harvard can see your profile.' How dare Rolling Stone question his inventiveness!"

Comments

Slashdot stories have gotten very sarcastic lately

[Anonymous Coward]

Some deserve it. But I don't read this site for editorials, I read it for some of the scientists and engineers that will comment after the fact.

But this kind of initial submission makes it hard to even read the front page.

What a genius...

[edwebdev]

Maybe Mark should also patent using a database to store information.

Re:What a genius...

[Roy Hobbs]

I'm still waiting on my patent for my public toilet preparation methodology.

Re:What a genius...

[snl2587]

I believe that patent was once held by Honeywell (please correct me if I'm wrong), so, fortunately, that's one area Mark wouldn't be able to get his hands on. Plus the prior art would be ridiculous.

Re:What a genius...

[lottameez]

Is that where you stuff toilet paper in every available gap so that no one can see thru the cracks to see what you are doing? If so, I hate to inform you there's a guy that works at Fannie Mae that has prior art on that one.

Re:What a genius...

[JCSoRocks]

...'cause the prior art on this won't already be ridiculous...

Seriously though - this whole situation is bonkers. Can we just start making people take IQ tests of some sort before being allowed to apply for a patent? Sort of the intellectual equivalent of "must be this tall to ride this ride". Or maybe they just need to add a new department to the USPTO that performs a "Is this completely f***ing retarded" test on all IT patent applications before the rest of the office even sees them.

Re:What a genius...

[homey of my owney]

I... I'm speechless... The man really is a genius... Maybe the rest of us should throw in the towel.

Grapes Taste Bitter To You?

[darkmeridian]

I read the Rolling Stone article and it was a hoot. All the challengers to Mark Zuckerberg come off as self-important and jealous douchebags.

For example, Aaron Greenspan claims to have invented the concept of an online facebook and is trying to cancel Facebook's trademark. Greenspan dismissed Zuckberg by writing, "Gates was shrewd, calculating and insanely competitive, bordering on autistic. Mark was inarticulate and naive."
Yeah, Mark was so naive he stole your idea and made himself into a billionaire.

There were lots of social networking sites before Facebook. The idea wasn't new. Mark Zuckberg pushes a product that is faster, more reliable, and for a while was less annoying to use than its competitors. His competitors just come off as incredible losers here.

Re:Grapes Taste Bitter To You?

[MikeBabcock]

I don't really understand the view that because someone succeeded they must be smart. This isn't necessarily true at all. Success is often a matter of luck or timing that had nothing to do with skill.

For example, Apple didn't succeed with their Newton handheld but Palm computing did with their Pilot. Most people agree its a case of market timing, even though the Newton was unarguably a more powerful device all-round.

Whether Mark stole an idea or not should be argued on its own merits, whether he succeeded in the resulting application of that theft or not.

People (with money) steal ideas all the time and then hire people to implement it for them leaving true inventors empty handed. Ask the inventor of the Yo-yo how his patent fights against big companies have been for example.

No matter what you were told in school, market forces are NOT fair. They may determine several things, but determining who DESERVES credit or compensation is not one of them.

Re:Grapes Taste Bitter To You?

[darkmeridian]

I agree with you: ruthless capitalism doesn't determine if you're right or not. Mark Zuckerberg may not be a smart dude and his rise to power may not be fair.

However, the critics cited in the Rolling Stone article are saying that Mark Zuckerberg was not a ruthless capitalist, which is plainly ridiculous. I mean, Greenspan said the following about Zuckerberg: "The way he talked, the way he dressed, everything about him screamed immature. He seemed unprofessional. I had run a company since I was 15. It just didn't seem like he got it. That whole persona just didn't impress me." This guy, who ran a company since he was 15, did not approve of Mark Zuckerberg. Yet Zuckerberg is the 24-year old BILLIONAIRE and Greenspan isn't. For Greenspan and the others to trash Zuckerberg's business acumen is the height of stupidity.

Re:Grapes Taste Bitter To You?

[spun]

For Greenspan and the others to trash Zuckerberg's business acumen is the height of stupidity. Really? No one ever succeeded through dumb luck? Success is a guarantee of competence? I suppose the fact that you aren't a billionaire proves you are incompetent? Zuckerberg is a schmuck who lucked out, nothing more.

Re:Grapes Taste Bitter To You?

[Chemisor]

> I don't really understand the view that because someone succeeded they must be smart. This isn't
> necessarily true at all. Success is often a matter of luck or timing that had nothing to do with skill.

It has everything to do with skill. It just not necessarily the skill you have, so it might look like magic to you instead. Could I have invented Facebook, for example? Technically, sure. There's nothing difficult about it; I would probably have even done a better job with the implementation. Why didn't I? Because I don't need it and I can't imagine why it would be useful, and so wouldn't have ever thought of it as a sellable idea. In fact, I still can't understand what all those social networking sites are for. It's not an idea that has any meaning to my generation. Yes, I tried it. I have a MySpace profile. I puttered around the site for a few days and just couldn't figure out what the big fuss was about. It took some serious amount of cultural knowledge to see that this idea would sell. I don't know why it sells, but that's why I'm not the Facebook owner. It is not about luck or timing here. It's about knowing things I do not.

Re:Grapes Taste Bitter To You?

[ThinkComp]

Hi there,

I don't know who you are, but I'm Aaron. So I thought I'd clarify something.

The Rolling Stone article got a lot wrong unfortunately. In my book, which sadly the reporter did not read too closely, I referred to Mark as naive in reference to a specific event: his not knowing A) what Viacom was, B) that MTV was part of it (despite having ambitions to create the next MTV), and C) that Viacom purchased other companies. To me, that seemed to illustrate a certain level of naivete at the time. I'm sure Mark is more familiar with Viacom now, since they offered to buy Facebook long ago.

Also, for the record, Mark is a paper billionaire, not a billionaire yet. I have to give him some credit for that, but when the methods of achieving that kind of success amount to theft and deception on a such a grand scale, it's hard to give too much credit.

You're free to think whatever you want about me, of course, but I did want to make sure that people have their facts straight.

Aaron

Re:Grapes Taste Bitter To You?

[Lumpy]

There are 3 facts about success.

1 - it about WHO you know and WHO knows you. Having the right network will make you a CEO.

2 - it's all about timing. I dont care how innovative your idea or product is, if it's not the right time for it, it will fail.

3 - Dumb luck. Many successes confound everyone. Twitter for example, what an inane idea, yet people are taking to it like flies.

Being a genius, inventor, or guru means NOTHING. Look at Tesla. he actually invented radio, AC power, and 90% of what we use today. Problem is other turds like Marconi used Tesla's ideas (and patents) to beat him to the patent office. Yet History still shows incorrectly as Marconi as the inventor of radio, even though congress and other bodies overturned the claims and gave it to Tesla. He died a pauper alone in his apartment. Tesla was as smart as Einstein if not smarter. He had bad timing and was did not have the right network.

Re:Grapes Taste Bitter To You?

[fictionpuss]

but I did want to make sure that people have their facts straight. You must be new here.

Re:Grapes Taste Bitter To You?

[NilObject]

I think a lot of the success of Facebook is attributable to the fact that it was college-only at first. It was a walled garden, which was a huge draw for people who wanted the social networking features without dealing with insane 14-year-olds and 50-year-old perverts. By the time Facebook opened up to both groups, however, college students were too heavily invested in it to be bothered to switch. And there wasn't much else to switch to, really.

I really miss the old days of Facebook, when you updated your profile all the time and joined/created all kinds of crazy groups for goofs. It was a lot of fun back then. Now my entire family has added me as a friend and all my exes reload my profile all day waiting to see if, by chance, I've become a miserable hermit. I can't post a picture without mentally making sure it's ok for my entire extended family and all future potential connections (bosses, etc.)

Re:Grapes Taste Bitter To You?

[spun]

Luck may play a part, insofar as nobody can really predict with any accuracy the thoughts and actions of millions of whims, but I haven't seen any popular products whose popularity can't actually be explained.

Pet Rocks. Everybody Loves Raymond. Cabbage Patch Kids. Tila Tequila. George W. Bush. Perhaps in hindsight you can explain them, but that is meaningless. Does your explanation provide any predictive power, or does it just fit itself to observed facts?

Sometimes, the only thing that makes a product popular is the fact that it is popular. It's the network effect. Most of the time, when people are free to do what they choose, they choose to imitate other people. Things become popular just because random fluctuations in popularity lead to a runaway feedback loop of imitation.

But Lumpy was talking about luck in general terms. Sometimes people know the right people, have the timing right, even have a good idea, but they still don't get the break. On the other hand, luck can trump everything else. Think of the inventions that were found while looking for something completely different.

Re:Grapes Taste Bitter To You?

[sideshow]

Yet Zuckerberg is the 24-year old BILLIONAIRE and Greenspan isn't.

Billionaire? Really? Is all that money on a piece of paper, or in his bank account?

Until Facebook has (at the very least) an IPO, Zuckerberg isn't a billionaire, he just owns part of an entity that some people believe to be worth billions.

Re:Grapes Taste Bitter To You?

[jstockdale]

Ok. So How about this for a non-self-important, non-jealous, non-douchey response:

Disclaimer: I happen to know many of Mark's friends, as well as having gone to school @ Stanford when Facebook made it's break-through in the beta stages. I've been a member for ages, and seen pretty much everything. I almost tried to work there, but when I interviewed I knew it wasn't the place for me.

Now to go on. Zuck, and Facebook by extension, really do think they know better than their users and everyone else. Their opt-out marketing ploys and from-the-first-day terrible privacy and retention policy's (go to the picture bucket for something you deleted. see it still? yeah, me too.) show their true colors as a data aggregation service.

They managed to create a token service that in exchange for hundreds of dollars of personal information (ie. your contact info is generally accepted as being worth $5. For browsing habits, preferences, etc. go up an order of magnitude), they give you shiny trinkets and a simplified website.

Zuck and many of his friends are more concerned with how they're going to cash out than any social good that they could bring from the service. Time and time again they demonstrate how little they are concerned by the preferences of their users, and believe that huge privacy and datamining fau paux's can be made up for by a well-worded apology (no doubt, written by their writing staff).

Do me a favor, and don't defend him. He doesn't deserve his success, and although he's been lucky, I expect the luck to run out before they sell out for their desired Billions.

In fact, how about this:

I'll put a $5k bounty on a very well written, adaptable Facebook scraper that can transfer all personal information and friends from their platform, to OpenSocial or a platform of my choosing.

Watch Facebook's bottom line once a altruistic company comes along with the same service.

Re:WOW

[morgan_greywolf]

I thought you weren't allowed to get a patent for something that's considered basic functionality?

No, you aren't allowed to patent something that is either prior art (someone else did it first) or obvious to someone skilled in the trade.

This would fall in the latter category. It's obvious that anyone who develops Web sites that you can do dynamic pages, so that means you can do dynamic legal agreements.

Duh.

Edison is a pretty good comparison

[MosesJones]

While I know its heresy to say it... Edison did just plain steal a lot of ideas and then pass them off as his own inventions. In fact the lack of global patent protection was a major reason for Edison becoming the person he did, in reality he lived off the inventions of others.

Edison was a patent troll ;)

It isn't about the technology

[Animats]

Facebook is a really good business idea. Technically it's uninteresting, but socially it's brilliant.

It also has more revenue per employee than almost anything else. Facebook, the company, is tiny. For their growth period to a billion-dollar company, they were in a little 3-story building on Litton in Palo Alto, between a yoga studio and a beauty salon. (There something about those few downtown blocks of Palo Alto. PayPal, Facebook, Alta Vista, and a host of other well-known names all started within a three block area. PayPal started above the bike shop. )

Facebook seems to hire based on Facebook. The women coming out of the building are good looking and the guys are hunks.

Re:It isn't about the technology

[eln]

Facebook seems to hire based on Facebook. The women coming out of the building are good looking and the guys are hunks. I think you're confused. The people you're seeing coming out of the building are coming from the yoga studio and the beauty salon. The Facebook employees come and go through the back door under the cover of darkness, like all geeks.

ConnectU

[thebonafortuna]

If this guy is the Thomas Edison of the 21st century, its no wonder we don't have flying cars.

Don't hate the player, hate the game.

[nine-times]

Seriously, hate the game, i.e. the patent system. It makes a lot of sense for companies to patent everything they possibly can, if only for defensive purposes. If the patent is accepted, cool, you have another patent to sit on. If it's not accepted, oh well, you lost some time and money. There's no real reason not to try to patent any little thought that passes through your mind, no matter how stupid or banal.

There are probably other reasons to hate this guy. Being even somewhat responsible for Facebook is probably enough. But filing for frivolous patents is just the way you do business these days, so nothing to get excited about there. It's just an indication that (in case you haven't figured it out) the patent system is in serious need of reform.

Re:Did that lawsuit ever get settled?

[slew]

Although there is a rumor going around about a settlement, apparently, at least something is still on-going....

The last entry in June 4, indicates a hearing and exihibits were being submitted so there's a probably a settlement conference on this, but maybe it hit some sort of last minute snag...

Re:Slashdot stories have gotten very sarcastic lat

[mujadaddy]

Wait, this site has thingies above the comments? Never noticed.

My application

[thatskinnyguy]

With something this obvious being patented, I think I'm going to patent my method of inspiring air in order to convert suspended iron into iron oxide in a liquid medium in order to live. I'll make a mint!