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Facebook Patents the News Feed

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the hope-for-narrow-focus dept.

daedae writes "It seems Facebook has been granted a patent for the news feed, as a method of monitoring activities, storing them in a database, and displaying an appropriate set of activities to an appropriate set of users. 'That sounds pretty broad, and the social-networking world was all atwitter at the possible ramifications. Writing for ReadWriteWeb, Marshall Kirkpatrick proclaimed, "This could be very big. ... MySpace, Flickr, Yahoo, Twitter (?), the sharing part of Google Reader, and even Google Buzz — do all of these sites have technology at the center of their social experiences that falls under this new patent of Facebook's?" The patent may not be that broad. Nick O'Neill at the All Facebook blog wrote that the patent doesn't appear to cover status updates as used by Twitter. "It appears that this patent surrounds implicit actions. This means status updates, which is what Twitter is based on, are not part of this patent. ... Instead, this is about stories about the actions of a user's friends. While still significant, the implications for competing social networks may be less substantial," O'Neill wrote.'"

4 of 96 comments (clear)

  1. where and order by by sopssa · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Here's the patent info.

    There are existing mechanisms that allow a user to display information about other users. Some mechanisms may allow the user to select particular news items for immediate viewing. Typically, however, these news items are disparate and disorganized. In other words, the user must spend time researching a news topic by searching for, identifying, and reading individual news items that are not presented in a coherent, consolidated manner. Often, many of the news are not relevant to the user. Just as often, the user remains unaware of the existence of some news items that were not captured in the user's research. What is needed is an automatically generated display that contains information relevant to a user about another user of a social network.

    So what they invented is a couple of WHERE and ORDER BY clauses in a sql query based on what the algorithm thinks is relevant to the user?

    Sounds like this is the second coming of Einstein.

    1. Re:where and order by by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      We're in a death-spiral where all companies patent everything, because everybody else is doing it. Welcome to government sanctioned anti-competition.

  2. This isn't possible and this is what it means by Kanel · · Score: 3, Interesting

    You can't patent something that has already been published or is out in the open. The Facebook news is well known so this means one of two things:

    1) This is a patent that was filed years ago, before facebook launched the feed. In the years since the filing, facebook has probably developed their feed away from the original proposal in the patent

    2) The patent contains something new that facebook has not implemented in today's facebook and which is not published elsewhere. In that case, what?

  3. How long? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    How long until someone patents writing?

    Or, to be simpler, what happens if someone patents patents?

    What is the world is coming to?

    We, as species, are only strong _because_ we share knowledge. All this infighting... what are we waiting for?

    An alien/animal intelligent enemy that unites us?

    Pathetic.