Facebook Patents the News Feed

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.'"

Comments

Software patents are evil

[butlerm]

Yet another example of why software patents are a threat to the health of the republic. The sad thing is that Facebook probably actually thinks this is an "invention".

Really Simple Syndication

[Tolkien]

They've just patented RSS feeds. Idiots.

Re:Really Simple Syndication

[Tolkien]

Man. I was in the middle of writing a rather lengthy post meant to contradict you and then I RTFA. In short, you're right, but it's hardly a "reader" rather the method for constructing the feed of relevant data in the first place. In any case, I'm sure we can all agree that this is a worthless patent to begin with.