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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.'"
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.
Since when has prior work stopped someone from getting a patent?
The USPO is getting lazy. There is quite a few examples of prior art which would extinguish this useless patent, namely Google News.
If its patented and only usable by one company the idea of everyone aware of the actions of the friends of your friends, then that privacy nightmare will became unpopular.
They used open-source code, namely JavaScript, which is open and free and created a process by leveraging existing technology
more importantly they created a process that others had also already created. every corporate intranet i've built since 1999 has had similar functionality.
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?
As a minimum Google Buzz and Twitter strike me as clearly violating this patent.
Facebook would probably not try to exercise this patent outside of their narrow sphere. The problem comes when they sell this to some patent troll who uses it to try to shut down the next big thing that comes along.
Combined with a couple dozen different patents it presents the appearance of an insurmountable roadblock, even if several of the pieces are fluff patents.
Even if we can't knock some sense into the patent office and expect them to find every existing example, we can extract a pound of flesh from those that apply for patents already in common usage, by imposing mind numbingly sever financial penalties for failing to mention and dispose of existing art in common usage at the time of application.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
They used open-source code, namely JavaScript, which is open and free and created a process by leveraging existing technology.
While I think the patent in question (and virtually all software patents) is bullshit, this part of the argument above is utterly absurd.
Even the most legitimate patents trivially fall into this category of things developed using other things that already exist by leveraging existing technology.
Twitter doesn't do anything like this. It just gives you a flat view from the people you follow, and lets you manually search using hand-entered search terms.
The cake is a pie
>> As a minimum Google Buzz and Twitter strike me
>> as clearly violating this patent.
Where does Buzz or Twitter automatically generate news items based on the activities of other users and include a link so that you can also participate in those activities?
This basically patents the part I hate the most about Facebook. Stupid updates about people feeding the Aquarium Fish or playing Mafia Wars and a link so you can play, too. If this stops other social media sites/apps from adding these stupid games and just sticking to status updates, links, pictures, etc., I'm all for it. I'll switch to one of them, eventually.
-John
Where does Buzz or Twitter automatically generate news items based on the activities of other users and include a link so that you can also participate in those activities?
Not used Buzz yet I see...
http://answers.oreilly.com/topic/1069-google-buzz-5-things-you-need-to-know/
Maybe no so much for Twitter, but Buzz can generate "news items" form a variety of your other google services, and allow others to see and comment upon them.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
As a minimum Google Buzz and Twitter strike me as clearly violating this patent.
Really? I bill tens of hours carefully picking over the specification, the claims, the prosecution history, and the prior art before I ever give my clients an opinion like that, and I never use the word "clearly." "Likely" is about the strongest commitment you'll get, because you don't really know until you've taken the thing to trial and exhausted your appeals.
The problem comes when they sell this to some patent troll who uses it to try to shut down the next big thing that comes along.
Why would they do that if it's as valuable as you think it is?
Even if we can't knock some sense into the patent office and expect them to find every existing example, we can extract a pound of flesh from those that apply for patents already in common usage, by imposing mind numbingly sever financial penalties for failing to mention and dispose of existing art in common usage at the time of application.
Patent applicants and their attorneys are already required to disclose to the patent office any relevant prior art that they're aware of (look up "inequitable conduct"). The penalty for failing to do so is a void patent. If a patentee intentionally held back prior art and then sued a competitor on the bad patent, the trial court could very easily award stiff sanctions. There is absolutely no incentive for holding back known art. Patent attorneys are paranoid about this. If anything, we err far on the side of disclosing stuff that's only marginally relevant rather than be found to have held back prior art. I myself have withdrawn (on the client's instructions) applications that had already been allowed so that we could submit art that we weren't even sure was relevant.
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