Facebook Patents Location Social Networking

bizwriter writes "Facebook just received a patent with broad claims that would seem to cover much of what Google (GOOG) Latitude, Foursquare, Gowalla, and others try to do in letting users share their locations with others. Patent number 7,809,805, called 'Systems and methods for automatically locating web-based social network members,' covers people manually entering a status, sending that and their location from a wireless device, and sharing both the status and location with others. Facebook's corporate value just took a big jump — and a number of other companies might have to either challenge the patent's validity or consider licensing deals."

Comments

Prior art

[ntheory]

Patent filed Feb 28th, 2007 by Facebook Announced November 8th, 2006 by Helio GFY Facebook

Prior Art? APRS

[Bill_the_Engineer]

As an old amateur radio operator I must ask. How is location based social networking different than APRS that's been in use for over a decade?

Operators with an attached GPS had their location updated automatically, Operators without a GPS entered their location manually, and the location was passed with each message packet. There were web pages that allowed people not currently on-the-air to monitor the communications via http.