Slashdot Mirror
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."
With all the mobile companies already suing each other, this should just add more..
Awesome.
Companies patent widely implemented ideas and sue everyone. Oh wait, that's not new.
Well the current purpose of the patent system is to provide work and revenue for lawyers. Its a way for them to attach themselves like parasites to the software buisness.
Perhaps instead of suing each other and licencing everything they could all get together and help get rid of software patents. Just imagine the money they could save on lawyers, in both applying for the patents, and defending against them.
How is it that every time a patent article is posted slashdot never posts the claims and always posts something from the abstract or the title which gives the patent holder no rights at all. The first claim is "1. A method of sharing locations of users participating in a social networking service at a geographic location, the method executed by a computer system and comprising: receiving location information and status information from a mobile device of a first user of the social networking service, the location information representing a geographic location of the first user, the status information manually provided by the first user on an input module of the mobile device; associating the location information with the status information of the first user in a database; and sending the status information and the location information of the first user to a second user for display. "
While that claim is still pretty broad it isn't nearly as broad as the thing posted in the summary.
Maybe some day /. will understand how to look at a patent but it probably won't be any time soon.
Polo!
*Cease and disist letter arrives in mail
Patent filed Feb 28th, 2007 by Facebook Announced November 8th, 2006 by Helio GFY Facebook
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.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
A patent on patenting would never be upheld because it would derail the gravy train for the legal industry.
This is patent is so silly that prior art can be found anywhere. For example XMPP folks have specs initially published in 2003 describing the same exact scenario:
http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0080.html (User Location)
This document defines a format for capturing data about an entity's geographical location (geoloc). The format defined herein can describe most earthbound geographical locations, especially locations that may change fairly frequently. Potential uses for this approach include:
Publishing location information to a set of subscribers.
Querying another entity for its location.
Sending location information to another entity.
Attaching location information to presence.
Geographical location is captured in terms of Global Positioning System (GPS) coordinates as well as civil location (city, street, building, etc.).