Facebook Gets News Feed Patent Granted

Shevonne authors at ChicWriter.com and wrote this article on behalf of TopHost.Gr, a Greek web host that offers shared hosting.

This week, Facebook was granted a patent for their “news feed” that was submitted in 2006.  The news feed is the first thing that you see when you log into the popular social networking site.

It is a way for you to keep up with what is the latest and greatest with your Facebook friends.

The abstract for the patent states:

“A method for displaying a news feed in a social network environment is described. The method includes generating news items regarding activities associated with a user of a social network environment and attaching an informational link associated with at least one of the activities, to at least one of the news items, as well as limiting access to the news items to a predetermined set of viewers and assigning an order to the news items. The method further may further include displaying the news items in the assigned order to at least one viewing user of the predetermined set of viewers and dynamically limiting the number of news items displayed.”

So, What’s Next?

This has caused concern throughout the webosphere because many social networking sites have similar services.  Additionally, Facebook was not the first to come up with this design.  Many of the features used in the Facebook news feed, such are Likes, are also being used by other services.  Social aggregators, like FriendFeed, have been doing this before Facebook became privy to it. However, these new features that have been added after the patent was submitted in 2006 will probably not be included.

The main question is “Will Facebook enforce this patent?”  Twitter has a feed that displays the latest tweets from the people you follow.  LinkedIn shows the updates from your connections and applications.  Google now has Buzz that is a social aggregator.  It is something that no one knows the answer to, but they are awaiting anxiously to see what Facebook does with this patent.

However, due to the difference between Facebook’s newsfeed in 2006 and today, many of these social networking sites can have ways around it.  Twitter can say that it’s a microblogging service, which has nothing to do with status updates.  LinkedIn can say that it’s only tailored to business.  Google can say that it’s a social aggregator, and not really providing updates on specific people.  We will definitely be on the lookout to see who this story develops.