Could this patent affect social networking sites such as MySpace, Flickr, Twitter and LinkedIn that use a news feed system?
The Palo Alto based social networking company Facebook, Inc. has been awarded a patent bearing Patent No. 7,669,123 for “dynamically providing a news feed about a user of a social network.” Facebook applied for the patent on Aug. 11, 2006. The 16-page patent describes how Facebook presents those status updates, links and more. By Facebook’s own numbers, that’s 60 million status updates per day posted by 35 million users around the world. Facebook’s news feed from its 400 million users has helped the social network far surpass its competitors, which also supply similar digital streams of consciousness.
In the most basic terms, this means Facebook has patented technology that delivers the stuff filling up a user’s newsfeed like shared links, videos and wall posts. All Facebook, the blog that originally uncovered the patent, says the patent does not apply to status updates, but only to “implicit feed stories.” Facebook, however, isn’t commenting on whether it believes the patent covers rival social networks, which all offer similar news feed updates, such as Twitter’s “What’s Happening,” MySpace’s “What are you doing now?” and LinkedIn’s “Network Updates.”
Sites such as MySpace, Flickr, Google Buzz, LinkedIn, Yahoo Mail, and Windows Live all generate some sort of newsfeed where underlying technology generates a list of news items from a user’s network to populate newsfeeds or streams.
ReadWriteWeb envisions a possible scenario where some of these popular social networks could fall prey to Facebook’s Intellectual Property rights. “If offering a stream of updates of the non-status messages of friends is something Facebook alone could deliver, that would be a major loss for the rest of the social web,” Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote for RWW.
Courtesy: www.msnbc.msn.com , www.sfgate.com