Facebook was on Tuesday granted a U.S. Patents for aspects of its news feed, as was first reported by AllFacebook. The patent, which covers methods for dynamically parsing and distributing information about what users have done on a social network to other users of that social network, names CEO Mark Zuckerberg as inventor along with other Facebook engineers and product people. It was originally filed in August 2006, before the Facebook news feed launched that September.
The patent is particularly valuable because news-feed style communication has become pervasive since it was launched on Facebook. However, it’s not clear that there aren’t precedents for the technology; for instance, the social network Multiply.com had a similar interface for keeping track of friends’ actions before Facebook launched its own.
Facebook, which said in a statement it was “humbled” and “pleased” by the patent, may well choose not to enforce it. In fact, one of the more important social networking patents, from the early site Six Degrees, was bought by LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman and Tribe.net/Zynga’s Mark Pincus explicitly to promote an open playing field for the sector by taking it away from people who might choose to enforce it in the courts. However Friendster, which was recently bought by a Malaysian company, made much of the fact that had obtained five U.S. social networking patents, at times using the patents to scare off the competition, at least in the press.
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