Patent #7,669,123, first unearthed by All Facebook, credits Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg and seven other current and former Facebookers as inventors and assigns the rights to the patent to Facebook, Inc.
Depending on what this patent actually covers, Facebook could use it to protect its intellectual property and force other companies with news feeds .
First though, we have to begin to understand what this patent is all about.
Overview: The News Feed Patent
While we’re going to take some time to really dig into this patent, its basics are simple enough. The patent awards Facebook protection for technology “dynamically providing a news feed about a user of a social network.”
While that synopsis is very general and could definitely apply to a lot of well-known social media apps and startups, the patent’s abstract focuses less on status updates and more on the display of stories to the user.
Here is the abstract in its full form:
“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.”As we see it, this patent is focused on the technology that displays the news feed, rather than the delivery of status updates that often compose them.
However, the patent also specifically covers the auto-generation of a user’s activity and the display of that to friends. That means the news updates you get when your friends upload videos and accept friend requests is covered by Facebook’s new patent.
Facebook pioneered news feed technology when it launched its News Feed feature back in 2006. While there was a lot of controversy about it back then, it is now a standard feature on multiple social networks.
The Potential Impact of the Patent
Facebook and its leadership are now credited as the inventors of the news feed, or more specifically several elements of the news feed. The big question that we have to ask is this: Could Facebook force other social media companies to stop using news feeds?
Here are a few potential scenarios we’ve come up with:
1. Facebook sues companies such as MySpace, Twitter and Google to take down their news feed features. It succeeds, pushing Facebook way ahead in the game.Let’s be clear: We don’t know what Facebook wants to do with its patent, and we are not patent lawyers with years of experience in this space. With that said, we do believe this patent could become very significant, very quickly. It covers a lot of technologies that are seemingly in use almost everywhere.
2. Facebook sues companies in defense of its patent. It wins a few and strike out on a few.
3. Facebook sues companies, but the courts don’t side with Facebook because their technologies are significantly different from Facebook’s news feed technology that it doesn’t infringe on the patent.
4. Facebook controls the patent, but doesn’t exercise its right to defend its invention.
If Facebook can make news feed a Facebook-only feature, then it drains the usefulness of countless social networks while boosting its own. However, the process of exercising that patent would get very ugly, and we’re not sure if Facebook has a lot of incentive to jump into the snake pit and incur that type of PR damage.
We’re going to take some more time to research this patent and consult with experts to see what impact this thing could have. In the meantime, let us know what you think about this new development in the comments.
Update: Facebook sent us the following statement:
“The launch of News Feed in 2006 was a pivotal moment in Facebook’s history and changed the way millions of people consumed and discovered information on the site. We’re humbled by the growth and adoption of News Feed over time and pleased with being awarded the patent.”
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