Facebook Granted Patent on the News Feed - This Could Be Very Big
Facebook has been granted a patent on the Newsfeed, "displaying a news feed in a social network environment." Nick O'Neill at AllFacebook found the patent first and says it could be "one of the most significant social web patents" in a decade.
If all algorithmic ranking and delivery of social activity updates to social network users falls under this patent Facebook applied for in August 2006 (one month before it launched its controversial Newsfeed) then there's going to be a whole lot of trouble for sites all over the web. We've got calls and emails in with Facebook PR, we're going to start thinking and reading up about what this could mean but for now, please join us over on Google Buzz to discuss this story as it unfolds in real time. Our coverage continues below.
Working Summary: This patent appears to cover primarily implicit user activity updates (such as "person X changed their employer listed or their relationship status or became friends with person Y") and the dynamic ranking of those items when delivered in the context of a social network. In contemporary Facebook terms, it would probably cover the News Feed but not the status messages in the Live Feed. It would probably not impact what Twitter is doing today. It could impact any number of other social networks - like LinkedIn, Ning and other systems not created yet. But it's possible that Facebook will only use this patent defensively. Time will tell what the company's intentions are.
18 months ago we wrote the following, as site after site adopted a Newsfeed model for delivering updates to users:
Today we're ready to declare The Newsfeed the dominant internet metaphor of the day; the cascading waterfall of updates from your friends, with comments swirling even around those - that model is everywhere now!
MySpace, Flickr, Yahoo!, Twitter (?), the sharing part of Google Reader and even Google Buzz - do all of these sites have technology at the center of their social experiences that falls under this new patent of Facebook's? Twitter probably doesn't fall under this patent because the filing
Text of the Patent
Here's the abstract for the patent, filed August 11th, 2006, Mark Zuckerberg listed as the first inventor:
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.
An initial response from Google's Chris Messina, a leader of the Activity Streams standards organization that includes Facebook.
I hope that this is defensive and Facebook doesn't intent to enforce this patent. this is why the Open Web Foundation was instantiated, so we could work on these kinds of features without any one organization invoking patent rights. this is just one more example of how the patent system isn't architected to support the right kind of innovation.[For all the other websites using activity streams-like formats] if this patent gets enforced, you could do it in reverse chronological order where there is no algorithmic ranking or you could license this technology from Facebook. i don't know what this means for Facebook's Platform and Connect.
It sounds crazy, but did Facebook invent the algorithm-driven newsfeed? Messina wasn't quite willing to grant that in our conversation, but it's a tough call. "Facebook certainly built the whole phenomena around the newsfeed," he said.
Don't miss: Dave Winer's take on this news.
Nick O'Neill has published the following update to his story, but I'm not buying his conclusion:
It appears that this patent surrounds implicit actions. This means status updates, which is what Twitter is based on, are not part of this patent. Instead, this is about stories about the actions of a user's friends. While still significant, the implications for competing social networks may be less substantial.
Implicit actions are a very big deal. LinkedIn contacts making new connections or changing their jobs would be the most immediate example that comes to mind. 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.
There's an active conversation going on our Google Buzz page for this topic, too.
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That sounds pretty vulnerable to obviousness. This is just a run-of-the-mill defensive patent, from the looks of it. RSS goes way back, and was intended to have readers embedded in all sorts of things.
It might fall under the patent - but it speaks of one method only - and all those sites use their own methods.
I don't know if that would fall under 'obvious' or not. Sillier things have been patented.
My 2c: This is more an example of what's wrong with the patent system than any kind of next big thing in social networking.
Its all an obvious progression. Ironically Google Buzz - the chosen form to discuss this, is going to be limited by this patent.
Yet another horseshit patent. Hell, I was using Twitter before this patent was even filed.
Reminds me of Amazon's patent on what is essentially mod_rewrite. Everyone does it, is a natural evolution of web technology, and you were not the first to do it.
And people want to see what is current all the time, and this patent could be big?
Ok, Facebook does show a whole lot of things in your "Top News" section, but it was nothing that should have a patent, as a FB user for a long time, Facebook does not use an algorithm all the time, it also displays heavily commented items very frequently in that feed, so do every tom dick and harry website, any website could come up with that kind of thing. I am pretty much sure that someone will patent this comment form tomorrow, such kind of shit gets through the patent monitoring group then we can expect this at the least.
What is next patent on how to eat? Just ridiculous. Unless it is a radical improvement they shouldn't give patent like this.
so what does this mean for the social networks that had a feed before facebook did? i should think that would mean that facebook couldn't get a patent since other sites had been doing this long before they did. but obviously i don't know much about patents.
Looks like there's going to be more:
U.S. Appl. No. 11/639,655, Mark Zuckerberg, Systems and Methods for Social Mapping, filed Dec. 14, 2006. cited by other .
U.S. Appl. No. 11/493,291, Mark Zuckerberg, Systems and Methods for Dynamically Generating a Privacy Summary, filed Jul. 25, 2006. cited by other
U.S. Appl. No. 11/503,037, Mark Zuckerberg, Systems and Methods for Providing Dynamically Selected Media Content to a User of an Electronic Device in a Social Network Environment, filed Aug. 11, 2006. cited by other .
U.S. Appl. No. 11/499,093, Mark Zuckerberg, Systems and Methods for Dynamically Generating Segmented Community Flyers, filed Aug. 2, 2006. cited by other .
U.S. Appl. No. 11/580,210, Mark Zuckerberg, System and Method for Tagging Digital Media, filed Oct. 11, 2006. cited by other .
U.S. Appl. No. 12/156,091, Mark Zuckerberg, Systems and Methods for Auction-Based Polling, filed May 28, 2008. cited by other .
Goodreads CEO said they developed / used it before Facebook in a Mixergy.com interview:
"One of the sites we built, that photo-sharing site I mentioned, was called ringo.com. It had a news feed before Facebook did. Its position was "see your friends' photos". You would add photos and there was a news feed that had all your friends' photos and our whole company, an 80-person company used this every day and every day there was an email update with everyone's photos from the weekend or the day before and it was really amazing because you really got to know everyone in the company much better than you did by just talking to them because you got to see where they were and then you had a basis for a conversation."
http://mixergy.com/goodreads-otis-chandler/
So..if Apple is the new MicroSoft and Google is the new Apple, is FaceBook then the new Google or the new Oracle?
Why can’t I log into my facebook patents?
Forget Facebook, they're not the ones who are approving these common practice patents. We've all been using news feed features for site overviews and user profiles for years; I vote we all take a visit to this so called 'patent office' to educate them - protest time! before someone patents creating a file with PHP and HTML in! :P
This doesn't have anything to do with your article, but I went to high school with a couple of the guys on your news feed. Small (facebook) world.
The Patent Office bureaucracy thrives on software and web patents. It generates more and more useless work for them. The costs we are all paying are huge. Not simply for their salaries. The waste in patents cost is in thousands of patent lawyers and software engineers wasted work, in court litigation, in slowing the innovation, in reducing our competitiveness.
Software and web innovations fall under the algorithms and ideas, neither of which was ever intended to be patentable! It takes hours of lawyer obfuscation to disguise the "algorithms" and "ideas" as "methods". This idiotic trick is enough to make the Patent Office happy to keep approving and to keep growing their bureaucracy.
Most of these patents are not really enforceable, but they are like sand poured in the mechanism of Internet.
Practically every _good_ software developer will agree that patents are not needed to motivate them.
It is a pure waste
An INCREDIBLY bad patent. commentary here:
http://answerguy.com/2010/02/25/patents-must-be-unique-facebook-7669123/
It will make help face-book revenue to increase. Nothing else because new users will join who wants to gt updated only on the important things only
Thank you for this very interesting article Marshall.
The Elgg Open Source social engine had RSS feeds in respect of individual users activity since early 2005. Also your connections activity and "all users" activity.
Practically every _good_ software developer will agree that patents are not needed to motivate them.