Watch out, Twitter and MySpace.
Facebook was recently awarded a Patent over their “News Feed,” a method of displaying news on social networking sites. The News Feed was introduced in 2006 and has been edited, but never abandoned, since the implementation.
Breaking news reports indicate that the method of the Patent is: “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.”
This recent development is sure to prompt other social networking sites to distinguish their “feeds” from Facebook in order to avoid any possible suits. MySpace’s news feature has been coined a “stream,” but the question remains, regardless of what the feature is named, whether the underlying method of creating and displaying the information is the same.
We’ll be sure to watch to see how Facebook is going to use this new patent in the upcoming months.
Tags: patent
