Facebook Patents The News Feed

Written by james | 26 February 2010
Posted in Social Media

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facebook logo lens flare Earlier this week, Facebook acquired a patent that poses to threaten the rest of the social media world. The biggest social network in the world has patented the news feed. Patent #7,669,123, refers to Facebook’s patent of the news feed, which was awarded to Facebook this Tuesday. It credits Mark Zuckerburg and seven other early Facebook users as the inventors, and assigns the rights for the patent to Facebook Inc.

Depending on what, exactly, the patent covers, Facebook could use it to not only protect their intellectual property, but they could also force other social networks so dismiss or change their technologies for how they inform everyone about actions people within their social circle are performing. This could show some rather large implications for other social networks that use news feeds, not to mention any other sites that use them.

Facebook has now released a statement on the matter, “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.”

Facebook had submitted the patent to protect the technology for “dynamically providing a news feed about a user of a social network”. What they mean by this is described in the diagram below. Although very general, this could affect a large number of Websites, including many well known social media apps and start-ups. But the actual official patent description pays more attention to the display of stories about the actions of Facebook friends.

Facebook patent diagram

The official patent description says: “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 now see, the patent is mainly focusing on the technology that displays the news feed and the auto-generation of stories about the actions of other users’ and the display of it to their friends. That means it covers updates that you get when your friends upload videos, photos, accept friend requests, make achievements on games/apps and any other actions that they perform on that social network.

While there was some commotion over the original launch of the Facebook news feed back in 2006, it has now become commonplace amongst all social media sites and social networks. Facebook and their leaders are now credited as the inventors of the news feed, or at least most of the specific elements of it. The question that should be running through our heads is, ‘Can Facebook use this patent to stop other social networks using a news feed, and if they can, will they?’

If Facebook do decide to try and push the competition out, there are a few possible outcomes that we can see happening. Facebook could sue other companies that use news feeds, to take those news feeds down or remove any technology included in the patent. If Facebook wins, it will push them far out of reach from any competitors. If they win some, but also lose some, it is still likely to push them ahead by a significant amount, and get most other social networks to change their technologies. Then again, maybe the way everyone else creates their news feeds may be slightly different enough to not infringe on Facebook’s patent, making it fairly useless. Hopefully Facebook will decide not to use the patent to pursue legal actions against other social networks and get rid of their news feeds, but I will advise you not to hold your breath on that one.

We have no idea what Facebook will be doing with this patent or what they can do and to what extent. We know they can try to do something but we don’t know if they will or if it will work. After all we’re web designers, not lawyers! We do know that this could be bad news for other social networks, even if all Facebook is looking for is to be recognised as inventors of the news feed. So watch out for new news on the subject if you're a dedicated user of a smaller social network that uses a news feed, you’ll need to be keeping track of what Facebook wants to do.