Just to make things clear for anyone who might see these comments, and may have seen some of the othter press on the Facebook patent, Facebook’s newsfeed patent wasn’t on the use of newsfeeds by social networking sites, but rather the automated notifications within those newsfeeds of activities of people, such as “John is now in a relationship” or ” Joe is now friends with Jim.”

It’s possible that what MySpace may be doing is similar enough to what Facebook patented that there might be an issue, but I haven’t looked or compared the two in any depth. I would imagine that Facebook would be paying attention.

The time that a patent starts running is often at the time it is filed rather than after it is granted.

It’s possible that MySpace could attempt to challenge Facebook’s patent, but it’s a lot harder to challenge a granted patent than one that is pending.

1) So does Facebook’s granted news feed patent now enable them to sue or issue a cease/desist order to MySpace since MySpace is using an almost identical news feed setup of showing added friends, posted events, etc?

2) If MySpace was doing their news feed setup before the Facebook patent was granted, are they grandfathered in?

3) If MySpace can prove they invented the technology before Facebook (since MySpace was around first), could they challenge Facebook’s patent?

Thanks!
Scott

You’re welcome.

I did read about the newly granted Facebook patent, and I had it listed in my post above as a pending patent application when I made this post last month.

The patent does explore the use of a news feed as a social activity, but it focuses upon reporting the activities of people in that social network, describing how it might report upon those activities, and how those activities might be shared across that network.

I’m not sure that it would be something that could impact the way that other social networking services such as twitter or friendfeed allow people to microblog and share news and links that they discover.

If twitter or friendfeed starting telling us that “Person A added Person B to their network,” or that “Person C posted photos to their gallery,” or that “Person Y became a fan of a certain goup,” it might be another matter.

The news feed described in the patent filing doesn’t involve “status updates” on Facebook, which are more like what you see on Twitter or Friendfeed, or many other social networks. Instead, it consists of automatically generated statements about people who participate in Facebook.

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=/netahtml/PTO/search-bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PTXT&s1=Facebook.ASNM.&OS=AN/Facebook&RS=AN/Facebook

Would love to hear your take on this! Aloha and Regards, Rob

Thank you. It is amazing how much information people put online about themselves in places like Facebook, and how many people are looking to the Web and social networks to find out more about people, including potential future employers.