Facebook Just Patented The Feed – What Does That Mean For Everyone That Uses Them?
by Volker Weber
On The Next Web:
There are times when you file a patent that you might never use and forget about it. Then there are times you file a patent and later have granted at the best possible time. Facebook is at just such a moment it seems with the granting of US patent number 7,669,123.
Comments
IANAL and this is just my observations. Reading the actual patent it is not a a basic feed, like what you would see with RSS.
Looks more like User A generates a history of usage, that then is broken down to be sub-divided on geo/social/subject context etc. After that the information is parsed through some privacy filter and what remains is broken down and fed out to related social contacts that may watch for certain conditions.
Pretty much what facebook does now. Of course there is only so many times that I need to know my mother is herding cattle on farmville before the information becomes pointless. :)
Yeah, but how long have Wordpress and other blogging engines been able to generate categorized or tagged feeds?
I have set up Wordpress with the P2 theme at my company - we all can create new entries, tag and categorize them, and then they are pulled out via category to appear on various Sharepoint sites that have their access controlled to different users.
As the OP states, this is probably going to get ugly.
The more interesting question might be how IBM is going to handle the feed they are planning for Vulcan.
when did XING (back then in 2006 OpenBC) has started to display a news feed? wasn't it there from the beginning?
Not just vulcan, but MOSS 2010 has that and so do a lot of stuff. Heck, I could argue some of the stuff in Jive and SocialText and about 10 pages on Google have this functionality if I wanted to make a case.
UGH.
IBM has the largest inventory of patents in the world. They'll most likely just find something to cross-license and be done with it.
I should patent my speed at hitting the "Hide", "Ignore", and "Block this Applications" boxes.
