Facebook patents News Feed

Last week, Facebook obtained a patent on the news feed, and almost immediately provoked a storm of speculation.  Could this be the end for Twitter?  An attempt to take on MySpace?  Part of anti-Google strategy?  Or maybe it's all just a storm in a teacup …

The news feed is usually a central aspect of social networking sites, and it brings together everything all of your contacts do.  There's no need to go looking to see what your friends are actually doing: everything they publish is automatically rolled into the feed.

Now--just a couple of weeks after Google launched Buzz, which added this functionality to Gmail--Facebook has announced a patent on it.

The coincidental timing has no doubt helped to bring more light to the story.  According to some, it's an attempt by Facebook to bury its competitors once and for all, with Twitter the main target.  The site often steals the limelight from Facebook but is essentially one huge news feed.  Most users consider them to be very different though, and plenty of people have an account with both.

So what's the new patent about?

That's the real question, so the first thing to do is actually read it. US patent 7 669 123 was awarded to Facebok founder Mark Zuckerberg and a handful of his colleagues.  It describes ''a method for displaying a news feed … in a social network environment.''

Specifically, that includes in the words of the application, ''monitoring a plurality of activities in a social network environment; storing the plurality of activities in a database; generating a plurality of news items regarding one or more of the activities, wherein one or more of the news items is for presentation to one or more viewing users and relates to an activity that was performed by another user; attaching a link associated with at least one of the activities of another user to at least one of the plurality of news items where the link enables a viewing user to participate in the same activity as the another user; limiting access to the plurality of news items to a set of viewing users; and displaying a news feed comprising two or more of the plurality of news items to at least one viewing user of the predetermined set of viewing users. ''

To put it more simply: when one of your contacts (a Facebook friend, say, or somebody who follows you on Twitter) publishes something, a link to that content automatically appears in your news feed.  The link doesn't just appear everywhere though: it only joins your news feed and that of your contact's other friends.

Seen that way, the patent would seem to describe 100% of the functionality of Twitter, as well as large portions of other social networking sites.  We can't think of any site where you can't choose to receive automatic updates about your contacts.

Facebook vs the rest

We'd say to go from that to saying that to suggesting that this is an outright attack on other social networking services is a little much.  First of all, the patent was originally demanded in July 2006: Twitter was still a tiny service at the time, nobody had even dreamt of Google Buzz, and Facebook was still restricted mostly to university students.

It's not clear either whether the patent really does apply to all news feeds in the way they exist at the moment.  We're not at all sure, because the patent applies to users' ''activities'': 'I've added John Smith to my friend list', or 'I've just published the photos from last night's party' for example.  The interest of making the summary of such actives public is that you too might want to get in touch with a particular user or go and look at the photos ...

As a result, though, the content itself--the photos, the status updates or the tweets--isn't actually included, and the patent makes no reference to it.  If status updates, tweets and other content isn't included, then the room to exploit the patent is dramatically reduced.

For the time being, Facebook hasn't given any sign that it intends to pursue its rights to the patent, which wouldn't necessarily be the best idea for the company.  Apart from the risk that a court might strike the patent down, it's almost unthinkable that Facebook would go after Twitter: all of the users that are members of both sites might well provoke the exact opposite by leaving it in droves.

Of course, everything is possible, but we'll just have to wait and see ...

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