Huh? How Can This Be?
Has Facebook patented the news, or at least the news feed, in social-networking environments? On Tuesday, the United States Patent Office granted Facebook a patent for “Dynamically providing a news feed about a user of a social network.” The patent is published and numbered 7,669,123.
Facebook’s patent, which was filed in 2006, describes a “method for displaying a news feed in a social-network environment,” including “generating news items regarding activities associated with a user of a social-network environment,” attaching an “informational link” to at least one of the news items, limiting access to the item to a “predetermined set of viewers,” ordering the news items, dynamically limiting the number of items, and displaying the news items.
So what would we call a “news feed” in something social other than Facebook? An ‘info feed’?






