Facebook snaps up a patent on its News Feed, but not status updates

by Jay Hathaway on February 26, 2010 at 08:00 AM

Social networking giant Facebook just scored an intellectual property victory by patenting its News Feed, the constantly-updating stream of friends' activities that users see when they sign into the site. The patent, uncovered by AllFacebook, also includes News Feed features like advertising, filters, and searching the feed.

The original application was filed by Mark Zuckerberg and half a dozen other inventors on behalf of Facebook back in 2006, but wasn't approved until this week. Facebook hasn't yet hinted at going after similar social networks for patent infringement, and it's unclear how much power this gives the company.

The patent, which seems broadly-worded, to say the least, covers "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."

It seems a bit scary, but this is hardly Facebook's attempt to build a Death Star, because what's missing from the patent is status updates. The feed of news from your friends -- including actions like adding friends, posting new photos, and making comments -- is clearly covered here, but I don't see anything about the Twitter-esque features of Facebook. If you're worrying about an ultimate legal showdown between Facebook and Twitter over who owns microblogging, you can relax. This will probably not be it.