Fratmen
02-26-2010, 08:53 AM
Do you think Facebook will become the new Acacia and use this patent to charge others or put them out of business?
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(CNET) -- Facebook this week was awarded a patent pertaining to streaming "feed" technology -- more specifically, "dynamically providing a news feed about a user of a social network," complementing another patent filing that has been published but not yet approved.
The implications for this, as AllFacebook.com pointed out earlier on Thursday, are far-flung: Facebook may choose to pursue action against other social-media sites that potentially violate this patent.
Twitter, as AllFacebook points out, is effectively one giant news feed, to the extent that it clearly has influenced some of the changes that Facebook made to its own feed technology.
That reaction could be alarmist. And yet prominent figures elsewhere in the social-media world don't seem thrilled.
"There goes the neighborhood," quipped Chris Messina, an open-standards advocate who recently joined Google as a member of its new Social Web Team, on Twitter.
"Can I start screaming loudly about patent reform now?" tweeted Matt Galligan, who founded a streaming-feeds start-up called Socialthing and eventually sold it to AOL. More at the Source (http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/02/26/facebook.patent/index.html?hpt=T2)
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(CNET) -- Facebook this week was awarded a patent pertaining to streaming "feed" technology -- more specifically, "dynamically providing a news feed about a user of a social network," complementing another patent filing that has been published but not yet approved.
The implications for this, as AllFacebook.com pointed out earlier on Thursday, are far-flung: Facebook may choose to pursue action against other social-media sites that potentially violate this patent.
Twitter, as AllFacebook points out, is effectively one giant news feed, to the extent that it clearly has influenced some of the changes that Facebook made to its own feed technology.
That reaction could be alarmist. And yet prominent figures elsewhere in the social-media world don't seem thrilled.
"There goes the neighborhood," quipped Chris Messina, an open-standards advocate who recently joined Google as a member of its new Social Web Team, on Twitter.
"Can I start screaming loudly about patent reform now?" tweeted Matt Galligan, who founded a streaming-feeds start-up called Socialthing and eventually sold it to AOL. More at the Source (http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/02/26/facebook.patent/index.html?hpt=T2)