No stranger to creepy behaviour (ahem), Facebook has apparently been granted a patent of the ‘news feed’ – not sure if that applies to what I thought were standards (RSS, Atom) or if the proviso about ‘social networks’ is key. From The Guardian:
But I wonder whether Facebook really inventing anything here that hadn’t already been demonstrated before. After all, Twitter – which uses some of the same ideas – was launched in July 2006, while Flickr had already been trialling a similar system for keeping you updated about activity on the site for a couple of years.
Facebook’s application was filed on August 11 of 2006, a few weeks before it launched on the site but after those rival services were already doing some similar things.
This is very early, more analysis will emerge. But hard to see this as a positive development… Or as reason for confidence in the current patent system.
You make a good point, it seems to make as much sense as granting Google a patent on searching the internet or Yahoo! a patent on internet email.