Facebook awarded patent for the 'feed'

Bangalore: Facebook this week was awarded a patent pertaining to streaming 'feed' technology, more specifically for 'dynamically providing a news feed about a user of a social network,' complementing another patent filing that has been published but not yet approved, reports CNET News.

The implications for this, as AllFacebook.com pointed out, are far-flung: Facebook may choose to pursue action against other social-media sites that potentially violate this patent. Twitter, 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.

"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.