Social networking giant has received a patent for sharing “news feeds”, an ability which allows users to share online activity with friends.
The United States Patent and Trademark Office awarded the site the patent, which was titled “Dynamically providing a news feed about users of a social network”.
“The method includes 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,” the patent description reads.
“As well as limiting access to the news items to a predetermined set of viewers and assigning an order to the news items.”
The patent could cause some problems for rival social networks, such as MySpace, which already offers a similar type of technology.
Patrick Stafford is a freelance journalist and a former deputy editor of SmartCompany.
