Facebook Receives Patent on News Feed

California – Facebook has been issued yet another patent related to the News Feed, almost six years after filing for it. Granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the new patent lists co-founder and chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg as one of the inventors.

The News Feed patent is described as: “Communicating a news feed of media content based on a member’s interactions in a social network environment.” The invention allows Facebook to let users not only view status messages, photos, and links to videos of online friends, but also particular actions their friends are taking. Such actions could include commenting on posts from other users or playing games.

Facebook’s U.S. Patent No. 8,171,128 is further described as: “a system and method for providing dynamically selected media content to someone using an electronic device in a social network environment. Items of media content are selected for the user based on his or her relationships with one or more other users. The user’s relationships with other users are reflected in the selected media content and its format. An order is assigned to the items of media content, for example, based on their anticipated importance to the user, and the items of media content are displayed to the user in the assigned order. The user may change the order of the items of media content. The user’s interactions with media content available in the social network environment are monitored, and those interactions are used to select additional items of media content for the user.”

In its application, Facebook described its method of allowing users to view certain status updates, pictures, links to videos, and their friends’ actions. The patent will let Facebook keep a profile of each user on the social network in a database, then identify the relationships between users, generating “stories” based on the connections with each other, and then creating a News Feed for each user.

The patent will also allow Facebook to monitor what actions the viewer takes in response to the stories, such as Liking, Sharing, or Commenting, and then uses that data to generate more stories.