Facebook's 'Newsfeed' becomes exclusive

Facebook users know the "newsfeed" technology well--the constantly updating page which appears when members log in to the social networking site. As of Tuesday, social networking fans will be seeing similar features become less prevalent across the web.

This week, Facebook obtained a patent for "dynamically providing a news feed about a user of a social network." This broad definition could cause problems for sites such as MySpace, Flickr, Google Buzz, LinkedIn, Yahoo Mail and Windows Live, reports PCWorld. Those sites all include some version of streaming user updates.

AllFacebook.com, a news blog following the story, reports that another patent by the company has been published, but has not yet been approved. This patent also addresses newsfeeds within a social network and was submitted in 2006--when Twitter was a mere twinkle in Biz Stone's eye. Twitter is just one of the sites that may be affected by Facebook's newly-asserted intellectual property rights.

Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb.com offered his analysis on the news with a post saying, "If offering a stream of updates of the non-status messages of friends is something Facebook alone could deliver, that would be a major loss for the rest of the social Web."

Back in October 2008, Kirkpatrick declared the newsfeed model "the dominant Internet metaphor of the day; the cascading waterfall of updates from your friends, with comments swirling even around those--that model is everywhere now!"

For more:
- see this PCWorld article
- see this AllFacebook.com article
- see this ReadWriteWeb post

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