Facebook Founder Receives Patent on His First Application

One week ago Mark Zuckerberg, the famed founder of Facebook.com, received U.S. Patent No. 8,225,376 titled “Dynamically generating a privacy summary.”  The patent relates to a system and method that automatically generates a privacy summary.  In the method according to one particular implementation of the invention, a profile for a user is generated, one or more privacy setting selections are received from the user, and the profile associated with the user is updated to incorporate the privacy setting selections. A privacy summary is then generated for the profile based on the privacy setting selections.

Although this is not the first patent awarded to Zuckerberg, who now has 10 issued U.S. patents, this patent is noteworthy because it relates to the the first patent application filed by Zuckerberg, which was filed almost six years ago, on July 25, 2006.  According to the Issue Notification, the patent is entitled to Patent Term Adjustment of 1258 days.

The Notice of Allowability explains that the patent was ultimately issued after an interview that lead to an Examiner’s Amendment.  Independent claims 1, 18 and 16 were amended by Examiner’s Amendment, as well as dependent claims 23-25.  Dependent claims 23-25 were all canceled, which lead the application to contain only allowed claims, thereby leading to issuance.

The Examiner’s Amendment was rather extensive, adding quite a bit of new language to each of the independent claims.  The amendment to claim 1 is illustrative of the limitations that put these claims over the top for patentability purposes:

1. (Currently Amended) A method for dynamically generating a privacy summary comprising:

accessing a profile for a user stored in an electronic database;

presenting a first user interface to the user;

receiving, via the first user interface, a plurality of privacy setting selections provided by from the user using the first user interface, whirring the privacy settings selections identify, for each of a plurality of different categories of information associated with the user, one or more other users who can access that category of information;

updating the profile associated with the user to incorporate the plurality of privacy setting selections;

generating, by a processor, a narrative explanation of which other users can access which categories of information based on the privacy settings selections, wherein generating the narrative explanation comprises, for one or more of the privacy settings selections, selecting a narrative explanation template based on the privacy settings selection, wherein the narrative explanation template comprises text that identifies a group of other users who can access a category of information about the user profile based on the privacy settings selection; and

providing the narrative explanation to the user associated with the provide in a second user interface after receiving the privacy setting selections [[via]] provided using the first user interface.

In addition to the aforementioned patent, the “Zuckerberg” U.S. patent portfolio now includes the following issued patents:

Dynamically providing a news feed about a user of a social network
U.S. Patent No. 7,669,123

Managing information about relationships in a social network via a social timeline
U.S. Patent No. 7,725,492

Generating segmented community flyers in a social networking system
U.S. Patent No. 7,797,256

Tagging digital media
U.S. Patent No. 7,945,653

Display panel of a programmed computer system with a graphical user interface
U.S. Design Patent No. D652424

Managing information about relationships in a social network via a social timeline
U.S. Patent No. 8,099,433

Display panel of a programmed computer system with a graphical user interface
U.S. Design Patent No. D653258

Display panel of a programmed computer system with a graphical user interface
U.S. Design Patent No. D653671

Communicating a newsfeed of media content based on a member’s interactions…
U.S. Patent No. 8,171,128

While this may seem like a long list of patents, Facebook has an astonishingly small number of patents that relate to innovations and technologies developed by the company itself.  Several months ago TechCrunch wrote this of Facebook’s growing patent portfolio and internal patent application production:

In the past few months, Facebook’s patent portfolio has grown exponentially as a result of acquisitions of patent portfolios from IBM and Microsoft. After acquiring 650 AOL patents and patent applications from Microsoft, the company now has approximately 1,400 patent assets. Amazingly, only 46 of these assets (24 issued patents and 22 published applications) were originally filed by Facebook.

Since this TechCrunch story ran on April 27, 2012, the number of issued U.S. patents assigned to Facebook has grown to 38.  Still, for a tech company the size of Facebook this is a paltry number.  If Facebook is going to stay where it is they are going to have to continue to acquire patent assets and really change the internal culture to one that is innovative.  You can only rely on the Applications of others for so long, particularly when those developers are the ones who own the underlying intellectual property in those Apps.

If Facebook does not evolve into a true and legitimate technology company their days are numbered. There will undoubtedly be some who will ridicule me for such a prediction, but all you have to do is look at history.  It is far more likely that Facebook will become a forgotten company that it is that they will stand the test of time and remain dominant.  As government regulators continue to look into Facebook’s privacy practices and they are confronted with more patent disputes, the company focus will become distracted and it doesn’t seem to me that the corporate culture relative to innovation will support any level of real distraction without severe consequences.