Facebook has just patented its “News Feed” feature. Patent #7,669,123, credits Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and seven other current and former Facebook guys as inventors and gives the rights to the patent to Facebook, Inc. This patent gives Facebook power to force other players like Google, Twitter and MySpace to either change their technology or take down their news feeds technologies.

The patent’s abstract says :

“A method for displaying a news feed in a social network environment is described. 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, as well as limiting access to the news items to a predetermined set of viewers and assigning an order to the news items. The method further may further include displaying the news items in the assigned order to at least one viewing user of the predetermined set of viewers and dynamically limiting the number of news items displayed.”

Not being a patent lawyer I leave the interpretation to the readers but one thing is for sure : If facebook wants, it can straight away sue almost all social networks, killing them ultimately. Other social networks should start looking for alternate technologies right away if they want to survive in this patent world.

Facebook has sent the following statement to a popular blog :

“The launch of News Feed in 2006 was a pivotal moment in Facebook’s history and changed the way millions of people consumed and discovered information on the site. We’re humbled by the growth and adoption of News Feed over time and pleased with being awarded the patent.”

[cb type="company"]Facebook[/cb]