Is Facebook's newsfeed patent anti-social?

Facebook’s new patent around displaying news feeds of users’ social network activities has caused uproar in the blogosphere over fears that it will prevent rivals from providing basic and widely used functionality, but lawyers have mixed views about the potential ramifications.

Facebook applied for the patent in August 2006 but was only granted it last week. It covers the technology that generates news items about social network users such as ‘Janet became friends with John’ and that attaches a link or video to such activity. Although the patent does not cover the publishing of a stream of status updates, it does cover the automated publishing of updates.

But Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb warned in his blog that popular social networks ranging from Twitter to LinkedIn could be affected by the move. "If offering a stream of updates of the non-status messages of friends is something that Facebook alone could deliver, that would be a major loss for the rest of the social web," he said.