Facebook patents news feed

UNITED STATES – The US Patent and Trademark Office has granted Facebook a patent for one of the most basic functions of a social networking website – the news feed. Facebook applied for the patent titled “Dynamically providing a news feed about users of a social network” in 2006. According to the granted application, the patent covers: “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.” Both Twitter and MySpace offer a news feed service, which allows users to receive news updates from other users, similar to Facebook’s news feed.