Facebook Patents Location Social Networking 120
bizwriter writes "Facebook just received a patent with broad claims that would seem to cover much of what Google (GOOG) Latitude, Foursquare, Gowalla, and others try to do in letting users share their locations with others. Patent number 7,809,805, called 'Systems and methods for automatically locating web-based social network members,' covers people manually entering a status, sending that and their location from a wireless device, and sharing both the status and location with others. Facebook's corporate value just took a big jump — and a number of other companies might have to either challenge the patent's validity or consider licensing deals."
Suing (Score:3, Insightful)
With all the mobile companies already suing each other, this should just add more..
Awesome.
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With all the mobile companies already suing each other, this should just add more..
Awesome.
IAAL
FTFY
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They will not necessarily attempt to enforce it. It's been a widespread practice for many years to accumulate a portfolio of weak patents and hold them in reserve for defensive use.
Feh (Score:1)
I'm the first to admit that I use the hell out of Facebook. Keeping in contact with old classmates, helping organize LAN parties with friends, posting about new articles on my site, doing the general "ZOMG it smells like snow outside!!!" type of things...but I never really saw the appeal of Places.
If really wanted people to know where I was, wouldn't I just post about it? Or is this something that some people just get, and others don't...? Also, how could Facebook patent it? They were hardly the first t
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"Keeping in contact with old classmates,..."
I never got that part. Why would anybody want to stay in touch with people you have nothing in common, just because a computer assigned the same classroom to them for some time, umpteen years ago.
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In my case, there were people that I was good friends with, but they moved away (either to live elsewhere, or to go off to college.) Out of the 186 people I'm friends with on Facebook, about 70 of them are people that I used to be friends with in K-12.
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I got lucky...all of the schools I went to had a HUGE geek/nerd population. There were almost as many geeks/nerds n my high school as the Abercrombie-wearing "popular" kids.
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This is one of those rare "cool" features of Facebook. Aside from the typical long-lost friend you reconnect with, there are dozens of people I was friends with in secondary school but were not close enough to overcome large distances. These are the people you liked, but if you went out to have a beer at a bar with them today, you probably wouldn't get tot he bottom of the first glass before you ran out of stuff to talk about. With FB, you can catch up, see their kids, and find out what's up with them in ma
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"Keeping in contact with old classmates,..."
I never got that part. Why would anybody want to stay in touch with people you have nothing in common, just because a computer assigned the same classroom to them for some time, umpteen years ago.
I understand part of that but I also made friends in class as well, and I wasn't the only one.
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Predicted future news: (Score:4, Insightful)
Companies patent widely implemented ideas and sue everyone. Oh wait, that's not new.
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damn the guy who didn't patent the toilet flushing mechanism seriously lost out .
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Shit out of luck, you might say. :-P
But, really, humanity is better off without that being patented. ;-)
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You're shitting me. ;-)
The purpose of the patent system (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:The purpose of the patent system (Score:4, Insightful)
Not a chance. (Score:2)
There's pretty much no chance this will stand up in a lawsuit. Plenty of other companies beat them to market with a product like this. Foursquare for instance.
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RTFA fail :-(
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Google bought Dodgeball (which did this sort of location tracking via sms) in 2005. Dodgeball's founder (Dennis Crowley [twitter.com]) then created Foursquare. If anybody should be patenting this it should be Crowley or Google.
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When they brought it to market is irrelevant. It looks like they filed this patent in 2007, which predates foursquare.
However it was filed after dodgeball. From wikipedia, dodgeball required you to text your location rather than auto-detecting it from the gps. The claims in the facebook patent specify auto-detecting your location so it doesn't sound like dodgeball is prior art.
Was there something prior to 2007 that was already doing this? Maybe brightkite or loopt?
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Exactly. I read the claims. I'm sorry, but the instant they added a GPS chip to phones and gave us programmatic access, this all became obvious. With even simple GPS access you can get location, direction, and speed. Using this in conjunction with anything you've done before is obvious. Maybe not always useful, but you can do it.
Then again this is the patent office and I'm sure that they are always surprised when it starts raining. When your definition of obvious is so low, dark clouds cannot be an indicato
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Was there something prior to 2007 that was already doing this?
I'd think that lots of the GPS gadgets back in the 1990s would qualify as prior art. Pretty much all of them communicated their position to another computer via some sort of "network" link, RS-232 or bluetooth or USB or whatever. There was software on the other computer that accepted the GPS info and did something mappy with it.
How could what facebook's doing not be a trivial variant of what GPS gadgets have done from the beginning? The only d
A Better Idea (Score:4, Insightful)
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Lawyers, and by extension politicians, would never let that happen.
Filed in 2007 (Score:2)
Before everyone goes off a wall here, it should be noted Facebook applied for this February 2007.
Foursquare didn't even exist until 2009.
Dodgeball (which Google bought and created Latitude from) was started in 2005, but at the time it was based on TXT messages, not GPS, so not sure it applies.
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As a follow up - if anything I am just pointing out the patent is 100% valid, which just goes to show how pointless software method patents are. Between the time of filing and the time of approval an entire industry had already been created with many competitors, before Facebook even got around to implementing the thing the applied for a patent on.
The patent system moves too slowly to be useful for software patents. It's only possible purpose is litigation, it does not provide any incentive to innovate.
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/. fails again (Score:2, Informative)
How is it that every time a patent article is posted slashdot never posts the claims and always posts something from the abstract or the title which gives the patent holder no rights at all. The first claim is "1. A method of sharing locations of users participating in a social networking service at a geographic location, the method executed by a computer system and comprising: receiving location information and status information from a mobile device of a first user of the social networking service, the l
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Problem is my old website had the capability to do ALL of this before it went under. Our newer reincarnation does not have this built in, but I still have the full database from my old website from 5 years ago. Would this count as prior art against the patent?
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In theory yes.
In practice you'll never survive a trial long enough to prove it.
Re:/. fails again (Score:4, Informative)
Problem is my old website had the capability to do ALL of this before it went under. Our newer reincarnation does not have this built in, but I still have the full database from my old website from 5 years ago. Would this count as prior art against the patent?
Prove it. You can send prior art to the USPTO to consider.
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While that claim is still pretty broad it isn't nearly as broad as the thing posted in the summary.
It's still blatantly obvious to anyone with an IQ higher than a watermelon.
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> It's still blatantly obvious to anyone with an IQ higher than a watermelon.
Which means that the C-level execs will think it very clever.
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While that claim is still pretty broad it isn't nearly as broad as the thing posted in the summary.
It's still blatantly obvious to anyone with an IQ higher than a watermelon.
Prove it. Remember, patents are legal documents that require evidence, an argument, and a conclusion to invalidate. You've got the conclusion part, but you're only 1/3rd of the way there.
Division of labor (Score:2)
How is it that every time a patent article is posted slashdot never posts the claims and always posts something from the abstract or the title which gives the patent holder no rights at all.
Because the editors are waiting for someone like you to make a comment that analyzes one or more of the independent claims. Slashdot editors are good at what they do, and armchair paralegals are good at what they do.
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While you have a point about the general level of comprehension of patents and patent matters on /. (and you're hardly the first to make it) I'd say this was a very poor choice of article against which to raise that criticism - unless you can explain exactly how that claim "isn't nearly as broad as the thing posted in the summary".
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"I can explain exactly how the claim isn't nearly as broad as the summary."
I really appreciate the work you put into that but I'm afraid I don't think you've succeeded - at least not from the perspective of the ordinary programmer or entrepreneur etc. I don't want to start quibbling about the degree and practical significance of each of the narrowings you identified - although in light of claim 21 at least one of them seems /entirely/ moot! - I just don't think those perfectly valid and patent-lawyerly-prop
Marco! (Score:4, Funny)
Polo!
*Cease and disist letter arrives in mail
weaksauce (Score:2)
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Why would anyone else want to wipe your ass?
This is just stupid (Score:2)
This idea is completely obvious when taking into account users having internet enabled mobile devices with GPS.
Shame on the USPTO to bundle up a couple existing technologies in an obvious manner that effectively shuts down inovation.
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It's just business as usual at the USPTO.
I, for one, am glad (Score:2)
that their years of hard work and billions of research dollars spent on the concept of telling friends where you are in addition to what you are doing has been rewarded. Can you imagine what kind of world it would be to live in where they were not given a patent for such a far-reaching, insightful, life-changing idea? It is brilliant innovations like this getting well-deserved patents that reaffirm my faith in our system of intellectual property protection. Don't listen to the nay-sayers who will undoubtedl
Google Latitude (Score:2)
Prior art (Score:2, Interesting)
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I came in here to post this :o
I thought it was older than that, like c2004
Possible prior art? (Score:2)
There's a social app for the iPhone, iPad, iPod touch and Blackberry called Grindr [grindr.com].
It uses GPS or WiFI location data to show potential (male/male) dates nearby.
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was it created prior to 2007?
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We used it on our Palm pilots in the mid 90s.
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I was going to bring up APRS but you beat me to it.
For the uninitiated: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_Packet_Reporting_System [wikipedia.org]
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Sorry for repeating the link. Someone can feel free to mark me redundant. I had the comment typed out and in my cut and paste buffer, and forgot to delete that line when I changed the first....
As usual, nothing new (Score:2)
Back when I was still a student, I used to update my status and location on my web page on the campus network. And I am aware that people used to do this with their "finger" profiles back before there was the web. Some people with "text pagers" even managed to these updates using their pagers. (Also, other things were wired to publish their status on web pages (or finger profiles), for example vending machines and hot tubs.)
Abolish Patents. (Score:2)
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Never would have realized - thanks! We'll get right on that!
Sincerely,
The Rest of the World
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Patents are abused -> abolish patents, copyright is abused -> abolish copyright, fine, we could then abolish arms, religion, philosophy, law, property, culture, language, ideas.
Fight abusers instead of giving in for everything they taint, no, uh?
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food for thought : 'if it wasnt abused, aristocracy would work perfect as a social system'. with your logic, even this is possible. so why not reinstate aristocracy
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> arms, culture, language are not rules that govern a society.
a thing I never implied. The theme was "things being abused".
And I guess that aristocracy wasn't fought because aristocrats abused their powers but instead cause new classes had acquired power but lacked proportional political representation. Else, as guys like Gaetano Mosca thought, an organized minority always prevails against a majority (that naturally defaults to a chaotic mass).
As for religion and philosophy, if the latter can't say much
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our discussion ends here. have a nice day. you have a lot of history reading to do.
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Proof: if revolutions started because of aristocracy abuse there would have been one after roughly one generation of aristocrat rulers everywhere. That did not happen.
Maybe you have problem parsing my grammar.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution [wikipedia.org]
dont go uttering the word 'proof' when you dont even know shit about elementary history. you are talking like an arrogant idiot, asking for proof of the moon existing. it is at that level.
no, it is at that level, and i am not going to spare any effort for teaching you. you need to school yourself. its your responsibility. this is my last reply. dont get offended if you dont get another.
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Oh the french revolution. A perfect example of a new class that fight for supremacy over aristocracy. That was my point though, not yours. Since you bring up wikipedia, whose symbols are up there in the picture, between the angels with somewhat dark wings?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Declaration_des_Droits_de_lHomme.jpg [wikipedia.org]
PS. Since you promised to STFU, anticipating your reactions as you read this, I further clarify that I believe that what's in the declaration of rights is of utmost moral and historical
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reading that article and following links you find there, will supply the historical information regarding aristocracy, that you so sorely lack. then you will keep refraining from saying moronic things like 'aristocracy didnt abuse power', or think that the principles of age of enlightenment, and reasons for
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You might read this thread again, instead.
When one says something didn't happen because aristocracy abused their power, he does not imply that they abused or didn't abuse their power. If you bothered to read it well you would even see where I necessarily imply that aristocracy abuses their power eventually.
I also have issues with the "modernity" of values that have names of greek origin.
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Prior Art? APRS (Score:4, Interesting)
As an old amateur radio operator I must ask. How is location based social networking different than APRS [aprs.org] that's been in use for over a decade?
Operators with an attached GPS had their location updated automatically, Operators without a GPS entered their location manually, and the location was passed with each message packet. There were web pages that allowed people not currently on-the-air to monitor the communications via http.
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APRS was invernted in 1994, by 2000 had all the features described in the patent. And, unlike a lot of claims of prior art, this one is meticulously documented in the proceedings of the Digital Communications Conference by WB4APR, WU2Z, K4HG, and others. Of course, fighting this will be expensive, but hopefully someone will.
The only ground to contest this prior art is whether ham radio is a social network. On that score I can only paraphrase the Breakfast Club: "It is social. Sad and pathetic yes, but socia
Corporate value just took a big jump... (Score:1)
... that will last until the patent is challenged on the bases that a) it is obvious to someone skilled in the state of the art and b) it was being done long before they thought of it (www.aprs.org)
they can have it (Score:2)
So, how do I turn it off, again?
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A patent on patenting would never be upheld because it would derail the gravy train for the legal industry.
Infringes on MY patent (Score:2)
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Unfortunately there's one test all patents do have to pass: Not pissing off the legal industry.
Anything that stops lawyers from doing their thing will never fly.
The claims seem obvious. (Score:2)
Especially the first few. Not much of a patent.
Negative patents (Score:2)
What is a "social networking service"? (Score:1)
Maybe I missed it, but I find it interesting that the patent doesn't explicitly state what a social networking service *is*. Sure, we all "know" what it is -- but in something like a patent shouldn't this be very clearly defined? What if a "social networking service" encompasses presence/IM/chat software? The XMPP protocol (Jabber, now owned by Cisco, is based off this) has drafts (see XEP-0080 [xmpp.org]) already written for providing user location in that context. I'm sure this isn't the only draft written of its ki
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> Do these fit into the realm of "social networking services"?
The patent attorneys who drafted this certainly hope so.
What exactly goes on in the USPTO? (Score:2)
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Mod parent up! That would be extremely fun!
GOOG! (Score:2)
Because I know that when I was reading this story I was idly wondering what Google's stock ticker symbol was!
Isn't that nice (Score:1)
prior art everywhere (Score:2, Informative)
This is patent is so silly that prior art can be found anywhere. For example XMPP folks have specs initially published in 2003 describing the same exact scenario:
http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0080.html (User Location)
This document defines a format for capturing data about an entity's geographical location (geoloc). The format defined herein can describe most earthbound geographical locations, especially locations that may change fairly frequently. Potential uses for this approach include:
Publishing locatio
gps? webbased who where the person is? (Score:2)
Hmm, seems like gps with any webbased interface should be prior art on this.
If I know you and you want to know where i'm at? Call me on my cell phone, text me, email me and ask.
911 System (Score:1)