Patent News Blog: Developments of Facebook in 'The Social Network'

Developments of Facebook in 'The Social Network'

By Libby Jones, Staff Writer

While Facebook continues to advance the social networking industry, the movie about its origins, The Social Network, hit theaters October 1.

While Facebook® continues to advance the social networking industry, the movie about its origins, The Social Network, hit theaters October 1. Because of Facebook’s® popularity with people all around the world, there is sure to be many people interested in how this social network got its start. The movie chronicles the life of Mark Zuckerberg who, as a student at Harvard University began the most profitable social networking venture in the world. As Facebook has advanced in the past six years with, “500 million friends [on Facebook], Mark Zuckerberg is the youngest billionaire in history... but for this entrepreneur, success leads to both personal and legal complications,” (Columbia Pictures).

The Social Network Trailer:

While this teaser keeps us on the edge of our seats to see the drama unfold in The Social Network, you can at least learn some Facebook® history in the meantime...

In honor of the new movie, it might be fitting that the company was granted yet another patent on August 31. This time Facebook® was granted patent protection for their click based search engine (US# 7,788,260). Basically the search engine works like this:

Ranking search results based on the frequency of clicks on the search results by members of a social network who are within a predetermined degree of separation.

As you can see, the search engine works like a web, zeroing in on what is important to you, based on what your friends are clicking.

So, if a bunch of your friends joined a new group and you heard about it and went searching for it, it would likely be ranked the highest on your search.

This search engine has created a whole new echelon of social networking, one that links even your search terms to your online “friends”.

Almost everything you can do on Facebook® is specific to their site. It has quickly become one of the most innovative online business ventures since Google® hit the scene. With over 70 national patent submissions already, you can bet Mr. Zuckerberg will have quite a few inventions to his name before the next decade is over – and quite possibly a few more hit movies under his belt.

October 4, 2010

Category: Celebrity Patents, IP Current Events

Comments

10/07/2010 02:41:10

The movie was excellent! I'm actually going to see it again! Facebook's gonna have a lot of patents too. I didn't realize how innovatiive they are!

10/18/2010 21:44:11

This is a clever idea, but I'm not always interested in the things my friends are clicking on. Sometimes I feel like Facebook is not simple enough anymore.

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