What will Facebook do with its News Feed patent?

February 26th, 2010 by Wendy McAuliffe

This week Facebook was awarded the patent for the News Feed - a feature common to Facebook as well as other social networks such as Twitter and MySpace, and a number of social media apps and startups.

The patent refers to the method of displaying stories/news items relating to online activities to a predetermined set of viewers, and “assigning an order to the news items”. According to reports, the patent also covers the auto-generation of a user’s activity and the display of that to friends. That means the news updates you get when your friends upload videos and accept friend requests is covered by Facebook’s new patent.

It’s true that Facebook pioneered the News Feed technology back in 2006, and so on the face of it deserves to own the patent…but what does this mean for the rest of the social media industry? Facebook is currently the world’s largest social network, and so if it’s going down the road of seeking patents for its technology, this could really hamper innovation and progress within social media, and render networks such as Twitter useless.

It’s currently unclear what Facebook plans to do with this patent. It could take the hard line and pressure Twitter, MySpace, Google etc into taking down their News Feed features, or at the opposite end of the scale it could choose not to exercise its patent.

The reason why social media has evolved so quickly is all down to collaboration, the mashup of content and technology and the sharing of creativity. Patents are arguably not a good thing in this space, but what can we do to stop them?

At the moment this is primarily an industry story, but should Facebook choose to make use of the patent, it’s likely to reach the attention of a wider audience. Ultimately the power rests with individuals to stop Facebook from agressively patenting its technology - if the business becomes too commercial in its focus, it will lose popularity, and could suffer massively in terms of online PR.

      

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Don’t write TV off as a news medium yet

February 19th, 2010 by Wendy McAuliffe

I recently watched the film Frost/Nixon which is a dramatic retelling of the post-Watergate television interviews between British talk-show host David Frost and former president Richard Nixon.
As a quick bit of background for those who aren’t familiar with the Nixon Interviews, in 1977 (three years after his resignation), Nixon granted British journalist Sir David Frost [...]

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Bad news sells. Is social media changing this?

February 12th, 2010 by Wendy McAuliffe

This week I caught an interview with Alastair Campbell on ITV’s Loose Women, promoting his new book Maya. Within the interview Campbell (who formerly wrote for the Daily Mirror) suggested that social networking is inverting the core principle of newspaper journalism, i.e. bad news sells, and replacing it with a more balanced view of the [...]

Posted in Blog, Blogging, Content, Digital media, Journalism, PR, Social media | 4 Comments »

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PR Observations on a Week in Politics

January 15th, 2010 by Wendy McAuliffe

It’s been a heavy week in politics, particularly from a PR standpoint. I thought it might be interesting to summarise my observations…
1. The Government’s apology to thalidomide survivors was delivered yesterday by Health Minister Mike O’Brien. It marked a big moment for victims of the 1950’s drug disaster in which pregnant women were severely [...]

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Why are women changing their Facebook status to a colour?

January 8th, 2010 by Wendy McAuliffe

If you’re a Facebook user, you may have noticed that women have been changing their Facebook status to a colour over the past day or so. Mine currently reads as ‘black’. It’s been driving men mad, including my husband! So what is it all about?
Well I hope I won’t get shot down for revealing that [...]

Posted in Blog, PR, Social media, Social networking | 6 Comments »

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