Facebook Patents the News Feed

This week Facebook was awarded with its first patent. I’m not a lawyer, let alone a patent lawyer, but I wonder what this will change.

They’ve been awarded a patent on their News Feed feature. The technical description is:

dynamically providing a news feed about a user of a social network (1)

Isn’t this Twitter?

How about the Twitter feed widget/gadget/plugin that is on millions of websites?

What does this say about ownership of your data? Or is the key word providing?

I think most sites I’ve designed in the last few years have a news feed from a social network. I’m really interested to see what this means on a practical level, and how the web reacts.

Source (1): http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/02/26/facebook.patent/index.html?hpt=T2