Rylan's Blogthing
punny.1
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On Tuesday, Facebook was awarded a major patent for %u201CDynamically providing a news feed about a user of a social network%u201D. This is a huge deal for a number of reasons, most significantly that it grants Facebook the opportunity to pursue other social networks which are infringing on their patent. Included in the patent are additional claims including feed filters, feed advertising, searching the feed, and more. (update We%u2019ve been told that this is about the implicit feed stories. Will update when we have more info.)
Earlier this morning we reported on another patent which actually has not yet been approved but was simply published. This patent is confirmed published. The application was submitted back in 2006, before many other social networks integrated the feed as a major component. Twitter, for example, didn%u2019t even launch prior to Facebook submitting this patent which could theoretically hold significant implications.The inventors named on the patent are some of the company%u2019s top executives, including the founder, Mark Zuckerberg: Mark Zuckerberg, Ruchi Sanghvi, Andrew Bosworth, Chris Cox, Aaron Sittig, Chris Hughes, Katie Geminder, and Dan Corson. What this patent means for the future of the social networking space is unknown, however this patent could be considered as significant as the original six degrees patent.
In contrast to the patent that we wrote about this morning, the news feed patent is much more general, which means it could be interpreted a lot of ways. For example, below is the news feed generation process as described by the patent:
Essentially it includes the generation of feed stories followed by the limiting of viewers of those stories. As many avid followers of the social networking space know, the feed (also called the %u201Cstream%u201D) has become one of the central components of online social activity. The entire Twitter product, for example, is a feed.
Whether or not Twitter should be concerned about this new patent award is unknown, however this could be considered one of the most significant social web patent since Jan. 16, 2001, the day the six degrees patent was first published.
Update
It appears that this patent surrounds implicit actions. This means status updates, which is what Twitter is based on, are not part of this patent. Instead, this is about stories about the actions of a user%u2019s friends. While still significant, the implications for competing social networks may be less substantial.
Let's get one thing straight as a laser beam, kittens: Blackjack is not Pontoon.
The Americans like to say it is, and are in the process of getting away with it - mainly because they own Wikipedia, which draws a distinction between the American "Blackjack" and English "Black Jack", as though a space bar input were all it took to cancel out years on years of sporting tradition. We disgruntled Brit bloggers know better.
In the card game properly known as Blackjack, the idea is to lose a hand of seven or more cards by taking turns to put them down. In the card game improperly known as Blackjack, you start with a hand of two and must score a total value of 21 or less.
Card Ace: Blackjack developer Self Aware Games is thus guilty of dire linguistic negligence. We'll forgive them, though, because we like Pontoon, and this here's one of the best ways to play it on Facebook.
CBS) In the world of energy, the Holy Grail is a power source that's inexpensive and clean, with no emissions. Well over 100 start-ups in Silicon Valley are working on it, and one of them, Bloom Energy, is about to make public its invention: a little power plant-in-a-box they want to put literally in your backyard.You'll generate your own electricity with the box and it'll be wireless. The idea is to one day replace the big power plants and transmission line grid, the way the laptop moved in on the desktop and cell phones supplanted landlines.
It has a lot of smart people believing and buzzing, even though the company has been unusually secretive - until now.
Full Segment: The Bloom Box
Web Extra: The Magic Box
Web Extra: Plug-In Power Plant
Web Extra: Naming The Bloom Box
Web Extra: A Skeptic's ViewK.R. Sridhar invited "60 Minutes" correspondent Lesley Stahl for a first look at the innards of the Bloom box that he has been toiling on for nearly a decade.
Looking at one of the boxes, Sridhar told Stahl it could power an average U.S. home.
"The way we make it is in two blocks. This is a European home. The two put together is a U.S. home," he explained.
"'Cause we use twice as much energy, is that what you're saying?" Stahl asked.
"Yeah, and this'll power four Asian homes," he replied.
"So four homes in India, your native country?" Stahl asked.
"Four to six homes in our country," Sridhar replied.
"It sounds awfully dazzling," Stahl remarked.
"It is real. It works," he replied.
He says he knows it works because he originally invented a similar device for NASA. He really is a rocket scientist.
"This invention, working on Mars, would have allowed the NASA administrator to pick up a phone and say, 'Mr. President, we know how to produce oxygen on Mars,'" Sridhar told Stahl.
"So this was going to produce oxygen so people could actually live on Mars?" she asked.
"Absolutely," Sridhar replied.
When NASA scrapped that Mars mission, Sridhar had an idea: he reversed his Mars machine. Instead of it making oxygen, he pumped oxygen in.
He invented a new kind of fuel cell, which is like a very skinny battery that always runs. Sridhar feeds oxygen to it on one side, and fuel on the other. The two combine within the cell to create a chemical reaction that produces electricity. There's no need for burning or combustion, and no need for power lines from an outside source.
In October 2001 he managed to get a meeting with John Doerr from the big Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins.
"How much do you think, 'I need to come up with the next big thing'?" Stahl asked Doerr.
"Oh, that's my job," he replied. "To find entrepreneurs who are going to change the world and then help them."
Doerr has certainly changed our world: he's the one who discovered and funded Netscape, Amazon and Google. When he listened to Sridhar, the idea seemed just as transformative: efficient, inexpensive, clean energy out of a box.
"But Google: $25 million. This man said, 'How much money?'" Stahl asked.
"At the time he said over a hundred million dollars," Doerr replied.
But according to Doerr that was okay.
"So nothing he said scared you?" Stahl asked.
"Oh, I wasn't at all sure it could be done," he replied.
