TheMadScientist - 1:05 am on Feb 27, 2010 (gmt 0)

The US patent office grants patents for most absurdly common sense ideas as long as it's computer tech, and involves an "algorithm", which they apparently don't understand... It's a very basic, obvious, thing that now no other (US?) social network can do, and therefore they can't give their users the features they will have come to expect.

Or there is a real invention on the news page most people don't notice and who you see the 'news' posts from is algorithmically determined based on which friends stories are determined to be most important to you.

Live Feed automatically determines which friends to include based on who Facebook thinks you want to hear from most. You can manually adjust this list below.

Go to the bottom of your FaceBook [facebook.com] home page and click 'edit options' across from 'older posts' to find the source of the quote.

IMO There's a bunch more going on at FB than most people realize and IMO the patent is not about a simple news feed scrolling down the page, which is simple, easy and knowing how to do it is common knowledge among programmers. (If I remember correctly an idea is not patentable if it's based on common knowledge. It's not an invention if everyone (or a large group) knows how to do it...)