Timelines.com is going public with its trademark battle against Facebook over the term “timelines,” which the social network is using to describe the new profiles it is rolling out.

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While you may find getting tagged in a photo of when you were drunk last night annoying, Facebook thinks such methods are worth protecting, which is why the company filed and received approval of a patent for it.
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Facebook has obtained approval of a second patent application related to the news feed, specifically for personalizing the content presented.
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Some people I know leave their Facebook profiles fairly blank to try to avoid targeted advertising. Facebook engineers have found a way around this with what they call “inferential targeting” – and they’ve filed a patent application to cover their method, as first noted by Inside Facebook.
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Social gaming company Zynga has filed a patent application for virtual currency in online games. That’s right – the maker of Farmville and Mafia Wars is trying to patent the system that underpins the revenues of every social game company. So no prizes for guessing what’s keeping the intellectual property lawyers at Facebook, Disney, Electronic Arts and other social gaming companies busy right now.
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In its latest salvo in the fight against spam, Facebook has filed a patent application for a “social CAPTCHA” system.
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Today Facebook was awarded a patent for “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”. The patent, which was first filed by in 2004, emphasizes that Facebook has been working on a number of algorithms to improve their search results, one of which is a tool that Google employs in their own search results: the number of clicks.
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Facebook has quietly protected its dominant position in social networking by buying the Friendster portfolio of patents from MOL Global.
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A Delaware court has knocked down a claim against Facebook for patent violation made by little-known software company Leader Technologies.
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Technology patent trolling seems to have become a regular pasttime — something that is influenced proprtionally with lucrative potential of a patent, and which the long-flawed approval process at the USPTO (U.S. Patent & Trademark Office) abets in the first place. Now there’s another questionable patent lawsuit, this one involving ‘online communities’, and naturally, Facebook is a target with its community of more than 400 million users.
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